The archaeology of war: A North American perspective

Journal of Archaeological Research, 1999

Occasionally the attacks, typically ambushes of smaU numbers of people, cumulatively resulted in numerous casualties. Variation in palisade strength is consistent with the organizational structure and warrior mobilization potential of late prehistoric societies in different parts of the Eastern Woodlands.

2009

Archaeologists, ethnohistorians, osteologists, and cultural anthropologists have only recently begun to address seriously the issue of Native American war and peace in the eastern United States. New methods for identifying prehistoric cooperation and conflict in the archaeological record are now helping to advance our knowledge of their existence and importance.

Science, 1998

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2010

Journal of Northwest Anthropology, 2016

The research described in this article evaluates the presence and significance of violence among a sample of human skeletal remains recovered from sites in the interior northwestern portion of the continental United States. Violent encounters were measured by analyzing signatures of traumatic injury indicative of violence. All of the burials were recovered from cultures found in the southern portion of the Plateau culture area. Historically, the populations inhabiting the Plateau have been thought of as relatively peaceful, with violence only developing because of contact with Euro-American explorers, soldiers, and settlers. The reality, however, is that more and more evidence is being presented to suggest that violence was always a part of life in this part of the world. This study adds to a growing body of research that supports the notion that violence was an important part of the local inhabitants' ideology and an adaptive strategy for securing resources and maintaining group solidarity. The results indicate a great deal of variation in violence among the groups over time but in general, there were periods of conflict in this region before and after Euro-American contact.

in Unlearning the Language of Conquest, edited by Four Arrows (Don Jacobs), 2006

Perhaps the ultimate price we all pay for diminishing the female's power and position in society is war, the great corporate money-machine and ideological tool of fascism. This chapter reveals the relationship between patriarchal culture and war. Discussion of this relationship has typically been suppressed in one of two primary ways. The previous chapter addressed the first way: simply curtail any discussion about the power of Indigenous women in peaceful, traditional Indigenous society. The second way is to re-create history so as to make the world believe that Indigenous cultures were not at all peaceful in the first place. The latter has been a primary occupation for a number of authors for some time. For example, in 2003, St. Martin's Press published Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlank's book, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, co-authored with Katherine E. Register. Like a number of other academic books, such as those referred to in the introduction, this one attempts to demonstrate that waifare today is far less prevalent than it was in ''primitive" cultures. It argues that the assumptions and the actions of early Indigenous People resulted in patterns of violence throughout the world, and that awareness of these P'!tterns in concert with recognizing the advantages of modern technology increases the ability for humans to avoid war in the future. An admirable goal, but their anecdotal evidence contradicts larger bodies of evidence about war in pre-contact cultures. In fact, their "evidence" simply replicates the self-authorizing mythology in which the majority of Americans have been thoroughly steeped. From images of the caveman dragging his mate into a cave afte1· crushing the head of an opponent with a club to memories of Saturday morning television programs depicting blood-thirsty savages, Americans do not need "more awareness" about Indigenous violence. As previous chapters have shown, popular literature, Hollywood movies, and school textbooks have done an ample job of getting the average person to see ancient cultures as having been prone to violence and war. A large body of research, however, opposes claims that war and belligerence were very prevalent in Indigenous cultures. A day spent looking at the Human Resources Area Files demonstrates this clearly. HRAF, an internationally PEACEFUL VERSUS WARLIKE SOCIETIES II I 3 5

The effect of warfare on hunter-gatherers is a question that has recently come to be a focus of conflict archaeology. One subject that is of particular interest is the identification of weaponry in Southern California. Numerous accounts have been given of club-type weapons and bows used for offense and defense. However, the archaeological evidence remains sparse because of the fragility and multiple uses of these artifacts. This research will analyze the role and impact of these weapons on conflict of Southern California societies. To analyze weaponry, a detailed examination of clubs from previously excavated collections is undertaken in conjunction with an experiment to observe trauma inflicted by the weapons. The experiment consists of wielding clubs on and shooting arrows in a pig carcass, both armored and unarmored, to see the amount of trauma inflicted on the tissue and bone. The clubs and armor are replicas of artifacts represented in primary accounts and museums. A comparison to similar weapons from other cultures (Europeans, Eastern Woodland tribes, and Polynesia) is included for analogy. The hypotheses of this experiment are: If a war club is effective, then the damage to the tissue and bone will be significant, and if armor is effective, then most damage will be dispersed. From the data, a detail of the impact of weapons and the tactics of these societies is determined.

Journal of Conflict Archaeology, 2011

There has been a long history of interest in the material remains of conflict, but in the last two and a half decades archaeologists have made strides in the study of war and warfare. Techniques have been developed, refined, and borrowed to expose the material record of combat. Sites associated with other military undertakings have been discovered and the material culture of conflict has been documented. This growth has expanded an understanding of past conflicts and challenged previously held ideas about warfare. Although archaeologists do not currently have interpretive frameworks to link the diverse sites and objects that form the archaeological record of war, modern military planners have developed such models. This paper uses sites from the North American Great Plains to suggest that military models of conflict analysis can contribute to a synthetic archaeological interpretation of conflict.