Violência e Pré-História - Violence and Prehistory

The Archaeology of Violence and Conflict: From Prehistory to the Great War

2011-11-01T19:00:00.001Z

Universiteit Leiden
Honours Classes

Laatst Gewijzigd: 11-10-2011

Inleiding

In the 17th century Thomas Hobbes postulated that humans were by nature warlike and that peace could only be achieved by states. By contrast Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued a century later that people were essentially peaceful and only became belligerent when corrupted by civilisation. These philosophical thoughts about the human nature have impacted ideas on warfare in the past enormously. It is only in the last decades that there has been a shift from normative speculations to an assessment of the archaeological data that can inform us about violence and conflict throughout human history. In this course we will evaluate data and ideas about violence and conflict from Prehistory up to the Great War (1914-1918), with evidence from various parts of the world.

The Honours Class will explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of recent, excellent research into conflict and violence through the ages, and will proceed in this manner beyond any ordinary descriptive account. The course will confront students with the major ideas and controversies in the current discourse about conflict in history. Students will learn to think critically about this topic and how to evaluate the material evidence for war and its social implications.

The Honours Class will comprise a series of lectures, which will explore violence and conflict in various periods and from various theoretical perspectives. Whenever possible, reference to conflict in our days will be taken into account. Students will learn from renowned scholars from several countries, who will present the latest developments in their fields of expertise, with ample opportunities for discussion and reflection.

Programma

De Honours Class zal worden ingericht rond acht bijeenkomsten van elk twee uur. De Honours Class vindt plaats in blok III van het tweede semester, de inschrijving sluit 1 december 2011.

Contactpersoon

Prof. P.M.M.G. Akkermans

http://onderwijs.leidenuniv.nl/honours-onderwijs/honourscollege/honours-classes/honours-class-archaeology.html

A arqueologia forense sugere que em torno de 15% dos indivíduos nas sociedades "pré-estatais" morriam de maneira violenta

2011-10-20T23:56:00.000+01:00

Ora viva,

A arqueologia forense suger que em torno de 15% dos indivíduos nas sociedades "pré-estatais" morriam de maneira violenta

Novo livro do psicólogo de Harvard defende que apesar de sentirmo-nos rodeados por violência, ela diminuiu ao longo da história

A história da humanidade representa uma evolução na qual as pessoas são cada vez mais inteligentes, e em consequência disso, menos violentas, diz artigo publicado nesta quarta-feira (19) no último número da revista Nature.

O psicólogo canadiano Steven Pinker argumenta que o aumento da inteligência, que se reflecte em pontuações médias cada vez mais altas nos teste de raciocínio abstrato, e também o desenvolvimento da empatia entre os seres humanos, propiciaram um declive da barbárie nos últimos séculos.

Além disso, a alfabetização e o cosmopolitismo favoreceram uma troca de ideias em nível global que "possibilita a compreensão do mundo e facilita os acordos" entre distintas sociedades.

"Apesar de atualmente sentirmos-nos constantemente rodeados pela violência, em séculos anteriores a situação era muito pior. Impérios em colapso, conquistadores maníacos e invasões tribais" eram comuns, afirma Pinker.

A arqueologia forense e a demografia sugerem que em torno de 15% dos indivíduos nas sociedades "pré-estatais" morriam de maneira violenta, uma proporção cinco vezes maior à registrada no século XX, apesar de suas guerras, genocídios e crises de fome.

Nesse sentido, Pinker aponta que a afirmação popular de que "o século XX é o mais sangrento da história" é uma mera "ilusão" que dificilmente pode ser apoiada em dados históricos.

A barbárie diminuiu comparada a épocas anteriores não só em relação a conflitos armados, mas também a comportamentos sociais, diz o investigador..

No século XIV, 40 em cada 100 mil pessoas morriam assassinadas, enquanto atualmente essa taxa se reduziu a 1,3 pessoas.

"Além disso, nos últimos séculos, a humanidade abandonou progressivamente práticas como os sacrifícios humanos, a perseguição de hereges e métodos cruéis de execução como a fogueira, a crucificação e a empalação", lembra o psicólogo.

Pinker atribui essa evolução ao aperfeiçoamento da racionalidade e não a um "sentido moral" dos seres humanos, que por si só serviu para "legitimar todo tipo de castigos sangrentos".

"A propagação de normas morais tornou frequentes as represálias violentas por faltas como a blasfêmia, a heresia, a indecência e as ofensas contra os símbolos sagrados", afirma.

O estudo ressalta que com o tempo o ser humano foi diversificando sua tendência ao comportamento agressivo, presente desde os primeiros Homo sapiens.

"A racionalidade humana precisou de milhares de anos para concluir que não é bom escravizar outras pessoas, exterminar povos nativos, encarcerar homossexuais e iniciar guerras para restaurar a vaidade ferida de um rei", diz o psicólogo.

O autor do estudo apoia sua tese sobre o aumento da inteligência em pesquisas anteriores, que mostram como o Quociente Intelectual (QI) médio aumenta a cada geração.

"As empresas que vendem testes de inteligência têm que normalizar os seus resultados periodicamente. Um adolescente médio de hoje em dia se voltasse a 1910 marcaria um QI de 130, enquanto uma pessoa típica do século XX não passaria da pontuação 70 atualmente", explica Pinker.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=steven-pinker-violence-is-lower-tha-11-10-18

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2011/1020/The-Better-Angels-of-Our-Nature-Why-Violence-Has-Declined

Saúde e fraternidade,

António Correia

facebook: http://pt-pt.facebook.com/people/Antonio-Correia/100001002237842

University of Glasgow :: Centre for Battlefield Archaeology :: Conference Programme

2011-09-05T18:35:00.000+01:00

Friday 7th October

09.00 - 13.00 Registration for delegates in the Gregory Building (see campus map)

10.00 - 13.00 Tour of the Arms and Armour Collections at Glasgow Museums, Nitshill Resource Centre (details to be posted)

Afternoon sessions and keynote speech to be held in the Officer Training Corps, 95 University Place

Chair: Lt Col Simon Higgens (Commanding Officer, Glasgow & Strathclyde Universities Officer Training Corps)

14.00 - 14.20 John Winterburn (University of Bristol)
Flying Elephants and Pumas: aerial archaeology and a desert war

14.20 - 14.40 Terence Christian (University of Glasgow)
Title tbc

14.40-15.00 Matthew Kelly (AHMS Pty Ltd/University of Sydney)
Eora Creek, Papua New Guinea, Battlefield Survey: local knowledge and historical events of World War Two

Discussion

15.15-15.30 Coffee/Tea Break

15.30 - 16.45 Session Two: Equipment, Methods and Techniques of Historical Warfare

Chair: TBC

15.30-15.50 Christina Mackie (Cranfield University at the Defence Academy)
An Application of Modern Ballistic Techniques to 15th Century Artillery

15.50-16.10 Brendan Halpin (University College, Dublin)
The Importance of Reenactment and Western Martial Arts: an Irish case study

16.10-16.30 James O’Neill (Queens University, Belfast)
Trailing Pikes and Turning Kern: assimilation and adaptation of military methods during the Nine Years War in
Ireland,1593-1603

Discussion

19.00 – Keynote: Dr Tony Pollard (Director, Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, University of Glasgow

To be followed by a wine reception in the Officer's Mess, hosted by the Glasgow & Strathclyde Universities Officer Training Corps

Saturday 8th October

09.00 - 09.30 - Registration and sessions to be held at the Queen Margaret Union (see campus map)

09.30 - 11.10 – Session Three: Social Meanings in Material Culture

Chair: TBC

09.30-09.50 Rachel Askew ()
‘Not with down-right bloews to rout’: the social side of siege warfare during the English Civil Wars

09.50-10.10 John Mabbitt (Newcastle University)
The Origins of Humpty Dumpty: archaeology, destruction and the narratives of the city

10.10-10.30 Abigail Coppins (Southampton University)
Prisoners of War at Portchester Castle 1793-1815

10.30-10.50 Chantel Summerfield (Bristol University)
The Forgotten City of Tents

Discussion

11.10 - 11.30 – Coffee/Tea Break

11.30 - 13.00 – Session Four: Death, Memory and Heritage

Chair: TBC

11.30 - 11.50 Emma Login (Birmingham University)
The Memory of Defeat or the Defeat of Memory: war memorialisation in the Lorraine region of France

11.50-12.10 HyunKyung Lee (University of Cambridge)
The Post-conflict Response of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) to the Built Heritage of the Japanese Occupation

12.10-12.30 Artemi Alejandro-Medina (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)
Franco’s Bunkers and Hitler’s Dreams in the Canary Islands: the heritage nobody wants to inherit

12.30-12.50 Tadeusz Kopys (Jagiellonian University)
The Massacre of Polish Soldiers in the Soviet Union 1939-1944

Discussion

13.10 - 14.30 Lunch

14.30-15.45 Session Five: Conflict Archaeology in Practice

Chair: TBC

14.30 - 14.50 Syed Shahnawaz (University of Padua)
Braving the Conflict: Swat Valley archaeological sites and the Operation Rah-e-Raast

14.50-15.10 Owen O’Leary (JPAC/Centre for Battlefield Archaeology)
Accounting for America’s Missing: recovery and identification of a Consolidated B-24 Liberator from World War Two

15.30-15.30 Alexandria Young (Bournemouth University)
Reconstructing the Aftermath of Battle: the effects of vertebrate scavenging on the recovery and identification of human remains

Discussion

15.50 - 17.10 Session Six: Tourism and Thanatourism at Sites of Conflict

Chair: TBC

15.50-16.10 Justin Sikora (International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, Newcastle University)
Considering the Value of Battlefields as Heritage through On-site Interpretation

16.10-16.30 Stephen Miles (Glasgow University)
From ‘Fields of Conflict’ to Dark Attractions: battlefields as thanatouristic sites

16.50-17.10 Annalisa Bolin (University of York)
Witnessing the Remains: material heritage, memory politics and western tourism in Rwanda’s National Genocide Memorials

Discussion

17.00 - 19.00 Drinks to be held in Jim's Bar of the Queen Margaret Union

19.00 - Conference Dinner: Mother India, Westminster Terrace

Sunday 9th October

09.00-9.30 Registration

09.30-11.10 Session Seven (a): Methodologies for Conflict Archaeology
~
Chair: TBC

09.30-09.50 Julie Wileman (University of Winchester)
Evidence for Prehistoric Warfare: a counter-intuitive perspective

09.50-10.10 Joanne Ball (University of Liverpool)
Lost Landscapes of Conflict: approaches to locating ancient landscapes

10.10-10.30 Carlos Landa (CONICET/Universidad de Buenos Aires), Emanuel Montanari (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and Facundo Gomez Romero (UNCPBA)
La Verde Battlefield (25 de Mayo, Buenos Aires Province)

10.30-10.50 Gavin Lindsay (Independent Researcher)
Material in Conflict: rethinking approaches to challenging assemblages

Discussion
Or

09.30-11.10 Session Seven (b): Heritage Management and Remembrance

Chair: TBC

09.30-09.50 Emilio Distretti (University of Portsmouth)
The Stele of Axum and Italy’s Colonial Legacy: all the remains in the land of amnesia

09.50-10.10 Elizabeth Cohen (University of Cambridge)
Reminders of a Shared Past: the Ottoman heritage in Greece

10.10-10.30 Iraia Araboalaza (GUARD Archaeology) and Carmen Cuenca-Garcia (University of Glasgow)
Retrieving the Long Lost Memory: Spanish Civil War archaeology

10.30-10.50 Emily Glass (University of Bristol)
‘Enverism Nostalgia’ or Albanian Cultural Heritage Icon: conflicting perceptions of Tirana’s pyramid

Discussion
11.10-11.30 Coffee/Tea Break

11.30-12.45 Session Eight: Ancient Warfare

Chair: Dr Jon Coulston (Ancient History and Archaeology, University of St Andrews)

11.30-11.50 Samantha L. Cook (University of Liverpool)
Archer’s Looses in Sudan: an Asiatic style in an African context

11.50-12.10 Catherine Parnell (University College, Dublin)
The Kopis and the Machaira: portrayals and perceptions

12.10- 12.30 Salvatore Vacante (Università degli Studi di Genova)
Alexander the Great and the Defeat of the Sogdian Revolt

Discussion

12.45-14.00 Lunch

14.00-15.15 Session Nine: Landscapes of Conflict

Chair: Ryan McNutt (Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, University of Glasgow)

14.00-14.20 Benjamin Raffield (University of Aberdeen)
A Landscape of Endemic Warfare: the archaeology of Scandinavian-occupied England

14.20-14.40 C. Broughton Anderson (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Subtle Violence: improvement and clearance in Galloway during the 18th Century

14.40-15.00 Salvatore Garfi (University of East Anglia)
Colonialism, Conflict and Exclusion: the case of Western Sahara

15.15-15.30 Coffee/Tea Break

15.30-17.00 Workshops/Roundtables

Workshops titles to be confirmed

Conference Posters
These will be on exhibit in the Queen Margret Unition throughout the duration of the conference.

Angela Cunningham (Kingston University)
Terrestrial Lidar as a Data Collection Method for Historic Landscape Reconstruction

Emma Login (University of Birmingham)
A Biographical and Collective Memory Approach to War Memorials
Beatriz Rodriguez Garcia (University of Bath)
Consuming Dark Tourism: the role of organisational storytelling and narratives

Tropical Civil War Correlated to El Niño.

