The widespread belief in a pacifistic past is a relic of 1960s ideology, which blames the modern West for the world’s ills.
Recent archaeological research is putting to rest the myth that pre-modern, non-Western societies were nonviolent.
‘C
olumbus didn’t discover the “New World” — he invaded it!!’
Many of us have seen T-shirts with that message in Greenwich Village and other progressive strongholds on what used to be called Columbus Day. “Who’s the savage? Modern man!” sings Rob Halford of Judas Priest in the 1978 song “Savage,” right after extolling the virtues of native tribes who were “born with the stars” and were “happy and peaceful” in their jungle kingdoms until the arrival of materialistic and warlike Western invaders who had the gall to claim to be civilized. Halford’s attitudes are common in pop music: Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett lists “the Zulu and the Navajo” among the victims of Western crimes in the hit song “Short Memory.”
The attitudes conveyed in such lyrics are as prevalent today as ever. In the ongoing furor over wrongs visited by the Catholic Church on the indigenous peoples of Canada, the cliché of peaceful, innocent premodern societies and warlike white aggressors has found a vocal proponent in Pope Francis. The pope has gone to great lengths to apologize for the sins of colonialists and settlers and to contrast their evil with the decency and nobility of the people whose lands they took and whose families they broke up.
In his April 1 audience with delegations from Canada’s indigenous peoples, the pope warned of the risk of forgetting what colonialists and warmongers did in the past: “Without historical memory, and without a commitment to learning from past mistakes, problems remain unresolved and keep coming back. We can see it these days in the case of war.”
The pope’s remarks recalled his long speech in Bolivia in July 2015, which was full of rhetoric about “the downtrodden native” and other marginalized groups who have been the victims of “colonialism old and new.” He urged them all to take a stand against “new forms of colonialism” that “engender violence” and exist in disharmony with the natural environment, and he issued an eloquent apology for the “many grave sins committed against the native peoples of America in the name of God.”
The notion that native tribes in the Americas and beyond were peaceful and egalitarian, and that Western colonialists “engendered” something that the tribes were too busy living in peace and appreciating nature ever to engage in — violence — is being called into question with a growing trend in the study of the past.
In the view of Christopher Knüsel, an anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux, this belief in a pacifistic past is a relic of 1960s ideology, which blames the modern West for the world’s ills. It does not hold up to scrutiny in the light of new archaeological discoveries, not to mention the enhancement of techniques for studying existing finds. An article by Andrew Curry in the January/February issue of Archaeology magazine, “The Roots of Violence,” quotes Knüsel criticizing the 1960s mindset and the fact that, as Knüsel puts it, “There was a long period when archaeologists said warfare didn’t happen in prehistory.”
The Bones of Jebel Sahaba
One find perfectly illustrates the falsity of such notions and the frequency and viciousness of war in the remote past. Curry’s article details efforts by Isabelle Crevecoeur of the French National Institute for Scientific Research to cast light on the 61 human skeletons discovered in 1964 in a 13,400-year-old mass burial site at Jebel Sahaba, in what is now northern Sudan, and subsequently brought to the British Museum.
Cataloguing arrow wounds, smashed skulls, broken bones, and other grisly features of the skeletons, the article casts Crevecoeur’s efforts as part of a larger project aimed at tracing how societies in this region of Africa evolved from a focus on agriculture to hunting and gathering. Violence grew increasingly prevalent, the theory goes, when the Nile Valley dried up some 13,000 years ago, natural resources got ever scarcer, and competition for them heated up.
Advanced techniques have highlighted the peculiarly ungentlemanly nature of war during the period in question. The use of 3-D imaging and other forensic and reconstructive tools by Crevecoeur and her team has revealed marks and damage to the skeletons indicating that a good number of people buried at Jebel Sahaba died in ambushes and surprise raids. They were either very young or very old and some had sustained injuries over months and years before their fatal wound, suggesting combat was frequent.
“The team’s findings suggest that the cemetery wasn’t a mass grave resulting from a single battle, but something perhaps grimmer: evidence of decades of continual violence among neighboring groups in the form of frequent raids, sneak attacks, and ambushes,” Curry writes.
The appearance of such an article in a mainstream magazine suggests that the depacifiying of the past is finally well underway and a more balanced view of pre-modern and non-Western societies is itself becoming mainstream. This shift is hard to imagine without the influence of a brilliant book by Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, published in 1996. My use of the term “depacifying the past” is a nod to Keeley, inverting the phrase “pacification of the past” that he introduced in his book.
War before Civilization grew out of Keeley’s exasperation with the lies people told about the past and about the so-called noble savage posited by Rousseau. The clash between the ideas of Rousseau, who popularized the notion of the peace-loving noble savage, and the concepts of Hobbes, who defined government’s role as restraining humans’ worst tendencies and supplanting the state of nature, and the implications of this clash of ideas for anthropology, fascinate Keeley. He also anticipates the argument some will make that Western incursions forced previously peaceful tribes to take up arms. His examples of native weaponry and warfare long antedate Western contact.
