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Oxford University Press; 1996 |
July 2004 | ||||||||||
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This investigation is necessary and timely. Keeley's clear analysis counters much recent popular history and other writing which takes for granted that mankind lived in some Golden Age of Peace before civilizations arose and began to make war. This peace of the primitives is a very old myth. Our desire for peace is natural, but we should not use erroneous history to slur our hard-built civilization while giving a false pedigree to human peacefulness. But this is prehistory, you say? Certainly, and that's what the archaeological and ethnographical evidence can clarify for us. Here's one of Keeley's examples from pre-Columbian North America:
Keeley discusses in several places the importance of fortification in prehistory. Neolithic villagers did not build ditches backed with palisades as symbolic structures for ritual or status, as asserted by writers referencing their own wish-fulfillment rather than archaeology. These barriers were built by the inhabitants out of fear for their lives, and this too often was justified:
War Before Civilization is a much richer book than we might guess from its title. It includes several striking archaeological and ethnographic photographs, as well as tracings of Neolithic cave paintings of archery battles. For more recent ethnographical examples of warfare, Keeley ranges over much of the world, discussing Modoc Indians of America's Pacific Northwest; Kalahari Bushmen of Southern Africa (featured in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy); Tahitians of Polynesia. (The index of War Before Civilization could usefully have been several times as detailed as it is.) It may be surprising that "primitive" tactics often are effective against "civilized" tactics, even with advanced weaponry in the balance. American versus British troops in the American Revolution, the Zulu War contrast between the battles of Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift, the U.S. Army campaigns against Indians in the West, are instructive in various ways. Keeley shows the importance of flexibility, fortification, and logistics to victory whether "primitive" or "civilized". Why are primitive raids and wars wishfully seen as unimportant or marginal to the health of tribes and nonstate societies? Because the numbers involved are much smaller than for inter-state wars, it is natural to assume that the effects of battle on the primitive populations and economies are trivial. This is incorrect. Inter-tribal raids often broke off after a handful of casualties, so their raids seem much less harmful than inter-state warfare; but the cumulative effect of frequent raids on small populations was devastating:
Keeley's charts of relative mobilization rates and casualty rates among tribes and modern nations are fascinating. He suggests that the terrible Twentieth Century wars would have had a death-rate twenty times higher "if the world's population were still organized into bands, tribes, and chiefdoms": the typical tribal combat casualty rate of .5 percent per year, during the course of the century would translate to "more than 2 billion war deaths". War Before Civilization is a valuable contribution to understanding human nature, good and bad as we may call it, before and beside the spread of civilization. We cannot judge human progress without awareness of prehistory, including peace and war. The inhabitants of those fortified Neolithic villages which were attacked, stormed, and burnt will not have died entirely in vain if we learn something from their life and fate. Our civilization allows us to conceive and establish social structures within which freedom, prosperity, and good-will may be extended in time and space. These conceptions may never lead us to a modern Golden Age of Peace, a real vanishing away of the use for weapons and defenses. But nostalgia for an imaginary peace of the primitives or of nonstate societies does not contribute factually to the discussion of constitutions, laws, and how best to get along with each other. The peace of the primitives before civilization is false to fact, contradicted by the archaeological and ethnographical evidence.
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Utopias at Troynovant: |
© 2004 Robert Wilfred Franson |
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