2011-08-27T12:05:00.000+01:00

Discovery News > Earth News > Tropical Civil War Correlated to El Niño

Analysis by Tim Wall

Thu Aug 25, 2011 03:04 PM ET

The El Niño/La Niña cycle has been correlated to periodic increases in warfare by researchers at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

Drought, crop losses, and other effects of the dry, hot El Niño climate conditions may destabilize already vulnerable nations. For example, the research notes the case of Peru. In 1982 a severe El Niño dried out the highlands of Peru and destroyed crops. That same year, attacks by the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, guerrilla revolutionary movement escalated into full blown civil war.

BLOG: Climate Change and Corn a Bad Combo in Africa

Though El Niño can't be said to cause warfare, the research found a strong correlation between fluctuations in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and large-scale civil strife. ENSO is the collective term for the El Niño/La Niña cycles.

The research, published in the journal Nature, found that the arrival of El Niño doubles the risk of civil wars across 90 affected tropical countries. El Niño, which strikes every three to seven years, may partially account for a fifth of worldwide conflicts during the past half-century.

"The most important thing is that this looks at modern times, and it's done on a global scale," said Solomon M. Hsiang, the study's lead author. "We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. That's a specific time and place, that may be very different from today, so people might say, 'OK, we're immune to that now.' This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict, and shows it right now."

BLOG: Did Drought Kill the Mayans?

The scientists examined ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) from 1950 to 2004, alongside the onsets of civil conflicts that killed more than 25 people in a given year. They studied 175 countries and 234 conflicts, more than half of which caused in excess of 1,000 battle-related deaths each.

For nations where ENSO has little effect on the weather, the chances of a civil war stayed steady at 2 percent. In countries where ENSO influences the weather, La Niña increased the chance of civil war breaking out to about 3 percent.

But during El Niño, the chance doubled, to 6 percent. The Columbia researchers estimated that El Niño may have played a role in nearly 30 percent of the civil wars in those countries affected by El Niño, and 21 percent of all civil wars during the period studied.

Specifically the study mentions Sudan, first in 1963, then 1976, and finally in 1983. The fighting which started in 1983 continued for 20 years and resulted in 2 million deaths.

El Salvador, the Philippines, and Uganda were plunged into turmoil during a 1972 El Niño.

Angola, Haiti, and Myanmar experienced serious civil conflict starting in the 1991 El Niño year.

Congo, Eritrea, Indonesia, and Rwanda suffered deadly conflict during the 1997 El Niño.

Wealthier nations are better at keeping calm through disruptive El Niño events. Australia is influenced by ENSO, but has never had a civil war.

"But if you have social inequality, people are poor, and there are underlying tensions, it seems possible that climate can deliver the knockout punch," said Hsiang.

"No one should take this to say that climate is our fate. Rather, this is compelling evidence that it has a measurable influence on how much people fight overall," said coauthor Mark Cane, a climate scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory . "It is not the only factor--you have to consider politics, economics, all kinds of other things."

Currently, the Horn of Africa suffers serious drought as well as brutal and deadly civil conflict. Discovery News recently covered research correlating La Niña conditions with drought in Eastern Africa.

BLOG: East Africa Drought Linked to La Niña

"Forecasters two years ago predicted that there would be a famine in Somalia this year, but donors in the international aid community did not take that forecast seriously," said Hsiang in a teleconference covered by the AFP.

"We hope our study can provide the international community and governments and aid organisations with additional information that might in the future help avert humanitarian crises that are associated with conflict."

‘We go to gain a little patch of ground’: postgraduate research in conflict archaeology'

2011-08-04T17:39:00.000+01:00

The Centre for Battlefield Archaeology Postgraduate Conference

First call for Papers

7th - 9th October 2011, University of Glasgow

Email: conflictpg@gmail.com

The Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow is hosting a three-day postgraduate conference bringing together researchers working within the field of conflict archaeology. It is intended that this conference be a postgraduate answer to the Fields of Conflict conference cycle. The first Fields of Conflict conference, held in Glasgow in 2000, represented a significant horizon for those eager for the opportunity to share pioneering research in the burgeoning field of conflict archaeology. In the last decade, conflict archaeology has transformed from a radical sub-discipline into an established, yet dynamic, academic subject covering a myriad of research avenues.

This postgraduate conference will bring together postgraduate researchers from around the world, providing a platform to present a new generation of research in the field of conflict archaeology. It is hoped that this conference will address a perceived lack of forum for the discussion and presentation of postgraduate work in all facets of conflict archaeology and will in turn foster a vibrant postgraduate research community that forges intellectual, international and interdisciplinary connections. We go, therefore, ‘to gain a little patch of ground’ (Hamlet IV.iv.18).

Papers will cover a wide range of research interests, reflecting the multifaceted nature of conflict archaeology, covering all time periods from the ancient to the contemporary.

Papers will examine topics such as:

■Methodologies and new approaches

■Landscapes of conflict

■Warfare, violence, resistance

■Politics and propaganda

■Memorialisation, remembrance and forgetting

■Imprisonment / internment

■Colonial encounter

■Heritage management of sites of conflict and public engagement

■Battlefield tourism, thanatourism

■Recreation, re-enactment and ersatz experience

■Ethics of studying violence and conflict

■Investigating and interpreting uncomfortable / problematic histories

■Recovery of remains

In addition, delegates are invited to participate in student-led workshops and round table discussions during the final afternoon of conference proceedings (more information to follow).

We are currently still accepting proposals for A0- and A1-sized research posters. If you would like to present your research as an academic poster, please send a 250-300 word abstract to conflictpg@gmail.com by 1 September 2011.

Selected papers from the conference will be published in a special edition of the Journal of Conflict Archaeology.

Watch this page for updates – a provisional programme will be coming soon.

For further information contact Natasha Ferguson, Jennifer Novotny or Jonathan Trigg.

Centre for Battlefield Archaeology

University of Glasgow

Gregory Building

Lilybank Gardens

Glasgow G12 8QQ

+44 (0)141 330 2304

conflictpg@gmail.com

Keynote speaker

The keynote speaker is Dr. Tony Pollard, University of Glasgow. He has carried out battlefield and conflict related archaeological projects in the UK, mainland Europe, Africa and South America. His interests range from 18th-century warfare, particularly in relation to the Jacobite rebellions in Scotland, to the archaeology of the First and Second World Wars. A co-organiser of the first Fields of Conflict conference, Dr. Pollard has long been at the forefront of research in conflict archaeology. His talk will explore (what?).

The keynote speech will be given on Friday evening, 7 October at the Officer’s Training Corps Drill Hall. This will be immediately followed by a welcome reception at the Drill Hall with a cash bar.

Conference dinner

The conference dinner will be held on Saturday, 8 October at Mother India, 28 Westminster Terrace, Glasgow G3 7RU (see http://www.motherindiaglasgow.co.uk/index.php?action=cms.westminster for more information). The price is £18.50 and includes starters, entrees, and bread and rice from a set menu. The menu includes vegetarian options.

We ask that you pay the conference dinner fee in advance, no later than Friday, 23 September so that we can finalise the booking for our large party. Though places may be available on the day, these will not be guaranteed.

Please advise us well in advance if you have any special dietary requirements or allergies.

To view Mother India’s set price menu, click here.

(add menus if we can get them)

Field trip

On the morning of Friday, 7 October, we will be offering an artefact handling session led by European Arms & Armour curator Ralph Moffat, at the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, Nitshill. A minibus will pick you up at 09.30 and transport you directly from the Archaeology Department (Gregory Building) to the Resource Centre, returning to the Archaeology Department at midday. For a sneak peak at some of the items in the Glasgow Museums collection, see http://collections.glasgowmuseums.com/cld.html?cid=533626

There is no charge for this session, however, please register here as soon as possible. Places are extremely limited, due to restrictions on how many people are allowed in the museum stores at one time.

If you have any questions or require additional information, email conflictpg@gmail.com

Link to the online web registration form here
For further information contact Natasha Ferguson, Jennifer Novotny or Jonathan Trigg.

Centre for Battlefield Archaeology

University of Glasgow

Gregory Building

Lilybank Gardens

Glasgow G12 8QQ

+44 (0)141 330 2304

conflictpg@gmail.com

The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes

2011-07-24T17:02:00.000+01:00

Author: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker's riveting, myth-destroying new book reveals how, contrary to popular belief, humankind has become progressively less violent, over millenia and decades.

Given the images of conflict we see daily on our screens, can violence really have declined? And wasn't the twentieth century the most devastatingly brutal in history? Extraordinarily, however, as Steven Pinker shows, violence within and between societies - both murder and warfare - really has declined from prehistory to today. We are much less likely to die at someone else's hands than ever before.

Debunking both the idea of the 'noble savage' and a Hobbesian notion of a 'nasty, brutish and short' life, Steven Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions are making us better people. He ranges over everything from art to religion, international trade to individual table manners, and shows how life has changed across the centuries and around the world - not simply through the huge benefits of organized government, but also because of the extraordinary power of progressive ideas. Why has this come about? And what does it tell us about ourselves? It takes one of the world's greatest psychologists to appreciate and explain this story, and to show us our very natures.

Sexo e Violência: Realidades Antigas e Questões Contemporâneas

2011-07-12T21:53:00.000+01:00

Novo livro
lançamento durante a reunião da Anpuh
são paulo – 21 de julho de 2011
apoio: FAPESP
ORGANIZADORES
José Geraldo Costa Grillo (UNIFESP)
Renata S. Garraffoni (UFPR)
Pedro Paulo A. Funari (UNICAMP)
São Paulo
Annablume/FAPESP
2011
Sumário
Introdução
O terrorismo dos kamikazes? Bombas carregadas a Eros
Ian Buruma
Mundo Antigo:
Tramas nos domínios do faraó
Margaret M. Bakos
O jardim do pecado: uma narrativa de violência sexual na Mesopotâmia
Katia Maria Paim Pozzer
Guerra, violência e sociedade na iconografia do sacrifício de Políxena
José Geraldo Costa Grillo
Homoerotismo, sedução e violência na Grécia antiga. Presentes e raptos, visões da pederastia na iconografia da cerâmica ática (séc. V a.C.)
Fábio Vergara Cerqueira
Corpo e sexualidade feminina na Atenas Clássica
Fábio de Souza Lessa
Sangue na arena: repensando a violência nos jogos de gladiadores no início do principado romano
Renata Senna Garraffoni
Sexualidades antigas e preocupações modernas: a moral e as Leis sobre a conduta sexual feminina
Marina Cavicchioli
Sexualidade e Violência no Reino dos Céus: O caso do Evangelho Secreto de Marcos e as tradições cristãs primitivas.
André Leonardo Chevitarese
Gabriele Cornelli
Mundo Moderno:
Arqueología, Resistência escrava e rebelião
Charles E. Orser Jr.
Pedro Paulo A. Funari
Espetáculos da diferença: gênero, raça e ciência no século XIX
Ana Paula Vosne Martins
A prostituição ontem e hoje
Margareth Rago
Os sussurros de Eros e Tânatos Renata Plaza Teixeira
Também quero ser “gato”: masculinidades e relações de subordinação
Vanda Silva
Crianças e Jovens: Adestramento e violência
Judite Maria Barboza Trindade

Interpersonal Violence in Paleolithic and Mesolithic Societies

2011-07-04T23:01:00.000+01:00

Posted on 05/14/2011 by Katzman in Aggsbach's Paleolithic Blog

These are razor sharp microlithic arrowheads from the middle to late Ertebølle period. Such artifacts could not only be successfully used for hunting animals, but also for killing humans.

Biological anthropologists argue for a continuity of an aggressive instinct from a common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans (Kelly 2005) -but why should an aggressive attitude be evolutionary more successful than coalitions with friends?

Social anthropologists see interpersonal violence as the outcome of competition of individuals for status, prestige and high rank. They have also noted, that inter and intra group violence is more prevalent in non segmented societies, than in segmented ones (Marcus 2008).

Historical Materialists simply believe that conflict and warfare are driven by the need for food, land and other resources.

The archaeological record of interpersonal violence shows an enormous regional variation, clearly arguing against any simple monocausal explanation. A convincing gold standard of identifying victims of a lethal conflict is the association of artifacts lodged in human bones, with corresponding skeletal damage or the presence of lethal bone lesions that are unambiguously caused by other humans.

The earliest possible skeletal evidence of intra group violence comes from Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain, with at least 32 human skeletons dating to ca. 250 k.a. BP. Several skulls of this sample have healed impact fractures. A final report is not available and therefore it remains somewhat unclear whether these findings should be interpreted as evidence of human conflicts.

Two late Paleolithic (Epigravettian at ca 13 k.a. BP) bodies of this kind are known from Italy. One, from San Teodoro cave in Sicily, was a woman with a flint point in her right iliac crest. This artifact was designed as a triangle and was most probably an arrow point. The other was a child with a flint in its thoracic vertebra, found in late Epigravettian layers of the Grotta dei Fanciulli (the famous Grotte des Enfants) at Balzi-Rossi / Grimaldi, on the LIgurian Italian / French border.

The most remarkable discovery of late Paleolithic Age comes from Jebel Sahaba, a few kilometers north of Wadi Halfa on the east bank of the Nile. A graveyard (ca 12 k.a.BP) containing 59 burials was located on a hill overlooking the Nile. Twenty-four skeletons had flint projectile points that were either embedded in the bones or found within the grave fill in positions which indicated they had penetrated the bodies. The excavator of the site, Fred Wendorf (The prehistory of Nubia, II p. 991) wrote: ” The most impressive feature is the high frequency of unretouched flakes and chips. In a normal assemblage all of these would be classified as debitage or debris and none would considered tools. Yet many of these pieces were recovered from positions where their use as parts of weapons were irrefutable”. joteIn total, more than 40% of the men, woman and children in the commentary had died by violence. Fred Wendorf, suggested that environmental pressure and vanishing resources on the end of the Pleistocene were the causes of violence, but this remains only one hypothesis. A detailed analysis of the skeletons with nowadays methods (dna-analysis, stable isotopes) is missing till now. If war is defined as organized aggression between autonomous social units, the archaeological record at Jebel Sahaba may indeed indicate the presence of an early war.

