The Causes and Origins of "Primitive Warfare": Reply to Ferguson

Ferguson's comment on my article is generally fair. Precisely for this reason, it serves to highlight the endemic problems, indeed the deep sense of confusion, surrounding the anthropological study of the causes of "primitive war," which I have tried to elucidate in my two-part article. In this restricted format the points I shall make must be telegraphic. I begin with the one important question raised by Ferguson that was not explicitly addressed in my article. When did fighting start? Was it a new cultural invention, which began with agriculture and the state, as Rousseauites have believed; or was it as old as the species, and, indeed, the genus Homo, encompassing 99.5 percent of our past, when humans lived as hunter-gatherers? Ferguson invokes the oft-mentioned point that there is little generally accepted evidence for fighting before the Mesolithic. But can there be, given the sort of evidence available to archaeology for earlier periods? There is a fundamental, built-in bias here, which is seldom addressed (Vencl 1984). Not only is the evidence from the Pleistocene extremely patchy; that which might indicate warfare can also be interpreted differently. Stone axes, spearheads, and arrowheads-all dual-purpose tools among historically known hunter-gatherers-can be claimed to have been used only for hunting. Wooden shields, leather body armour, and tusk helmets-again widely familiar from historical hunter-gatherers-are not preserved. Comprehensive examinations of large specimens of fossilised human bones have concluded that at least some of them were injured by human violence (including a Neanderthal man from some 50,000 years ago, found with a stabbing wound in the chest from a right-handed opponent) (Roper 1969; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979: 126-127; Trinkaus and Zimmerman 1982; Keeley 1996: 36-37). Still, hunting and daily life accidents are difficult to distinguish in fossilised injured bones from those caused by fighting. Under these circumstances, is there any evidence that can possibly persuade a systematic sceptic? What is it then that suddenly makes the archaeological signs of warfare from the Mesolithic, and even Upper Palaeolithic, less open to dispute? In o e word-sedentism. It left evidence of fortifications, burnt settlements, and large-scale communal cemeteries-the sort of material evidence without which archaeology is in the dark but which is necessarily absent before sedentism. Seeing coins only where there is light from a lamppost in one of the most serious possible distortions. All the same, is that not precisely the question in dispute? Was it not in fact sedentism that inaugurated warfare, as Rousseauites have always claimed? What evidence and general perspectives are rel vant for deciding the issue?