Violence and Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers

About this book

How did warfare originate? Was it human genetics? Social competition? The rise of complexity? Intensive study of the long-term hunter-gatherer past brings us closer to an answer. The original chapters in Violence and Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers examine cultural areas on five continents where there is archaeological, ethnographic and historical evidence for hunter-gatherer conflict despite high degrees of mobility, small populations and relatively egalitarian social structures. Their controversial conclusions will elicit interest among anthropologists, archaeologists and those in conflict studies.

Contents

Part One: A Neglected Anthropology: Hunter-Gatherer Violence and Warfare
Chapter 1. Hunter-Gatherer Conflict: The Last Bastion of the Pacified Past? / Mark W. Allen and Terry L. Jones
Chapter 2. Forager Warfare and Our Evolutionary Past / Steven A. LeBlanc

Part Two. Violence and Warfare among Mobile Foragers
Chapter 3. Violence and Warfare in the European Paleolithic and Mesolithic / Elizabeth Hutton Estabrook
Chapter 4. Wild-Type Colonizers and High Levels of Violence among Paleoamericans / James C. Chatters
Chapter 5. Foragers and War in Contact-Era New Guinea / Paul B. Roscoe
Chapter 6. Scales of Warfare and Violence in Australia: Fighting Foragers and Collectors in Conflict / Mark W. Allen
Chapter 7. Conflict and Territoriality in Aboriginal Australia / Colin Pardoe
Chapter 8. Conflict and Interpersonal Violence in Holocene Hunter-Gatherer Populations from Southern South America / Florencia Gordon
Chapter 9. Warfare and Expansion: An Ethnohistoric Perspective on the Numic Spread. Reprint of article from 1986 published in Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology (8:65-82) /  Mark Q. Sutton
Chapter 10. Large Game Exploitation at the Boundaries: Modeling and Measuring Competition and Conflict with Geochemistry / R. Kelly Beck,, Frank E. Bayham, and Deana Grimstead
Chapter 11. Wait & Parry: Archaeological Evidence for Hunter-Gatherer Defensive Behavior in the Interior Northwest / Kenneth C. Reid
Chapter 12. Violence and Warfare in the Arctic / Christyann Darwent and John Darwent
Chapter 13. "They had among them some wars and battles": Conflict, Clans, and the Baja California Peninsula / Matthew R. DesLauriers

Part Three: Violence and Warfare among Semi-Sedentary Hunter-Gatherers
Chapter 14. Middle and Late Archaic Trophy-Taking in Indiana / Christopher W. Schmidt and Amber Osterhol
Chapter 15. The Bioarchaeological Record of Blunt Force Cranial Trauma in Central California / Marin Pilloud, Al Schwitalla, Terry L. Jones, Brian Codding, and Randy Wiberg
Chapter 16. Early Archaic Violence in western North America: The Bioarchaeological Record of Dismemberment, Human Bone Artifacts, and Trophy Skulls in Central California / Al Schwitalla, Eric C. Strother, Marin Pilloud, Terry L. Jones, Brian Codding, and Randy Wiberg
Chapter 17. Stable Isotope Perspectives on Hunter-Gatherer Violence: Who's Fighting Whom? / Jelmer W. Eerkens, Eric Bartelink, Karen S. Gardner, and Traci Carlson
Chapter 18. Violent Adaptations: Technology of Violence and Cultural Evolution along the Santa Barbara Channel / James M. Brill
Chapter 19. Violence and Warfare on the Northwest Coast / Jerome S. Cybulski

Part Four: Synthesis and Conclusion
Chapter 20. Putting a Pacified Past to Rest: Final Thoughts / Patricia Lambert

About the Authors
Index

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Biography

Mark W. Allen is Professor of Anthropology at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona. He has been studying the anthropology of warfare since 1988 when he began dissertation research on the prehistory of the New Zealand Maori. He has also studied prehistoric violence among hunter-gatherers in the Great Basin, California, the American Southwest and Australia. He co-edited The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest and has also recently published a synthesis of prehistoric warfare and violence in California.

Terry L. Jones is Professor of Anthropology at California State Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo. He has published over 60 scholarly articles in major research journals as well as monographs and edited volumes including Prehistoric California: Archaeology and the Myth of Paradise (with L. Mark Raab), California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity (with Kathryn Klar) and Contemporary Issues in California Archaeology (with Jennifer Perry). Jones is founding editor of the journal California Archaeology.