Coming back to the European Record, at Ofnet cave in Bavaria two pits contained the skulls and vertebrae of thirty-eight individuals, all stained with red ochre, dating to around 6.5 k.a. cal BC (Orschiedt 1998). The Ofnet finding most probably represents a massacre, which wiped out a whole community and was followed by the ceremonial burial of skulls. Most of the victims of deadly attacks were children; two-thirds of the adults were females, which led to the suggestion, that a temporary absence of males may have been the precipitating cause of the attack. Half the individuals were wounded before death by blunt mace-like weapons, with males and females and children all injured, but males having the most wounds.

Territoriality may have had an important connotation in semi sedentary Ertebølle communities. At Skateholm, two larger cemeteries from the middle to late Ertebølle period both located on an island contained about 85 graves. An arrowhead was lodged in the pelvic bone of an adult male and a bone point was found with another male At the Ertebølle Vedbæk cemetery on Zealand, one adult, probably male in a grave with three bodies had a bone point through the throat. Bone points that probably caused lethal damage have also been found in the chests of burials of adults at Bäckaskog and Stora Bjers in Sweden. Other Mesolithic victims of fatal injuries are known from France (Téviec in Brittany) to the Ukraine (Vasylivka III cemetery) in the East.

Ofnet-Cave (after R.R. Schmidt)

Reply

Imix says:

05/16/2011 at 10:55 am

Two things cross my mind when reading on this topic: First, that hominis unlike other primates are or became hunters of large mammals – killing a large mammal is deep in their blood and their psyche – also, then, of humans? Second, while we do not know the circumstances and context of the famous Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, there is a conspicuous absence of images of interpersonal violence such as war parties, raids, killings in them, which is in contrast to rather frequent depictions of such acts in most historial ethnic art.

Reply

Cernunnos says:

05/17/2011 at 9:47 am

Very interesting topic, indeed. I haven’t heard of the mentioned quite clear indications of interpersonal violence during the later phases of the paleolithic. I’d appreciate if you could state your sources, not because I reject your credibility, of course, but because I’d like to find out more about the sites by myself. Thanks a lot!
Anyway, they are all quite late and I doubt that the Sima de los Huesos evidence has much to do with the usual meaning of the term violence. Still, like in the previous comment, I consider the notion of lacking evidence (of course you know about the problems of “absence of evidence”) for inter- and intrapersonal violence during most of the paleolithic and especially in contrast to post-paleolithic periods, as a still valid paradigm.

Reply

Katzman says:

05/17/2011 at 5:45 pm

I doubt the Sima de los Huesos evidence also, and of course it does not fulfill my “gold standard”. The most useful articles and books about the topic:
Thorpe I. J. N. Anthropology, archaeology, and the origin of warfare. World Archaeology; 2003. 35: 145–165.
Kelly R.C. The evolution of lethal intergroup violence. PNAS 2005. 102: 43 15294-15298.
Marcus J. The Archaeological Evidence for Social Evolution. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2008. 37:251–66
Wendorf F (Ed.) Prehistory of Nubia. Vol 2 954-996

Massacres during the late Linear Pottery Culture of Middle Europe

2011-07-04T15:42:00.000+01:00

Posted on 05/19/2011 by Katzman
in Aggsbach's Paleolithic Blog

As shown in earlier posts there are many possible explanations for the phenomenon of intra / intergroup violence during prehistoric and historic times. First evidence for murdered individuals and even massacres of a larger group of persons is available for the late Paleolithic in Europe and the Egypt

The first farmers in Europe are represented by the Early Linear Pottery Culture (LBK ), which developed in South Central Europe around 5.7 k.a BC. During the first phase the LBK began to spread from Hungary to the middle Rhine valley, with settlements established mainly on fertile soils like loess. During the late phase (about 5.0 k.a. BC), LBK settlements can be finally found from the Paris Basin in the West to central Poland and Moldavia in the East. There is no evidence of mass kills during the early and middle LBK. The archaeological record of the later and latest phases of LBK shows signs of greater regionalism and is characterized by settlements with fortifications and some clear indications for intensified intra / intergroup conflicts.

Asparn-Schletz in Lower Austria, about 50 km north of Vienna, is one of the fortified settlements from the end of the LBK period. During excavations, large numbers of human remains were found at the base of a fortification ditch. It is estimated from the number of cranial and postcranial remains that approximately 200 individuals were deposited. The skeletons were found mainly in strange positions, and often several skeletons were grouped together. The bodies were deposited prone and many skeletons were incomplete with extremities missing. The skeletal investigations showed that most of the skulls were lethally fractured. Many postcranial remains exhibit unusual features too. The age and the sex distribution of the individuals showed that the occurrence of females among the young adult population is significantly reduced. From these results, it has been suggested that the traumatic lesions originate from inter-human aggressive acts. It was also suggested that the reduced abundance of females amongst the young adults was interpreted as an indication of the abduction of women of child-bearing age. It seems that these humans were probably the victims of a massacre which led to the abrupt end of the LBK settlement at Schletz (Stadler 2004, Teschler-Nicola et al. 1999).

A similar situation as in Schletz is also found at 2 Neolithic sites from the LBK period in Germany: At Talheim near Heilbronn in Baden-Württemberg and at a fortified large settlement at Vaihingen, in the Neckar region 650-700 km to the west from Schletz. At Talheim the remains of 34 human individuals were excavated from a mass grave found in 1983/84 located outside the settlement area. In contrast to Schletz, no fortifications have yet been found. The position of the skeletons indicated that these human remains were not buried according to usual LBK burial rites, but were victims of a massacre. Many bodies were lying in a strange twisted posture, and several skeletons were mixed together. Several skulls were lethally fractured. The whole assemblage was interpreted as a mass grave, with bodies quickly thrown into a pit and covered, because carnivore bite marks on the bones were absent. Regarding the age and sex profile of the cadavers a possible deficit of infants in the age group of below 4 yr was suggested by the excavators. One (very speculative) explanation was that they may have been kidnapped by the attackers (Wahl and König 1987).

At Vaihingen, 12 people’s bodies were thrown or dumped in two pits outside the ancient village, without ceremony and without any special treatment. Strontium isotopes indicated that perhaps 40% of these people were born elsewhere. Indications of violence are present in some of the bodies.

At Herxheim, a LBK enclosure near Landau, Rhineland-Palatinate, highly fragmented parts of more than 500 bodies were found since 1900. Human remains were present. Similar to Schletz the settlement was equipped with an outer and an inner fortification ditch. The human remains were mainly deposited within the ditches. Many skeletons were incomplete and were not lying in a correct anatomical position. Several bones were fragmented and deposited together with animal bones, pottery, and other waste material from the settlement. The most extraordinary findings at Herxheim are calottes from human skulls which at some places appeared to be grouped together (Häußer 1998). For the Herxheim site, a massacre-scenario is unlikely. The sheer number of individuals that were found strongly argues against the possibility that they were the victims of a single raid. Whilst many skulls showed evidence of violence, wounds often seem to have healed, or can be interpreted as peri- and post mortal event suggesting that this may not have been the cause of death. Nowadays a ritual context is preferred for the interpretation of the Herxheim enclosure. One interpretation suggest a common burial ground for individuals, that lived far off Herxheim and were finally secondary buried at the site. Alternative readings consider „less humanistic practices or ritual tortures and killings by captives, slaves or witches” (Groneborn 2009).

Arrow origins traced to Africa

2011-06-24T18:56:00.000+01:00

By Dan Vergano,
in USA TODAY Science Snapshot

Nicknamed Otzi, for his resting place in the Ötztal Alps, the "Iceman" was outfitted with a copper ax, flint knife and bearskin hat, a surprise to archaeologists because they all were so well-crafted. His bow and 12 arrows, two of them nicely feathered and tipped with flint points, were likely less surprising, because they nicely fit with the then-current story of the bow and arrow's origins.

"The invention of the bow and arrow used to be closely linked to the late Upper Paleolithic (Stone Age) in Europe," less than 30,000 years ago, says anthropologist Marlize Lombard of South Africa's University of Johannesburg, in a study in the current Journal of Archaeological Science.

Last year, however, Lombard and her colleagues reported in the journal Antiquity, that arrows were around at least 64,000 years ago, and were first discovered not in Europe, but in South Africa. A single quartz arrowhead, bloodstained, had turned up at the Sibudu Cave site, dating to that time. In the new Journalof Archaeological Science study, Lombard reports more arrowheads and more evidence pushing back the age of the bow and arrow.

Why does it matter? Well, modern-looking humans turn up in fossils from as long as 195,000 years ago in Africa, but only spread worldwide starting about 60,000 years ago. Anthropologists have debated for decades about the innovations or changes, everything from language to genes to tools, that turned modern man loose on the world.

Arrows are one possibility for what helped people spread all over the world, either through hunting or fighting, as Lombard cautiously notes. "Although the existence of bow and arrow technology (more than 60,000 years ago) may have far-reaching consequences for hypotheses about human behavioural evolution and adaptation, it is by no means easy to establish," she says at the beginning of her study. In the study, she looks through the microscope at 16 quartz blades found in dirt layers as much as 65,000 years old at the South African site.

All but two of the ancient blades have blood traces on them and nine were deliberately hafted, or chipped, to fit onto a tool, she finds. More than half of the blades look like they were attached to arrows and eight carry traces of blood stains, Lombard concludes. "It is therefore my reading that at least nine tools in this sample were probably used as transversely hafted arrowheads."

The others may have been blades used to butcher animals, she suggests, or fitted onto barbs or darts.

"I think the finding adds to growing evidence for the great antiquity of complex projectile weaponry in Africa," says paleoanthropologist John Shea of Stony Brook (N.Y.) University. "The real startling upshot of this finding is that it challenges longstanding archaeological beliefs that important changes in projectile technology only occurred very recently, less than 30,000 years ago, after humans dispersed into Europe."

In North America, Shea adds, "it also challenges the longstanding hypothesis that the bow and arrow were only invented a few thousand years ago and largely in conjunction with the origins of agriculture."

Even after prehistoric people invented arrows, they likely kept on using spears as well, Lombard suggests. Hunters in Africa still use spears to run down wildebeest and zebra, while using arrows only during part of the year to hunt for giraffe, eland, hartebeest and springbok. So, she concludes, archaeologists shouldn't be surprised when they find both heavier spear points and arrowheads mixed together at future archaeological digs.

" Complex projectile technology may have given our species a crucial ecological advantage in competition with other hominin (human) species as they dispersed from Africa," Shea says, by e-mail. That's one explanation for the disappearance of the Neanderthals, who have left only spear points behind at sites in Europe. Outgunned by modern humans and their arrows, the (literal) "killer app" of its day, the Neanderthals weren't able to compete for game and faded from the archaeological record (if not completely from our genes) about 30,000 years ago.

And the age of the bow and arrow may go further back, Shea says. "My own personal hunch is that the bow and arrow dates to at least 100,000 years ago based on stone tools found at sites in Ethiopia, Kenya and neighboring countries."

No wonder Otzi had such nice arrows. Archery was an ancient technology in his day. Unfortunately for the Iceman.

After a puncture wound was discovered in Otzi's left shoulder a decade ago, researchers at Italy's South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, X-rayed the wound and found what had killed the Iceman— a flint arrowhead that severed a major artery and likely paralyzed his arm. "The Iceman probably bled to death within a matter of minutes," the museum notes, because of the arrowhead.

Vitrified Forts

2011-06-17T15:32:00.000+01:00

By K. Kris Hirst, About.com Guide

Definition:

There are some 200 hillforts and other settlements in the world which evidence signs of being subjected to intense heat. Such burned forts range in age from Neolithic to Roman period. The heating was so extreme that all, some or part of the structures were vitrified or calcined. Vitrification is a chemical process by which silicate-based rocks are turned into a glass-like amorphous solid; calcination is the loss of moisture, reduction or oxidation in carbonate rocks.
Granite, basalt, gneiss or other silicate rocks begin to crystallize at temperatures about 650°C, and melt and vitrify when exposed to temperatures between 1050 and 1235°C. Biotite micas melt at 850°C. Carbonate rocks such as limestone and dolomite become calcined when exposed to temperatures of 800°C.
Why Vitrify?
In some cases, vitrification of timber-laced ramparts was done on purpose, to produce a more solid defensive feature. In others, vitrification was a result of an accidental or purposeful fire by people bent on destruction.
Vitrified forts (or vitrified structures) are difficult to date, because exposure to such intense heat destroys the organic materials, although recent research at Misericordia (Portugal) seems to suggest that archaeomagnetic dating may be a workable solution.

Sources
Catanzariti, Gianluca, et al. 2008 Archaeomagnetic dating of a vitrified wall at the Late Bronze Age settlement of Misericordia (Serpa, Portugal). Journal of Archaeological Science 35:1399-1407.
Friend, C. R. L., N. R. Charnley, H. Clyne, and J. Dye 2008 Experimentally produced glass compared with that occurring at The Torr, NW Scotland, UK: vitrification through biotite melting. Journal of Archaeological Science 35(12):3130-3143.

