15349. (Lawrence H. Keeley) War Before Civilization

I rec­om­mend this study of war­fare in pre­his­toric soci­eties, based on archae­o­log­i­cal work and com­par­isons with anthro­po­log­i­cal stud­ies of non-state (trib­al and hunter-gath­er­er) soci­eties. When Kee­ley began his work, his field was dom­i­nated by a kind of “neo-Rousseau-an” ortho­doxy that in pre­his­toric soci­eties with­out cen­tral­ized states, war­fare was unim­por­tant, triv­ial in its effects, and, if extant, more rit­ual than in earnest. This ortho­doxy was not based on any­thing more sub­stan­tial than wish­ful think­ing. Even when it held sway, the weight of archae­l­og­i­cal and anthro­po­log­i­cal evi­dence con­tra­dicted it. But it was so strong a notion that Kee­ley could not get a grant to study pre­his­toric fortress­es, with clear­ly evi­dent moats, pal­lisades, and skele­tons of bat­tle vic­tims, until he renamed them “enclo­sures”.

Kee­ley’s work was part of a move­ment to ques­tion some of the more naive notions about pre­his­to­ry and anthro­pol­o­gy that had fixed them­selves in the litur­gy after World War II. We like to imag­ine that some­where, some­when, peo­ple lived in a par­a­dis­i­cal state of peace­ful­ness and serene “one-ness with nature”. This dream is used to pro­vide a con­trast to the per­ceived faults of “us and now”. When this kind of myth-mak­ing occurs, objec­tiv­i­ty usu­al­ly goes out the win­dow. The truth, which is hard for many to face up to, is that mod­ern indus­tri­al soci­eties tend to be less vio­lent, both in terms of death by war­fare and in terms of per­son­al crime and mur­der, than any tra­di­tion­al soci­ety in pre­his­to­ry, record­ed his­to­ry, or in the remote areas stud­ied by social anthro­pol­o­gists. The evi­dence for this has always been there. It has sim­ply been ignored. Peace and har­mo­ny are some­thing we will have to build, by look­ing into the future. It isn’t in the past. The tools for it are avail­able to us, if we use courage to face facts, and rea­son to change our bad habits.

Kee­ley also dis­pels the notion that non-state war­fare is tac­ti­cal­ly defi­cient, strate­gi­cal­ly inef­fi­cient, or car­ried out for strict­ly sym­bol­ic rea­sons. When ancient humans clubbed each on the heads or skew­ered each oth­er with spears, they prob­a­bly did it for exact­ly the same rea­sons that mod­ern humans lob hand grenades and fire Exo­cet missiles.

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