Universal War
Those who criticize what Keeley has to say in War before Civilization miss the geographically and culturally holistic approach that he takes. His attribution of warlike tendencies to pre-modern societies applies to all parts of the world, Europe especially. Keeley’s idea for the book had its roots in the frustrations he met with when applying for grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation in the hope of undertaking a study of a site in northeastern Belgium dating to the Neolithic period, around 5000 b.c. The site featured what Keeley believed to be a fortification designed for protection against raiders. But, in Keeley’s telling, his attribution of a military feature to the site made it hard to sell the NSF on his project. At the time, the ruling attitude in the field of archaeology was the same that had prevailed during Keeley’s freshman year of college, when he and classmates inspected the site of a shell-mound village in San Francisco Bay full of skeletons with embedded projectile points. When Keeley wrote his thesis on the ancient Mayans, many people in the field still denied that the civilization in question had any proclivity for fighting, despite the widespread depictions of war in Mayan murals and hieroglyphs and fortifications at places such as Tikal and Becan.
War before Civilization cannot fail to enrage those who propagate the woke myth of the West as uniquely wicked and belligerent. They will not enjoy seeing a picture of the “bone bed” in the place now called Crow Creek, S.D., dating to a.d. 1325 It contains the remains of 500 scalped and mutilated men, women, and children. The book also presents a gruesome image of U.S. cavalryman Sergeant Frederick Wylyams, whom Southern Cheyenne tribesman mutilated in 1867 in keeping with a custom they put to use in war designed to deny the victim physical ability and wellness in the afterlife.
The sanctity of the human body enjoys little respect in the primitive societies examined here, and contempt for enemy combatants cuts across regions and cultures. Over and over in his survey, Keeley details an aptitude for mauling and mutilating. He describes how South American tribes and the Guanche tribesmen of the Canary Islands used spears with weakened tips that would break off upon impact and remain in the wound. The hollow cassowary claw that the Mae Enga tribes of New Guinea put on the ends of their spears and arrows would be hard to remove from a wound and would cause it to fester, and the Dani of highland New Guinea made an explicit distinction in the crafting of arrows for hunting game and for warfare. For the latter, they put barbs on the tips and daubed them in grease or mud to boost the chances of infection. African tribes such as the Tiv of Nigeria, the Meru of Kenya, and the San of southern Africa used poisoned arrows, as did many tribes in both North and South America.
Besides their effectiveness at designing weapons with a high kill rate, Keeley details how pre-modern societies developed methods of war explicitly conceived to exterminate enemy tribes. Returning to the example of highland New Guinea, he describes how raiders surrounded men’s houses, set them on fire, and killed all who rushed out. The Oglala Sioux warriors under Chief Red Cloud successfully used a diversionary tactic against the U.S. Army in 1866, pretending to have suffered defeat and begun a retreat in order to lure the enemy into the path of their ready and waiting main force. The Murngin aborigines of Australia made brilliant use of the same ruse.
Lest anyone accuse Keeley of using anecdotal evidence or cherry-picking data to support generalizations, his book is crammed with tables and charts presenting figures on the prevalence and lethality of war in pre-modern societies. The Kato tribe of California lost 1.45 percent of their number every year to war, and the Dani of New Guinea, the Dinka of northeast Africa, and the Fiji of Melanesia lost roughly 1 percent. For the sake of comparison, imagine if America in 2022 lost 1.45 percent of its population of 330 million in battle. That’s 4,785,000 people.
The Direction of the Field
Keeley has contributed to a shift in the focus and thrust of anthropology whose outcome is hard to predict. What is clear is that his influence has been vast and that he has made hitherto verboten ideas mainstream.
“I do think that there is increasing work on this subject, especially since the late 1990s, in the academic community. It has become a more and more popular subject, with a number of important works, especially from people working in South America, such as Elizabeth Arkush, Tiffany Tung, and Charles Stanish, and in Western Europe, such as Keith Otterbein and Axel Nielsen, to name just a very few,” said Stephanie Selover, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Washington.
“Topics come in and out of vogue in academia, and warfare is having a rather strong moment. There has always been an emphasis on the history of warfare, especially that of Rome, for example, but archaeologists in particular have been working on studying prehistoric war, or earlier warfare than in the past,” Selover added.
Elizabeth Arkush, an anthropology professor at the University of Pittsburgh with a focus on the Peruvian Andes, agreed with Selover that a high volume of new research in the field has brought forth strong evidence of war in many premodern contexts. In the current climate, you might ask whether scholars working in this field experience pressure to avoid the delicate topic of early non-Western war altogether or to sugarcoat it and present war as something rare, fleeting, and incidental.
“Yes, I’ve felt some pushback on this topic, but I also fully understand and sympathize with the reasons for the pushback,” said Arkush, noting the scale and ferocity of Western expansion over the past five centuries and the fact that non-Western peoples in the historical periods in question faced tough choices that may be hard for us today to comprehend: “Warfare was sometimes the least worst option.”
As Keeley put it near the end of War before Civilization: “The modern-day primitive nostalgist listens to tribal music celebrating the sacredness of nature on a stereo composed of completely artificial materials ultimately extracted from strip mines and oil wells on territories seized or extorted from tribal societies.” His work brings home the further irony that Rousseau never actually got up and left his comfortable life in civilization to join the hunter-gatherers of Tasmania or others he so admired.