Examples:
Monte Novo and Misericordia (Portugal), Pico del Castillo (Spain), Tap o'Noth and Finavon Castle (Scotland)

First Cannibals Ate Each Other for Extra Nutrition

2011-06-17T15:23:00.000+01:00

In Discovery News

By Jennifer Viegas

Thu Aug 26, 2010 05:20 AM ET

Why did our ancestors eat each other?

Simple: They were hungry.

The world's first known cannibals ate each other to satisfy their nutritional needs.

The cannibals belonged to the species Homo antecessor, related to both Neanderthals and modern humans.

Homo antecessor appears to have preyed on competing groups, treating victims like any other meat source.

The world's first known human cannibals ate each other to satisfy their nutritional needs, concludes a new study of the remains of cannibal feasts consumed about one million years ago.

The humans-as-food determination negates other possibilities, such as cannibalism for ritual's sake, or cannibalism due to starvation. In this oldest known case of humans eating humans, other food was available to the diners, but human flesh was just part of their meat mix.

"These practices were conducted by Homo antecessor, who inhabited Europe one million years ago," according to the research team, led by Eudald Carbonell.

Carbonell, a professor at the University of Rovira and Virgili, and his colleagues added that Homo antecessor was "the last common ancestor between the African lineage that gave rise to our species, Homo sapiens, and the lineage leading to the European Neanderthals of the Upper Pleistocene."

For the study, published in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, the anthropologists analyzed food remains, stone tools, and other finds associated with Homo antecessor at a cave site called Gran Dolina in the Sierra de Atapuerca near Burgos, Spain. An apparent refuse pile containing tools and meat bones from animals also included multiple butchered bones of Homo antecessor individuals.

"Cut marks, peeling, and percussion marks show that the corpses of these individuals were processed in keeping with the mimetic mode used with other mammal carcasses: skinning, defleshing, dismembering, evisceration, and periosteum (membrane that lines bones) and marrow extraction," according to the researchers.

They added that the butchery techniques identified at the site "show the primordial intention of obtaining meat and marrow and maximally exploiting nutrients. Once consumed, human and nonhuman remains were dumped, mixing them together with lithic tools."

The other bones belonged to animals such as ancient bears, wolves, foxes, mammoths, lynx and more.

The bones and many stone tools indicate this was a campsite. All human butchering took place inside the cave.

"Other small-sized animals were processed in the same way," the scientists wrote. "These data suggest that they (Homo antecessor) practiced gastronomic cannibalism."

To further support this belief, the researchers point out that the consumed individuals came from a variety of age groups, ranging from young children to young adults.

The living arrangement, choice of prey, hunting and butchering methods all suggest that Homo antecessor lived in cohesive groups that likely would have competed with other Homo antecessor groups.

"Necessarily, a level of behavioral complexity is present among these human groups," the anthropologists believe. "This complexity allows using the cannibalism in response to resources competition with other human groups."

Based on other findings, eating one's enemy for political and nutritional gain was also likely practiced by Neanderthals and early members of our own species, who also practiced cannibalism for other reasons, such as during rituals.

Biologist Steven Vogel at Duke University ruminated on cannibalism in his book Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle. Vogel calculated that we'd have to consume too many of our brethren for cannibalism to be a sustainable nutritional source in and of itself.

Instead, humans "muscled our way up the food chain," Vogel said, developing better hunting weapons and other tools to allow almost everything to be on our menus.

A computer dating revolution (of the archaeological kind)

2011-06-06T21:45:00.001+01:00

in The Independent
Monday, 6 June 2011

Innovations in programming are changing archaeologists’ perception of how settled life and early agriculture spread through Britain, David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent, reports.

Windmill Hill, a large Neolithic causewayed enclosure in Avebury, was dated within a span of six centuries, but the new project has narrowed that down to just six decades

The long-lost ‘history’ of prehistoric Britain, including our island’s first wars, is being re-discovered - courtesy of innovations in computer programming as well as archaeology.

Using newly refined computer systems, developed over recent years by programmers at Oxford University, archaeologists from English Heritage and Cardiff University have for the first time been able to fairly accurately date individual prehistoric battles, migrations and building construction projects.

After eight years of research, the team has been able to create a ‘historical’ chronology for the first 700 years of settled life in Britain.

“In effect, we have been able to turn pre-history into history. In the past we knew about events in prehistory – but we weren’t able to date them sufficiently precisely to put them into a chronological sequence,” said Dr. Alex Bayliss, English Heritage’s chief dating specialist.

“Now, for the first time, we’re able to tell the real story of how settled life in Britain began,” said her colleague, one of Britain’s leading experts on the period, Professor Alasdair Whittle of Cardiff University.

The new dating revolution is completely changing archaeologists’ perception of how settled life and early agriculture first spread through Britain and how, some 800 years before Stonehenge, Britain’s first monumental buildings came to be constructed.

For the first time ever, computer programmers and archaeologists have now fully developed and utilized on a mass scale a technique – known as Bayesian Chronological Modelling – to be able to glimpse the real political and even military events which shaped Britain’s prehistoric past.

The new research, based on computer-refined radiocarbon dates, strongly suggests that farming life-styles were introduced from the continent through Kent and Essex by immigrants – not simply through the transmission of knowledge and ideas. The work also reveals that for the first 200 years, roughly the first 8 to 10 farming generations, the agricultural revolution spread very slowly – from Kent/Essex in around 4050 BC to the Cotswolds by 3850 BC (on average just over half a mile per year).

But the research also suggests that in around 3850 BC, the new farming culture reached some sort of demographic or political ‘critical mass’ – for the new dates reveal that suddenly the agricultural lifestyle (also being adopted by Britain’s indigenous pre-agricultural inhabitants) spread throughout Britain within just 50 years – at an average speed of around 9 miles per year – ie. some 15 times more rapidly – vastly faster than most archaeologists had previously thought.

The new study – partly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council – has also discovered that this farming explosion in around 3850 BC seems to have triggered the construction of Britain’s first monumental buildings – the great communal tombs known today as long barrows. But the new more precise dating system has also indicated, contrary to previous archaeological belief, that most of them were only in use for two or three generations – not normally the centuries prehistorians had always assumed.

Yet the most intriguing new discovery seems to be a political one – a finding that hints at ferocious competition for power between competing groups, possibly even competing traditions and ideologies.

The new study, ‘Gathering Time’, published this month, has revealed that the introduction of continental-style ceremonial/political complexes into Britain – massive circular enclosures, each up to 300 metres in diameter – met with a mixed reception.

The new dating analysis reveals that at first (around 3700 BC) large numbers – around 40 to 50 – were built within 50 to 100 years. However some were violently attacked, their palisaded ramparts burnt down and their people killed. By around 3625 BC, attempts to build new enclosures had almost ceased.

This pause – potentially the result of opposition to the new order – lasted around half a century. A brief revival of enclosure-building between approximately 3575 and 3525 BC, detected by the new dating analysis, may represent a temporary political/military comeback for what had been briefly a dominant new tradition. This later period of monument building and subsequent ongoing occupation is also associated with terrible violence – with several of these ceremonial centres coming under attack from massed prehistoric archers.

Gradually, by around 3300 BC, the monumental enclosures (known today as ‘causewayed camps’) were abandoned – and an entirely British (as opposed to continental European-originating) style of monument, great processional avenues associated with funerary rituals, began from 3550 BC, to take their place as the dominant monumental (and probably ideological) tradition in Britain.

The ability of the refined dating system (precise to within around two and a half decades rather than two and a half centuries) is therefore transforming archaeologists’ understanding of pre-history. In the future it may even be possible to work out what the political/military events actually represent – whether they in fact represent tensions between continental immigrants and people of indigenous origin (who had adopted agriculture from those immigrants) – or whether they represent tensions between tribes or other groups of a single or related ethnic and cultural tradition. Only future research using the newly refined dating techniques plus DNA and other technologies will finally reveal the full story.

The Bayesian computer programme

The technique which English Heritage and Cardiff University has used to discover the chronology of Britain’s early agricultural ‘history’ (the early Neolithic) uses computer programs to narrow down the date ranges provided by conventional radiocarbon dating tests.

Typically radiocarbon dates in the early Neolithic have been so imprecise that they could only be expressed as wide date ranges, typically some 250 years long.

The Bayesian computer program solves this ‘imprecision’ problem by systematically checking each year in a given radiocarbon date range against other archaeological dating information, mainly the original stratigraphic relationships between the archaeological items being tested.

When literally hundreds of pieces of radiocarbon and stratigraphic data from a given site have been systematically analysed by a Bayesian computer program, the precision can typically be improved to a 25 year rather than 250 year date range.

The Bayesian software, which the archaeologists have been using, has been developed principally at Oxford University. The first program was brought out in 1995, but over the past 16 years constant improvements have been made to the system. Perhaps most importantly, however, the just completed English Heritage/Cardiff University investigation into the early Neolithic has enabled archaeologists for the first time to learn how to apply the new technique on a grand scale.

Re-discovering Britain's First Wars

Reconstructing the chronology of the early Neolithic has enabled English Heritage and Cardiff University archaeologists to re-discover Britain’s first wars – a series of conflicts which the new dating analysis shows occurred mainly between 3675 and 3475 BC.

The archaeologists have now succeeded in giving relatively precise dates to eight out of Britain’s eleven known early Neolithic battles. In almost all cases the targets for attack were the early Neolithic monumental enclosures known as causewayed camps – and the attacks were carried out through a mixture of massed archery and the use of fire.

In some cases enhanced defences appear to have been built in particularly insecure periods only to be attacked and burned down relatively rapidly. The wars were between agricultural peoples – but whether those peoples were from the same or different ethnic or cultural groups is not yet known.

Conference Defence Sites: Heritage and Future 2012

2011-06-06T21:29:00.000+01:00

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/57231703/Conference-Defence-Sites-Heritage-and-Future-2012

Sex and Violence: Is Sex at the Psychological Root of War?

2011-06-05T19:36:00.000+01:00

in AlterNet

Miller-McCune Magazine / By Tom Jacobs

March 30, 2011

Research from Hong Kong suggests that, among men, the impulses to make love and war are deeply intertwined.

Guys: What do you feel when you look at a photo of an attractive woman? Excited? Intrigued?

How about warlike?

Such a response may seem strange or even offensive. But newly published research suggests it is far from uncommon — and it may help explain the deep psychological roots of warfare.

With yet another war in full swing, we once again face the fundamental question of why groups of humans settle their differences through organized violence. A wide range of motivations have been offered over the years: In a 2002 book, Chris Hedges compellingly argued that war is both an addiction and a way of engaging in the sort of heroic struggle that gives our lives meaning.

Evolutionary psychologists, on the other hand, see war as an extension of mating-related male aggression. They argue men compete for status and resources in an attempt to attract women and produce offspring, thereby passing on their genes to another generation. This competition takes many forms, including violent aggression against other males — an impulse frowned upon by modern society but one that can be channeled into acceptability when one joins the military.

It’s an interesting and well-thought-out theory, but there’s not a lot of direct evidence to back it up. That’s what makes “The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships,” a paper just published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, so intriguing.

A team of Hong Kong-based researchers led by psychologist Lei Chang of Chinese University conducted four experiments that suggest a link between the motivation to mate and a man’s interest in, or support for, war.

The first featured 111 students (60 men) at a college in China. Each was shown 20 full-body color photographs of members of the opposite sex. Half viewed images of people who had been rated attractive; the other half saw pictures of people classified as unattractive.

Afterward, “participants responded to 39 questions about having wars or trade conflicts with three foreign countries that have had hostile relationships with China in recent history,” the researchers write. Twenty-one of the questions “tapped the willingness to go to war with the hostile country,” they noted, while 18 addressed “peaceful solutions to trade conflicts.”

The results duplicated those of a pilot study: Male participants answering the war-related questions “showed more militant attitudes” if they had viewed the photos of attractive women. This effect was absent in answers to the trade-related questions, nor was it found among women for either set of questions.

In another experiment, 23 young heterosexual males viewed one of two sets of 16 photos. One featured images of Chinese national flags; the other focused on female legs. They then performed a computer test to see how quickly they could respond to common, two-character Chinese words. Half of the words related to war, while the others related to farms.

If they were motivated by nationalism or patriotism, the young men would have presumably responded to the war words more rapidly after having viewed the flag. But in fact, the researchers write, they “responded faster to war words when primed by female legs.”

In contrast, the rate at which participants processed farm-related words did not vary depending upon which photos were seen. This result was repeated in a follow-up experiment using a slightly different design.

Why would men with mating on their minds be more receptive to the idea of war? Chang and his colleagues suggest there is a “mating-warring association” deep in the male brain, due to the fact successful warriors have traditionally enjoyed greater access to women.

This instinctual force propels men “to engage in organized lethal aggression by co-opting other human adaptations, including our unique cognitive and social mind,” they write. To put it more simply, our rational brains lose the internal battle to our instinctual selves.

If peacocks impress potential mates with colorful feathers, the researchers write, perhaps warriors attract women with their ribbons, badges and fancy dress uniforms. And men’s “swords and missiles” may be our answer to a stag’s horns: weapons that showcase one’s virility.

The researchers concede war is a collective enterprise that cannot be explained entirely by individual motivates. And it’s worth noting this theory doesn’t explain why women join the military (admittedly in relatively small numbers). Furthermore, while there’s no reason to believe their results are culturally driven, it would surely be interesting to try to duplicate them in the U.S. or Europe.

Such caveats aside, their work provides further evidence that the impulse to fight may go deeper than the desire to defend one’s nation, religion or tribe. If their thesis is correct, the 1960s slogan “Make love, not war” may have to be revised. Love — at least the sexual variety — may have more in common with war than anyone imagined.

Teschler-Nicola et al - Evidence of Genocide 7000 BP: Neolithic Paradigm and Geo-climatic Reality

2011-06-02T16:57:00.000+01:00

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/56940813

Early Bronze Age battle site found on German river bank

2011-05-22T22:28:00.000+01:00

In Archaeology Daily News
May, 22 2011

BBC

Fractured human remains found on a German river bank could provide the first compelling evidence of a major Bronze Age battle.
Archaeological excavations of the Tollense Valley in northern Germany unearthed fractured skulls, wooden clubs and horse remains dating from around 1200 BC.
The injuries to the skulls suggest face-to-face combat in a battle perhaps fought between warring tribes, say the researchers.
The paper, published in the journal Antiquity, is based primarily on an investigation begun in 2008 of the Tollense Valley site, which involved both ground excavations and surveys of the riverbed by divers.
They found remains of around 100 human bodies, of which eight had lesions to their bones. Most of the bodies, but not all, appeared to be young men.
The injuries included skull damage caused by massive blows or arrowheads, and some of the injuries appear to have been fatal.
One humerus (upper arm) bone contained an arrow head embedded more than 22mm into the bone, while a thigh bone fracture suggests a fall from a horse (horse bones were also found at the site).
The archaeologists also found remains of two wooden clubs, one the shape of a baseball bat and made of ash, the second the shape of a croquet mallet and made of sloe wood.
Dr Harald Lubke of the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology in Germany said the evidence pointed to a major battle site, perhaps the earliest found to date.
"At the the beginning of the Neolithic, we have finds like Talheim in Germany, where we have evidence of violence, but it doesn't look like this situation in the Tollense Valley where we have many humans there in the riverbed," he told the BBC.
"We have a lot of violence from blunt weapons without any healing traces, and we have also evidence of sharp weapons. There are a lot of signs that this happened immediately before the victims died and the bodies are not buried in the normal way."
The archaeologists found no pottery, ornaments or paved surfaces which might be suggestive of formal graves or burial rituals.
Many of the bones appear to have been transported some distance by the river, although some finds appear to be in their original position.
The researchers suggest the bodies may have been dumped in the river before being washed away and deposited on a sandbar. Alternatively, the dead could have been killed on the spot in "the swampy valley environment", the paper concludes.
Dr Lubke believes the real conflict may have been fought out further up the river, and that the bodies so far found represent just a fraction of the carnage wrought by the battle.
"This is only a sample, what we have found up until now - the modern river bed only cuts across part of the river bed of that time. There are likely to be many more remains.
"It's absolutely necessary to find the place were the bodies came into the water and that will explain if it really was a battle or something else, such as an offering, but we believe that a fight is the best explanation at the moment."
Evidence was also found among the human remains of a millet diet, which is not typical of Northern Germany at the time, which the researchers say may betray the presence of invaders.
While bronze pins of a Silesian design could suggest contact with the Silesian region 400km to the south-east, they say.

Standing Up to Fight: Does It Explain Why We Walk Upright and Why Women Like Tall Men?

2011-05-20T15:21:00.000+01:00

These two photo sequences depict a key part of a University of Utah experiment that showed why there is a fighting advantage to walking on two legs and being tall -- something that may help explain why ape-like human ancestors started walking upright and why women today tend to prefer tall men. In the top three photos, a participant in the study kneels with four limbs on the ground and then raises one arm to strike downward on a padded block equipped with sensors to measure the force of the blow. The bottom three photos show the same experiment, but with the blow delivered from an upright position. The study found that blows delivered downward from a two-legged posture are more powerful than downward blows from an all-fours posture, or than any blows delivered upward, from the front or sideways. (Credit: David Carrier, University of Utah)

ScienceDaily (May 19, 2011) — A University of Utah study shows that men hit harder when they stand on two legs than when they are on all fours, and when hitting downward rather than upward, giving tall, upright males a fighting advantage.

This may help explain why our ape-like human ancestors began walking upright and why women tend to prefer tall men.

"The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that our ancestors adopted bipedal posture so that males would be better at beating and killing each other when competing for females," says David Carrier, a biology professor who conducted the study. "Standing up on their hind legs allowed our ancestors to fight with the strength of their forelimbs, making punching much more dangerous."

"It also provides a functional explanation for why women find tall men attractive," Carrier adds. "Early in human evolution, an enhanced capacity to strike downward on an opponent may have given tall males a greater capacity to compete for mates and to defend their resources and offspring. If this were true, females who chose to mate with tall males would have had greater fitness for survival."

Carrier's new study is being published May 18 in the online Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.

The idea is not new that fighting and violence played a role in making human ancestors shift from walking on all fours to walking on two legs. But Carrier's new study physically demonstrates the advantage of fighting from an upright, two-legged posture.

Carrier measured the force of punches by male boxers and martial arts practitioners as they hit in four different directions: forward, sideways, down and up.

A punching bag fitted with a sensor measured the force of forward and sideways punches. For strikes downward and upward, the men struck a heavy padded block on the end of a lever that swung up and down because it was suspended from an axle.

In either case, the men struck the target as hard as they could both from a standing posture and on their hands and knees.

The findings: for all punching angles, men hit with far more force when they were standing, and from both postures they could hit over twice as hard downward as upward.

Humans: Two-Legged Punching Apes?

The transition from four-legged to two-legged posture is a defining point in human evolution, yet the reason for the shift is still under debate. Darwin thought that our ancestors stood up so they could handle tools and weapons. Later scientists have suggested that bipedalism evolved for a host of other reasons, including carrying food, dissipating heat, efficient running and reaching distant branches while foraging in trees.

"Others pointed out that great apes often fight and threaten to fight from bipedal posture," says Carrier. "My study provides a mechanistic explanation for why many species of mammals stand bipedally to fight."

Carrier says many scientists are reluctant to consider an idea that paints our ancestors as violent.

"Among academics there often is resistance to the reality that humans are a violent species. It's an intrinsic desire to have us be more peaceful than we are," he says.

Nevertheless, human males and their great ape cousins -- chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans -- frequently fight each other for territory and access to females.

The most popular theories about why we became bipedal are based on locomotor advantages -- increases in the efficiency of walking and running. However, research shows upright posture is worse for locomotion, contrary to what Carrier initially believed.

"If you're a chimpanzee- or gorilla-type ancestor that is moving on the ground, walking bipedally has a cost," he says. "It's energetically more expensive, it's harder to speed up and slow down, and there are costs in terms of agility. In every way, going from four legs to two is a disadvantage for locomotion. So the selective advantage for becoming bipedal, whatever it was, must have been important."

Nearly all mammals, including chimps and gorillas, move on all fours when they run or cover long distances on the ground. On the other hand, all sorts of four-legged animals stand up and use their front legs to fight. They include anteaters, lions, wolves, bears, wolverines, horses, rabbits and many rodents and primates.

Carrier believes that the usefulness of quadruped forelegs as weapons is a side effect of how forelegs are used for walking and running. When an animal is running with its body positioned horizontally, the forelegs strike down at the ground. By lifting the body to a vertical posture, animals can direct that same force toward an opponent.

In addition, quadrupeds are stronger pulling back with their forelimbs than pushing forward. That translates to a powerful downward blow when they rear up on their hind legs. These advantages, which grow directly out of four-legged movement, can be used most effectively by an animal that can stand easily on two legs.

Carrier predicted that animals would hit harder with their forelegs when their bodies were held upright than when they were horizontal, and that they would hit harder downward than upward. Although it would be ideal to test these hypotheses with four-legged animals, humans should still possess the advantages that led our ancestors to stand upright, and they are more practical test subjects.

The results were exactly what Carrier expected. Men's side strikes were 64 percent harder, their forward strikes were 48 percent harder, their downward strikes were 44 percent harder, and their upward strikes were 48 percent harder when they were standing than when they were on their hands and knees. From both postures, subjects delivered 3.3 times as much force when they hit downward rather than upward.

Do Women Want Men Who Can Fight?

While Carrier's study primarily deals with the evolution of upright posture, it also may have implications for how women choose mates. Multiple studies have shown that women find tall men more attractive. Greater height is also associated with health, social dominance, symmetrical faces and intelligence in men and women. These correlations have led some scientists to suggest that women prefer tall men because height indicates "good genes" that can be passed on to offspring. Carrier believes there is more to it.

"If that were the whole story, I would expect the same to be true for men -- that men would be attracted to tall women. But it turns out they're not. Men are attracted to women of average height or even shorter," he says.

The alternative explanation is that tall males among our ancestors were better able to defend their resources, partners and offspring. If males can hit down harder than they can hit up, a tall male has the advantage in a fight because he can punch down to hit his opponent's most vulnerable targets.

Carrier certainly isn't saying women like physically abusive men or those who get into fights with each other. He is saying that women like tall men because tallness is a product if the evolutionary advantage held by our ancestors who began standing upright to fight.

"From the perspective of sexual selection theory, women are attracted to powerful males, not because powerful males can beat them up, but because powerful males can protect them and their children from other males," Carrier says.

"In a world of automatic weapons and guided missiles, male physical strength has little relevance to most conflicts between males," he adds. "But guns have been common weapons for less than 15 human generations. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that modern females are still attracted to physical traits that predict how their mates would fare in a fight."

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Utah, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Journal Reference:

1.David R. Carrier. The Advantage of Standing Up to Fight and the Evolution of Habitual Bipedalism in Hominins. PLoS ONE, 2011; 6 (5): e19630 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019630

Mass burial suggests massacre at Iron Age hill fort

2011-05-06T22:40:00.001+01:00

BBC, 18 April 2011 Last updated at 03:10 GMT

Archaeologists have found evidence of a massacre linked to Iron Age warfare at a hill fort in Derbyshire.

A burial site contained only women and children - the first segregated burial of this kind from Iron Age Britain.

Nine skeletons were discovered in a section of ditch around the fort at Fin Cop in the Peak District.

Scientists believe "perhaps hundreds more skeletons" could be buried in the ditch, only a small part of which has been excavated so far.

Construction of the hill fort has been dated to some time between 440BC and 390BC, but it was destroyed before completion.

The fort's stone wall was broken apart and the rubble used to fill the 400m perimeter ditch, where the skeletons were found.

A second, outer wall and ditch had been started but not finished.

Iron Age warfare

The findings provide a rare insight into warfare in pre-Roman Britain, according to Dr Clive Waddington of Archaeological Research Services, who directed the excavations.

"There has been an almost accepted assumption amongst many archaeologists that hill forts functioned as displays of power, prestige and status and that warfare in the British Iron Age is largely invisible," he said.

"For the people buried at Fin Cop, the hurriedly constructed fort was evidently intended as a defensive work in response to a very real threat."

The skeletons are of women, babies, a toddler and a single teenage male. The archaeological team believe they were probably massacred after the fort was attacked and captured.

All were found in a 10m long section of ditch, the only part to be excavated so far. The ditch was 5m wide with 2m deep vertical edges and would have guarded a 4m high perimeter wall.

Animal bones, also found in the ditch, suggest the fort's inhabitants kept cattle, sheep and pigs. There were also remains from horses which indicate some of the fort's inhabitants were of high status.

The human and animal remains at Fin Cop are relatively well preserved, at least partly due to the limestone geology - the alkaline chemistry slows down decay of organic material including bone.

This may also help explain why similar evidence of Iron Age warfare has not been found at other sites; many hill forts are built on gritstone or sandstone whose acidic soil accelerate the decay of organic matter.

La violence aux origines de l'humanité : Les temps préhistoriques

2011-04-08T23:39:00.001+01:00

Jean GUILAINE - 1er février 2003 (1)
in Église Réformée d'Auteuil: Etudes & Recherche

La préhistoire fut-elle, comme certains l'ont pensé, une période pacifique, un âge d'or ?

Au delà même du mythe traditionnel d'une âge d'or originel, suivi d'une " chute ", certains spécialistes ont cru pouvoir l'assurer. Par exemple, Marshall Sahlins pour qui la société des origines était presque paradisiaque, une humanité peu nombreuse pouvant alors acquérir sa nourriture quotidienne sans difficulté dans un environnement riche et giboyeux, ce qui laissait à ces heureux ancêtres beaucoup de temps pour le repas, pour le loisir et pour l'affection et leur permettait de vivre en harmonie les uns avec les autres (Age de pierre, âge d'abondance, chez Gallimard en français).

En fait, il n'en est rien. L'analyse approfondie des fouilles les plus récentes(2) prouve que la préhistoire fut une époque de violence et de guerres, et cela aussi bien au paléolithique, le temps des chasseurs cueilleurs, qu'au néolithique, le temps où apparaissent les agriculteurs et les éleveurs.

Rappel du cadre chronologique : paléolithique puis néolithique

Pour commencer, revenons sur ce cadre chronologique. Pendant la presque totalité de la préhistoire, l'homme a été un prédateur. Par la chasse, la pêche ou la cueillette, il a vécu sur la nature, prélevant sur elle pour consommer, mais il n'a pas transformé la nature. De 2 500 000 ans en Afrique (pour remonter aux traces humaines les plus anciennes connues) à 10 000 ans avant notre ère (donc 99,9 % de la préhistoire) on peut dire que la nature est dominante et l'homme dominé. C'et l'époque dite " paléolithique ".

Puis, à partir, grosso modo, d'un peu moins de 10 000 ans avant notre ère, on observe une sédentarisation : l'homme commence à se fixer en certains endroits favorables. Il va pratiquer l'agriculture et l'élevage. C'est l'époque dite " néolithique ". A partir de ce moment-là - c'est-à-dire une époque très récente à l'échelle de la préhistoire - l'homme devient un agriculteur et un pasteur. Domestiquant les animaux et les céréales, il va pouvoir désormais produire son alimentation, alors que jusque là il s'était contenté de la prélever sur la nature. Différence immense : l'homme, devenu capable de faire se reproduire les plantes et les animaux, devient, dans une mesure certes encore modeste, le maître de la nature. C'est le début du culturel et de l'artificiel. En un sens, nous sommes les descendants de ces premiers paysans du néolithique qui ont transformé et humanisé la nature et en ont totalement changé les paysages.

Cela dit, cette transformation fut très progressive. Concernant " nos pays " (3), le passage au néolithique semble avoir débuté au Proche-Orient. Il s'est fait vers 8 500 avant notre ère, non sur le " Croissant fertile ", comme l'on dit souvent, mais, comme le montrent les recherches les plus récentes, avec un " épicentre ", une zone clé, qui se situe dans la partie supérieure des cours du Tigre et de l'Euphrate. C'est à partir de là que, vers l'Est, vers l'Ouest, vers le Nord et vers le Sud, selon un processus qui prit quelques millénaires, ont diffusé sur les continents environnants les premiers paysans, dès lors qu'ils maîtrisaient la culture des plantes et qu'ils avaient domestiqué des animaux. Par le " pont " anatolien notamment, ils sont passés en Grèce et ont peu à peu colonisé l'Europe.

Il faut donc toujours garder à l'esprit que le passage au néolithique ne s'est pas produit simultanément partout et que, pour l'Europe, plus on va vers l'Ouest, plus il est tardif. De plus, cette époque néolithique, la plus proche de nous, a pu être balisée. On y distingue, après le néolithique stricto sensu, les âges des métaux (cuivre, puis bronze, puis fer). Puis, dans un certain nombre de régions où ces éléments sont acquis, l'homme restant toujours un éleveur et un agriculteur, on voit apparaître l'écriture, les premières villes et les premiers états (Egypte, Mésopotamie, Vallée de l'Indus, Chine du nord - pour se limiter à l'ancien monde). C'est alors le début de l'Histoire.

Indices de la violence préhistorique : à l'orée de la période historique, la guerre est déjà là

Lorsqu'on veut parler de la violence préhistorique, une des questions que l'on peut se poser est de savoir quand commence la guerre. Or, précisément, le début de l'histoire nous apprend qu'à ces époques reculées la guerre est déjà une pratique courante. L'archéologie, notamment mésopotamienne ou égyptienne, nous enseigne que les premières cités sumériennes s'entre-déchiraient et que l'unification de l'Egypte se fit par la guerre.

C'est ainsi, par exemple, qu'un panneau célèbre, dit l'étendard d'Our (British Museum), retrouvé dans les tombes royales d'Our et datant d'environ 2500 ans avant notre ère, montre des scènes de violence contre des ennemis vaincus : chars roulant sur le corps des ennemis et prisonniers dénudés menacés par des soldats en armes. En Egypte, la non moins célèbre palette de Narmer (Musée du Caire), censée raconter l'unification de l'Egypte - en fait la conquête du Nord par le Sud - montre sur une face le personnage central, Narmer, le premier pharaon mythique, en train de lever sa hache pour éliminer un autre personnage qui est un personnage du delta. Au revers, le pharaon, suivi par son porte-sandales et précédé par ses porte-étendard contemple le champ de bataille où l'on voit de nombreux sujets allongés et décapités. Toujours en Egypte, le poignard en silex de Djebel-el-Arak (Musée du Louvre) s'assortit d'un manche en ivoire sculpté représentant une scène de combat.

Ce qui est valable en Mésopotamie et en Egypte, l'est aussi ailleurs. Il est certain que les archéologues peuvent lire la violence sur des documents laissés par les premières civilisations historiques (c'est-à-dire celles qui ont laissé des documents écrits) et que cette violence ne peut-être considérée comme une " nouveauté " de ces époques lointaines.

Autre indice d'une violence ancestrale : le cannibalisme, et plus précisément un cannibalisme rituel, ceux qui le pratiquaient voulant vraisemblablement s'approprier les vertus d'un défunt honoré ou la force d'un ennemi tué au combat et particulièrement valeureux. Par les traces laissées sur les ossements (traces de décharnement en vue d'une possible consommation), on a des preuves que ce cannibalisme a traversé toute la préhistoire. On en trouve encore des traces vers 8000 ans avant notre ère.

Tout cela dit, pour parler de la violence préhistorique et en produire des preuves, nous traiterons essentiellement d'abord du temps des chasseurs cueilleurs, soit la très longue durée du paléolithique ; puis des premiers agriculteurs, c'est-à-dire l'époque néolithique ; et enfin, moins longuement, nous déborderons sur quelques faits concernant les âges des métaux.

Précisons néanmoins que nous serons relativement brefs et rapides sur les temps les plus anciens, pour la raison bien simple que, plus il s'agit de temps anciens, plus la documentation est réduite, disparate, souvent mal conservée et surtout très difficile à questionner. Les éléments disponibles sont peu intelligibles.

Si, exemple extrême, nous voulions remonter à l'époque des australopithèques, entre six millions d'années et trois millions d'années, nous verrions que les australopithèques sud-africains, dont les restes sont rares, portent des traces d'enfoncement, des marques de blessures, mais nous ignorons complètement si ce sont des blessures accidentelles ou si elles ont été causées par un tiers. Certains archéologues pensent même que certaines des modifications que l'on constate sur les os ont pu intervenir post mortem, du fait des conditions de fossilisation qui ont pu entraîner des déformations de l'os. Autrement dit, ce n'est que lorsque la documentation augmente et devient plus récente qu'elle peut donner lieu à des interprétations et encore, celles-ci prêtent souvent à discussion, surtout si les " documents " sont anciens.

Ce dont nous allons essentiellement parler, c'est donc de notre espèce, l'homo sapiens, ou plus précisément l'homo sapiens sapiens (4).

La violence au paléolithique

Quelles preuves a-t-on de la violence au paléolithique ?

Ce sont d'abord les nombreuses traces de traumatismes osseux provoqués par des armes. Soit des blessures au crâne (fractures, crânes défoncés ..) ; soit des pointes de flèches que l'on trouve encore fichées dans les os, et ce dans toutes les parties du corps, vertèbres, os du bassin, os des membres etc.. Ainsi par exemple, les restes d'un bassin trouvé à Skühl, en Israël, montrent une tête de fémur et un os coxal perforés par un projectile. Les victimes ne sont pas que des hommes : on observe que ces violences atteignent aussi bien des enfants ou des femmes, comme par exemple cet enfant gravettien de Grimaldi qui porte la pointe d'une arme de jet dans la colonne vertébrale.

Une deuxième preuve de la violence paléolithique est fournie par certaines gravures rupestres. Elles offrent quelques scènes où l'on voit des sujets percés de flèches ou de sagaies comme, par exemple, une gravure figurant sur les parois de la grotte de Cosquer, près de Marseille. On a aussi, dans la grotte de l'Addaura, en Sicile, une scène de supplice où deux hommes ont les jambes repliées en arrière et retenues par une corde formant nœud coulant autour du cou, ce qui ne peut aboutir qu'à une strangulation. C'est en quelque sorte une exécution, mais une exécution qui ne fait pas couler le sang.

Enfin, dernière preuve, il est quasi certain que les paléolithiques se faisaient la guerre. Avec quelles armes ? Pendant très longtemps des javelots, ont été lancés à bras. Puis il y eut une invention qui a donné au système beaucoup plus de force, c'est l'invention du propulseur. C'est une baguette cannelée (en bois ou en os) dans laquelle on met la flèche (ou le javelot) qu'on veut lancer. Le fait de tenir ce propulseur avec la flèche à l'intérieur fait que le propulseur guide la flèche et lui donne en même temps beaucoup plus de précision et de force. C'était un premier progrès balistique.

L'arc fut ensuite une découverte importante : il accentue la précision et la force du projectile. Invention essentielle, utilisée jusqu'au..... Moyen-Age, où elle fut supplantée par l'arbalète. Les plus anciens arcs connus remontent aux 9ème ou 10ème millénaires avant notre ère. On les retrouve surtout dans les tourbières du nord de l'Europe, dans des endroits où le bois peut se conserver. Ce sont des arcs qui appartenaient encore à des civilisations de chasseurs-cueilleurs. Il est vraisemblable que l'arc a été inventé vers la fin des temps paléolithiques, aux environs de 12 000 à 10 000 avant notre ère.

Un exemple de massacre guerrier au paléolithique : le massacre du Djebel el Sahaba

Il y a une vingtaine d'années, une mission américaine a fouillé au Soudan une nécropole remontant à 12 000 /10 000 ans avant notre ère, donc des chasseurs-cueilleurs (site du Djebel Sahaba, non loin du Nil). On a trouvé là une soixantaine de personnes enterrées et la moitié de ces personnes avaient des pointes de flèche ou de dards dans les os. Rien ne nous dit, d'ailleurs, que les autres sujets n'ont pas aussi été tués de façon violente. Si la flèche n'atteint que des parties molles, elle peut être mortelle sans que pour autant la pointe reste fichée dans un os. Autrement dit, ces gens-là ont été exterminés par des congénères. S'agissait-il d'une élimination à l'intérieur du groupe social, ou d'ennemis qui ont essayé de chasser des gêneurs ? nous n'en savons rien.

Ce qui est intéressant, dans ce cas du Djebel Sahaba, c'est que des sujets ont reçu de 6 à 20 pointes de flèche. Une étude balistique a montré que certains d'entre eux étaient déjà à terre lorsqu'on a continué de leur tirer dessus ; on s'est acharné sur des corps déjà transpercés (et peut-être déjà morts). Cet acharnement montre qu'il s'agit d'une sorte de violence de masse et non de règlements de compte individuels. Ce cas du Djebel Sahaba, avec cet acharnement à tirer sur les corps, n'est d'ailleurs pas unique. Dans le mésolithique européen, à l'époque des derniers chasseurs collecteurs, on a de nombreuses nécropoles où l'on a trouvé des sujets pareillement percés de flèches, et souvent de plusieurs flèches.

Une violence accrue du fait de la sédentarisation

Enfin il est intéressant de noter que ces traces de conflits au sein de la société des chasseurs collecteurs se retrouvent souvent dans des nécropoles en bordure de grands fleuves : le Gange, le Dniepr, le Danube, le Nil près des cataractes (cas du Djebel Sahaba). Nous sommes là vers la fin des temps paléolithiques ; l'homme est toujours un chasseur, un cueilleur, un pêcheur, mais on voit une certaine tendance des populations à se sédentariser dans les régions où il y a en abondance de la nourriture. On peut y chasser, pêcher, collecter des plantes sans avoir à faire de grands circuits, comme c'était, semble-t-il, le cas auparavant.

Pendant longtemps, en effet, l'humanité, au moins en partie, a été une humanité mobile, en quête de nourriture. La population était clairsemée et chaque groupe parcourait de très grands territoires. Puis, petit à petit, on voit les populations tendre à se fixer ; elles se sédentarisent, avantageusement, dans les endroits où, sans faire de trop grands déplacements, elles peuvent trouver de la nourriture tout au long de l'année. Or ces terres se trouvent souvent près des fleuves, notamment près des grands fleuves et de leurs rapides, en des lieux proches de niches écologiques différentes, avec une grande variété végétale et animale. Selon une hypothèse en général admise par la communauté des préhistoriens, la sédentarisation se serait produite dans de tels lieux où, potentiellement, la nourriture pouvait être acquise sans trop de difficultés. Ces lieux étaient donc recherchés, disputés, et cela pouvait entraîner des heurts et des conflits. Les traces de ces conflits, nous les avons justement dans les nécropoles qui se trouvent dans ce type de situations.

La violence au néolithique

Il ne faut pas imaginer les premiers paysans qui ont lentement traversé l'Europe pour arriver jusque chez nous, comme des barbares frustes et incultes. Ce n'étaient plus des primitifs. Il s'agissait d'homo sapiens comme nous, contraints à la solidarité dans la mesure où ils devaient dépenser leur énergie pour défricher la forêt et lutter contre la nature. Pendant longtemps on a même pensé que ces paysans néolithiques ignoraient la violence. En réalité, comme on va le voir, leurs relations étaient loin d'être toujours pacifiques.

- De multiples exemples de violence

Il y a une vingtaine d'années, près de Stuttgart, à Talheim, on a fouillé une fosse commune néolithique. Il y avait là trente-trois sujets : tous ont reçu des impacts de flèche ou des chocs et beaucoup de crânes sont défoncés à la hache de pierre. Il s'agit apparemment d'une tuerie organisée d'hommes, de femmes et d'enfants. On a creusé une fosse commune et on s'est débarrassé des corps dans cette fosse.

Cette découverte jeta un froid dans la communauté archéologique qui, comme on vient de le dire, avait pensé que les néolithiques ignoraient la violence. A partir de ce moment-là, on a réexaminé attentivement un certain nombre de documents osseux qui existaient dans les laboratoires, et qui provenaient de fouilles souvent beaucoup plus anciennes. On s'est alors aperçu que les traces de violence étaient nombreuses à l'époque néolithique. Il peut s'agir soit d'impacts de flèche, soit de crânes défoncés. Par exemple, les haches de pierre polie, omniprésentes puisqu'elles servaient à déforester : ces outils de déforestation pouvaient très bien se transformer en armes le moment venu. Sur certains fragments des crânes de Talheim on peut voir dans la boîte crânienne exactement la forme, en négatif, de la hache de pierre polie qui à servi à défoncer le crâne de ce sujet.

En Autriche, sur un site néolithique, on a découvert les restes de plusieurs dizaines de sujets sur lesquels on voit des impacts de flèche, des traces de coups, des crânes défoncés à la hache de pierre. Dans le Palatinat, sur un autre site néolithique, à Exheim, on a retrouvé les crânes de 300 individus. Tous ont été brisés par la moitié, de façon à ne conserver que la partie supérieure de la calotte crânienne. Il s'agit presque toujours d'adolescents ou d'enfants. L'interprétation de ce constat est difficile. S'agit-il de trophées de guerre, après le rapt d'une population d'enfants ? s'agit-il d'enfants de la communauté qui ont été éliminés ou sacrifiés, à la suite d'une crise interne à la population de ce site ? Nous n'avons pas de réponse.

Prenons enfin le cas de la France. Le néolithique français se situe en gros entre 5 500 et 2 500 avant notre ère. On y trouve de nombreux exemples de violence. Dans l'Allier, à Pontcharoux (vers 4 500 - 4 000 avant notre ère) une tombe multiple contient sept sujets tous enterrés en même temps. Or l'un de ces sujets porte dans la moelle épinière la trace d'une flèche qui s'y est plantée et qui l'a tué. On s'interroge sur les six autres. Ont-ils été tués en même temps et mis dans la même fosse ? ont-ils été " poussés " pour qu'ils accompagnent le précédent ? les a-t-on éliminés ? De tels cas ne sont pas rares.

Dernier exemple : en Vendée, aux Châtelliers-du-Vieil-Auzay, dans une sorte de grand tumulus on a trouvé trois tombes qui contiennent chacune deux sujets, un adulte et un adolescent. Tous ont subi soit des impacts de flèche, soit des chocs sur le crâne qui ont entraîné la mort. Chose surprenante, bien qu'ils aient été tués, ces sujets ont quand même reçu une sépulture décente. S'agissait-il de sujets sacrifiés ? Là aussi, il n'y a pas de réponse.

- La guerre au néolithique - Le Levante espagnol

Curieusement, vers la fin du néolithique, on retrouve dans les tombes (5) une grande quantité de pointes de flèche aux formes variées et très élaborées, foliacées, losangées, à pédoncule et ailerons etc.. Il y en a une grande profusion et l'étude des matériaux montre que ces pointes de flèches circulent comme des denrées précieuses entre des lieux éloignés. Or ces pointes de flèche impliquent nécessairement les flèches elles-mêmes tout comme les arcs et leurs accessoires. Alors que nous sommes déjà vers la fin du néolithique et que l'homme vit d'agriculture et d'élevage, tout se passe comme si la chasse restait importante. Mais quand on étudie les reste d'animaux de cette époque, on voit que la viande dont l'homme se nourrit provient essentiellement des animaux domestiques et que la chasse, au niveau alimentaire, apporte très peu. Et pourtant, c'est à cette époque où la chasse ne joue qu'un très faible rôle alimentaire que les pointes de flèche sont en surabondance. Que peut signifier une telle constatation ?

Elle veut probablement dire que si les flèche ne jouent plus grand un rôle dans la chasse, pour l'alimentation, elles jouent par contre un rôle important en tant que symbole, pour la position sociale. C'est là un fait très important, auquel il y a une explication. Plus la densité de population augmente, plus l'individu masculin, qui veut se mettre en valeur, ne peut y parvenir dans les comportements ordinaires de sa vie quotidienne de paysan ou de pasteur. Il n'y a que deux domaines où il peut " briller ", se constituer une position sociale importante : ou la chasse ou la guerre. Il construit son statut social à partir de son courage et de son amour du danger. Autrement dit, si les flèches servaient peu à la chasse, on peut penser qu'elles servaient à la guerre.

Or précisément, l'art rupestre de l'époque néolithique nous donne des informations sur la violence et la guerre. Il nous faut ici parler notamment de l'Espagne, en particulier du Levante espagnol. Dans toute la zone montagneuse qui regarde vers la Méditerrannée, des Pyrénées à la chaîne Bétique, à l'arrière des plaines côtières, se trouvent des paysages très tourmentés. Ce sont des régions calcaires dans lesquelles il y a beaucoup d'abris sur les parois desquels les populations préhistoriques ont peint un certain nombre de scènes, presque toujours des scènes de chasse, et parfois des scènes de guerre. Pendant longtemps on a pensé, puisqu'il y avait des scènes de chasse, qu'il s'agissait de populations de chasseurs, plus précisément de paléolithiques terminaux, de mésolithiques. Puis, la recherche aidant, on s'est rendu compte que ces scènes étaient d'âge néolithique et que ces scènes représentant la chasse ou la guerre ont été peintes par des paysans ou des éleveurs qui n'ont pas représenté sur les parois des grottes des scènes de leur vie quotidienne mais tout ce qui avait un caractère mythique qui pouvait grandir l'individu.

Par exemple des groupes d'archers face à face, avec parfois un peu à l'écart un petit groupe de " réservistes ". Les sexes sont indiqués : ce ne sont que les mâles qui se battent. Souvent apparaît le chef d'un groupe ou de l'autre, caractérisé par sa coiffure ou des plumettes sur la tête, au derrière et aux mollets. Les batailles ainsi représentées ne sont pas désordonnées : ce sont des batailles rangées. Dans un cas, on a une véritable scène d'exécution avec la victime, criblée de flèches, allongée sur le sol. Enfin, sur l'un de ces panneaux et pour un camp, on a pu faire le décompte du nombre des archers. On arrive à 20 à 25 auxquels il faut ajouter, en arrière-plan, des " réservistes " au nombre de 25. Au total 50 personnes dans ce camp. Si on considère que ne se battent que les jeunes mâles, on peut évaluer, avec les adultes plus âgés, les femmes et les enfants, que cela représente une communauté d'au moins 200 personnes (en transposant démographiquement). Il est clair qu'il ne s'agit plus des bandes de l'époque paléolithique, toujours très peu nombreuses. Nous sommes carrément dans un milieu de type néolithique.

La violence à l'âge des métaux : idéologie du guerrier et meurtres rituels collectifs.

Nous serons beaucoup plus brefs.

Vers la fin de la préhistoire, à l'âge des métaux, on voit se mettre en place, en occident, une figure de guerrier, que l'on perçoit grâce au mobilier trouvé dans les tombes : des armes pour les hommes, des parures et des objets domestiques pour les femmes. Il y a déjà une séparation idéologique entre les sexes que confirme l'examen des premières statues-menhirs. L'homme y est représenté avec ses armes, la femme avec des seins qui évoquent sa fonction nourricière et domestique. Non qu'à l'époque il y ait des armées de guerriers, cela viendra plus tard. Mais l'idéologie du guerrier est déjà préparée.

De la même époque, enfin, datent les meurtres rituels collectifs : le " chef ", pour magnifier son pouvoir, se fait enterrer avec ses épouses, ses courtisans et ses serviteurs, tués pour l'occasion. On en a notamment des traces en Egypte et en Mésopotamie. En Egypte, sous la première dynastie, autour de la tombe du pharaon, sont disposées les tombes des serviteurs ; par exemple à Abydos, autour de la tombe du roi, 800 tombes subsidiaires (serviteurs, courtisans, artisans, femmes du harem ...). Deux souverains ont été enterrés au dessus du corps de leurs serviteurs. En Mésopotamie, les tombes des rois d'Our accusent une profusion de richesses, mais aussi de nombreux sujets sacrifiés. Dans la tombe du roi Anou : 59 serviteurs mâles et 19 femmes ont accompagné le roi. Dans une autre tombe encore, 68 femmes et 6 hommes. On retrouve également ce phénomène au Soudan, dans la civilisation de Kerma (3ème millénaire). Il y a 200 ou 300 personnes autour d'une sépulture princière.

L'exemple le plus célèbre reste évidemment celui du premier empereur de Chine, vers 200 ans avant notre ère. Ce mégalomane s'est fait construire une pyramide de 400 m de côté pour abriter son tombeau et lors de ses funérailles, ont été sacrifiés les concubines de son père, plusieurs princes et leurs serviteurs, même peut-être ses propres enfants ; et aussi tous les artisans qui avaient travaillé au tombeau, pour en conserver le secret. C'est également lui qui a voulu être protégé par une armée symbolique de milliers de guerriers dont on a modelé des statues en terre cuite, qui sont disposées dans des casernes souterraines. Ici, toutefois, on était passé de l'être vivant à la figuration symbolique.

En définitive, les sociétés préhistoriques n'ont pas été plus pacifiques que les civilisations historiques. Elles ont connu des crises et des tensions comme toutes les sociétés. Elles ont pratiqué meurtres, violences et exécutions. S'il est vrai que dans de nombreux cas l'archéologie ne peut pas répondre aux questions que l'on se pose, on peut penser néanmoins que les sociétés préhistoriques se faisaient la guerre, peut-être pour des rivalités de territoires, mais aussi peut-être pour des motifs idéologiques : Vexations, insultes, rapts de femme. La violence est une réalité de tous les temps.

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(1) La conférence de Jean Guilaine, illustrée par de nombreuses diapositives, fut exceptionnellement longue. Le présent condensé de cette conférence a été établi par J.L. Wolfender.

(2) Un certain nombre des exemples cités sont donnés par Jean Guilaine dans son livre : Le sentier de la guerre, visages de la violence préhistorique , écrit en collaboration avec J. Zammit - Editions du Seuil, 2001.

(3) Nous désignons ici sous le terme de " nos pays " l'aire géographique formée de l'Asie occidentale, de l'Europe et du pourtour méditerranéen. Or la transformation néolithique est un phénomène constaté dans les diverse parties du monde. On admet en général qu'il y a eu plusieurs foyers de néolithisation, en Asie, en Afrique subsaharienne, en Amérique ... qui virent la domestication de plantes et d'animaux différents. Le foyer proche-oriental semble être le plus ancien.

(4) Rappelons ici que notre espèce est apparue hors d'Europe, en Afrique, il y a environ 100 000 ans et qu'elle y fut contemporaine de l'homme de Néandertal ; alors qu'en Europe l'homme de Néandertal, dont on a des traces vers -100 000 ans, a largement précédé l'homo sapiens sapiens qui n'y est parvenu que vers -40 000 ans. Certains paléontologistes considèrent le Néandertal comme un sapiens, d'autres comme une espèce distincte. Nous n'entrons pas ici dans ce débat.

(5) Vers la fin du néolithique, on voit se développer ce qu'on pourrait appeler des " armes de parade ". On le constate dans les tombes où les gens mettent des offrandes : le défunt part avec son carquois, avec ses haches, avec ses objets de parure, avec ses flèches. Subsistent les pointes de flèche.

Tribal warfare

2011-04-07T22:30:00.000+01:00

FERGUSON - THE CAUSES AND ORIGINS OF ‘‘PRIMITIVE WARFARE’’ ON EVOLVED MOTIVATIONS FOR WAR

2011-04-03T23:00:00.001+01:00

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/52202928

GAT - THE CAUSES AND ORIGINS OF ‘‘PRIMITIVE WARFARE’’ : REPLY TO FERGUSON

2011-04-03T22:45:00.000+01:00

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/52202435

New Report On First Death By Spearing In Australia

2011-04-03T22:29:00.001+01:00

ScienceDaily (Jan. 5, 2008) - Science News

A new report led by an Australian National University archaeologist on the first evidence of death by spearing in Australia has been published in the British journal Antiquity.

The paper outlines the collaborative detective work that took place following the discovery of the skeletal remains of an Aboriginal male in the Sydney suburb of Narrabeen during excavations for gas works in 2005. A number of stone tools, interpreted as spear barbs, were also discovered at the site.

Lead author Dr Jo McDonald from the Research School of Humanities at ANU said that anatomical, forensic and artefact studies indicate death by spearing and the archaeological evidence showed that that the man was slain and abandoned in a coastal dune around 4,000 years ago.

“Ritual punishment using barbed death spears was witnessed at European contact in the Sydney region,” Dr McDonald said. “The Narrabeen man provides early archaeological evidence for ritual or payback killing by spearing. The timing of this event is significant for understanding other archaeological indicators of increased social complexity across south-eastern Australia.”

A multidisciplinary approach was taken to the salvage. Dr Richard Fullagar and Dr Judith Field from the University of Sydney studied the spear barbs. As well as finding human bone on several of the points, they also discovered signs of head-on tip impact and other damage consistent with the spearing of a human. Dr Denise Donlon, also from the University of Sydney, analysed the slain man’s skeleton and was able to determine that he was aged in his 30s at the time of his death. Altogether 17 pieces of flaked stone, thought to be spear barbs, were found around or embedded in the skeleton.

Dr Joan Brenner Coltrain from the University of Utah analysed the stable isotope chemistry of the man’s bones, which indicated he subsisted on a diet of marine foods including fish, shellfish, seaweed and sea birds. A study of the site’s geomorphology by private consultant Dr Peter Mitchell, combined with the age of the skeleton, indicated that this event took place at a time of higher sea level, suggesting the body was left on the crest of a fore dune.

“This was an example of the type of good research which can be achieved in the context of cultural heritage management – and an example of the exciting nature of archaeology in Sydney – where unique finds can be preserved in urban contexts,” Dr McDonald said. “It also shows how archaeological research can provide Aboriginal communities with the types of information that they want to know about their ancestors.”

Australian Archaeological Association spokesman, Professor Peter Veth from ANU, said the publication of the report in Antiquity was highly significant for archaeology in Australia.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Australian National University.

Primitive Warfare and Sports

2011-04-02T20:05:00.001+01:00

Sutherland / BAJR - Battlefield Archaeology: a guide to the archaeology of conflict

2011-04-02T19:58:00.000+01:00

http://www.scribd.com/full/404876?access_key=56x2osus754dc

Whitehead - Violence & the cultural order

2011-03-30T18:58:00.002+01:00

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/51916992

Corbey - LAYING ASIDE THE SPEAR: HOBBESIAN WARRE AND THE MAUSSIAN GIFT

2011-03-30T18:52:00.000+01:00

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/51916237

Scientists Trace Violent Death of Iron Age Man

2011-03-29T22:08:00.000+01:00

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2011) - Science News

Scientists have examined samples of the skull of an Iron Age man using a range of sophisticated equipment including a CT scanner. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of York)

An Iron Age man whose skull and brain was unearthed during excavations at the University of York was the victim of a gruesome ritual killing, according to new research.

Scientists say that fractures and marks on the bones suggest the man, who was aged between 26 and 45, died most probably from hanging, after which he was carefully decapitated and his head was then buried on its own.

Archaeologists discovered the remains in 2008 in one of a series of Iron Age pits on the site of the University's £750 million campus expansion at Heslington East. Brain material was still in the skull which dates back around 2500 years, making it one the oldest surviving brains in Europe.

A multi-disciplinary team of scientists, including archaeologists, chemists, bio-archaeologists and neurologists, was assembled to attempt to establish how the man's brain, could have survived when all the other soft tissue had decayed leaving only the bone.

The team is also investigating details of the man's death and burial that may have contributed to the survival of what is normally highly vulnerable soft tissue. The research, which was funded by the University of York and English Heritage, is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Archaeologists from York Archaeological Trust, commissioned by the University to carry out the exploratory dig before building work on the campus expansion started, discovered the solitary skull face-down in the pit in dark brown organic rich, soft sandy clay.

Since the discovery, the brain and skull have been kept in strictly controlled conditions, but scientists have examined samples using a range of sophisticated equipment including a CT scanner at York Hospital and mass spectrometers at the University of York.

Samples of brain material had a DNA sequence that matched sequences found only in a few individuals from Tuscany and the Near East. Carbon dating suggests the remains date from between 673-482BC.

Peri-mortem fractures on the second neck vertebrae are consistent with a traumatic spondylolisthesis and a cluster of about nine horizontal fine cut-marks made by a thin-bladed instrument, such as a knife, are visible on the frontal aspect of the centrum.

Histological studies found remnants of brain tissue structures and highly sensitive neuroimmunological techniques, together with analyses, demonstrated the presence of a range of lipids and brain specific proteins in the remains.

The scientific team is now investigating how these lipids and proteins may have combined to form the persistent material of the surviving brain and what insight this may give on the circumstances between death, the burial environment and preservation of the Heslington brain.

The team is headed by Dr Sonia O'Connor, a Research Fellow in Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford and an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of York. It included scientists from the Departments of Archaeology, Biology and Chemistry at York, Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford, the Biocentre and the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Manchester University and the UCL Institute of Neurology in London.

Dr O'Connor said: "It is rare to be able to suggest the cause of death for skeletonised human remains of archaeological origin. The preservation of the brain in otherwise skeletonised remains is even more astonishing but not unique."

"This is the most thorough investigation ever undertaken of a brain found in a buried skeleton and has allowed us to begin to really understand why brain can survive thousands of years after all the other soft tissues have decayed.."

Despite the place that 'trophy heads' appear to have played in Iron Age societies and evidence for the preservation of human remains in the Bronze Age, the researchers say there is no evidence for that in this case. Analyses found no biomarkers indicating deliberate preservation by embalming or smoking.

Dr O'Connor added: "The hydrated state of the brain and the lack of evidence for putrefaction suggests that burial, in the fine-grained, anoxic sediments of the pit, occurred very rapidly after death. This is a distinctive and unusual sequence of events, and could be taken as an explanation for the exceptional brain preservation."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of York, via AlphaGalileo.

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Journal Reference:

1.Sonia O'Connor, Esam Ali, Salim Al-Sabah, Danish Anwar, Ed Bergström, Keri A. Brown, Jo Buckberry, Stephen Buckley, Matthew Collins, John Denton. Exceptional preservation of a prehistoric human brain from Heslington, Yorkshire, UK. Journal of Archaeological Science, 2011; DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2011.02.030

War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. Edited by R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1992.

2011-03-24T22:53:00.001Z

Review from American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17:2(1993):239-245.
Thomas D. Hall
DePauw University
HTML version October 26, 1998

The catchy title of this collection will grab the attention of scholars interested in Indian-White relations, but the subtitle could deter those who expect either a dry theoretical treatise or another round of quincentenary-inspired European-bashing. That would be truly unfortunate, because this collection has much to offer. Fundamentally, all the authors address the general question of the roles and consequences of warfare in contact between states and "tribal" peoples. The answer is at once simple and complex: simple because warfare increases; complex because the increase varies considerably with specific conditions of each encounter. Almost universally, the level of warfare between the invading state (almost always an invasion from the tribal perspective) and tribal peoples increases. No surprise here. Almost as universally, warfare among tribal peoples increases precipitously. Again, this is not much of a surprise. What is surprising is that this pattern holds for ancient Rome, ancient Sri Lanka, seventeenth century Africa, contemporary New Guinea, and all over North and South America. In short, what is well known for the European-Indian encounter in the Americas is in fact a generic pattern of state-tribe encounters.

This collection is a result of a conference on warfare sponsored by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation held at the School of American Research in 1989. The conference was held to focus attention on the roles of state expansion on warfare and to conceptualize the study of tribe-state warfare in ways that would encourage further research. The results are summarized in an the important first chapter by Ferguson and Whitehead and a brief set of diagrams in an appendix. These, however, are best addressed after surveying the substantive reports contained in the volume.

According to D. J. Mattingly, Berber tribal structure in North Africa during Roman times remains poorly understood. Still, transhumant peoples (those who follow a more-or-less prescribed circuits) were relatively easily to control because of predictable travel patterns. Once local elites were absorbed into the Roman world, they shed their tribal affiliations relatively easily. This kind of indirect rule was generally quite efficient. Roman policy oscillated between territorial expansion and hegemonic control of tribal peoples beyond the border (approximately between direct and indirect rule). Shifts in strategy were often determined by local considerations, such as relative costs and benefits of military expansion versus costs of tribute to buy influence, as opposed to imperial concerns of the center. Roman borders "were filters, designed to facilitate observation and supervision of movement between the territorial and hegemonic zones" (pg. 56). They were almost never used as absolute barriers. While Roman attempts to assimilate North African tribes ultimately failed (for reasons Mattingly does not discuss), Roman policy was relatively successful in the first two centuries of the Christian era.

R. Gunawardana shows that tribal peoples survived sustained conflict with ancient Sri Lankan states, yet maintained their tribal identities. Sri Lankan differences, he argues, are significantly different from European experiences with tribal peoples. He also indicates that withdrawal from a territory by tribal peoples has different motives, depending on circumstances. When a state is trying achieve hegemony over a people, withdrawal constitutes a denial of hegemony. However, when a state is seeking territorial expansion withdrawal constitutes a cessation of territory. Trade and ideology play important roles in his account. Trade can inspire warfare in attempts to seize resources, or to acquire access to them, or to control strategic transportation nodes. These correspond, approximately to plunder, hegemonic control, and territorial expansion. Plunder could take the form of material goods, unutilized tribal resources, or captives. Sometimes alliances were formed in which tribal people retained autonomy in exchange for serving as military units in the state's army, becoming in essence, "ethnic soldiers." State control often took the form of ideological, specifically, religious imperialism. This presented an especially thorny doctrinal problem for Buddhism which stressed nonviolence.

Ross Hassig compares the relations of Aztecs and Spaniards to tribal peoples. For the Aztecs the lack of wheeled vehicles slowed expansion, but did not stop it completely. Again there is an oscillation between territorial and hegemonic strategies. Expansion creates its own resistance by spreading state military technology and political organization and through a rather steep decline in effectiveness with distance. While expansion brought many useful products to the Aztecs it also stimulated a demand for Aztec "gifts." Thus, trade had impacts considerably beyond direct conquest and warfare. Here religious conflict and change was not a cause of war, but a consequence. Rather, expansion was fueled, at least in part, by specifics of Aztec social mobility through expanding marriage alliances, primarily with conquered or absorbed elites.

Spanish conquest differed considerably. Spaniards tried to monopolize new technologies (horses and guns, the latter more successfully) and were not interested in hegemony but centralized administrative control. Spanish warfare used local auxiliaries extensively and sought resources including labor of conquered peoples. They tended to displace nomadic tribal peoples who were not suitable for plantation labor, or to convert them to sedentary peasants through the efforts of religious missionaries.

Robin Law traces the complex changes in warfare in Dahomey, West Africa in the slave trade. He reviews the roles of trading inferior guns to induce dependency on Europeans, and hence a steady flow of captives for the slave trade. Even so, the introduction of guns greatly transformed warfare from mass armies to the use of armed elite forces. Warfare also led to replacement of a kin-based political system with one that was territorially based. He further notes how the slave trade created subimperialism: "While Dahomey at one level constituted a part of the West African periphery of the European-dominated trans-Atlantic trading system, it had its own periphery in the form of the neighboring peoples it raided for slaves" (pg. 124). Thus warfare and its impacts spread a great distance from the coastal points of contact.

Neil Whitehead uses the history of Northeastern South America to show how "Tribes make States and States Make Tribes." That is, the interaction of warfare at times pushes some groups to centralize and take on state-like forms of organization (or even become states). At other times warfare compels partially centralized chiefdoms to fragment. Survivors flee into hinterlands and form nomadic bands. He sees the formation of "segmentary lineages," an organizational form which allows successively larger, if more diffuse, kinship alliances to form and collapse in response to changing military pressures, as a generic solution to tribe-state warfare.

He re-examines the role of special trade goods in state-tribe trade relations. Even when some tribal peoples treated European "baubles with contempt" (pg. 145), both sides saw the utility in extending and maintaining political control. Even though guns were not of much use in rain forests, they were valuable as symbols of access to European goods. Here too, access to guns was used to encourage slave trade. More assimilated Indians were used against "wild" (i.e., unassimilated) Indians. The key point in Whitehead's account is the complex ways in which tribes and states construct each other through their interactions.

Thomas Abler re-examines the roles of trade in muskets and beaver hides in Iroquois history. While reciting much that is familiar, he reports some new findings and revises others. He dissects the cycle of trading beaver hides for guns, then needing guns to collect more beaver hides to trade for more guns. Reliance on European goods caused beaver hides to become far more important than deer hides. Dependence on guns changed warfare, decreasing formal battles--while a warrior could dodge an arrow or spear, he could not dodge a bullet.

Abler's strongest point is that depletion of beaver hides was a major impetus to expansion. He argues that the source of conflict between Hurons and Iroquois was access to beaver hunting territory rather than competition over the middleman role in the hide trade. It must be noted that warfare among tribes was often about trade: either gaining access or blocking access of rivals. His account is sufficiently persuasive to demand a serious hearing.

Warfare had other impacts on Iroquois society. Iroquois men often served as ethnic soldiers in European wars fought in North America. Many adult males were lost in war or to disease. The need to replace them led to wars to obtain captives who often were integrated into Iroquois society. Abler argues that the village was the key unit of Iroquois organization, and that councils were as much symbolic as real. He suggests that Iroquois social structure strongly resembles a segmentary lineage system that never quite became a state.

Michael Brown and Eduardo Fernandez examine state tribal relations in eastern Peru. They note that the tribal peoples of this region, known as Asháninka, had had contacts with Incas in prehistoric times, so had experience with state societies. Attempts to missionize the Asháninka were successful only as long as promised trade goods were delivered. Repeated interactions created a complicated social mosaic which were never understood by Spanish administrators. It is clear that various headmen learned to manipulate state leaders to their own advantage. Brown and Fernandez emphasize a point that runs through all these chapters. Namely, that tribal peoples were not mere passive victims of state expansion, but active shapers of their own histories. They conclude that, from prehistoric times to present conflicts generated by Shining Path guerrillas, state expansion consistently increases the level of violence in the zone of expansion.

In what is probably the most revolutionary chapter, Brian Ferguson argues that the Yanomami Indians of Venezuela, long celebrated in anthropology as unusually fierce, became that way at least in part because of impacts of European states. The argument is avowedly not that all that emanates from Europe is evil, but that under very peculiar circumstances state contact can lead to exceptionally severe tribal warfare.

European contact goes back at least four centuries. Two major factors contribute to intensified fighting. First, as villages became anchored near European outposts in order to obtain trade goods (steel tools, and, later, shotguns) game became depleted. In order to preserve his group, a headman would attempt to monopolize access to European goods and to extend alliances through marriages. Second, these processes coincided with the spread of European diseases which tore apart the social fabric, especially the system of marriage alliances. All of this led to heightened competition for increasingly scarce resources and a devaluation of women compared to men. These same processes also contributed to ethnogenesis as "regionally diverse Yanomami came to be generally recognized as a single cultural entity" (p. 225).

In the final chapter Andrew Strathern discusses recent changes in Papua New Guinea. With independence came a period of consolidation of political power and structure. During this time the power of the now local state in the hinterlands decreased considerably and with it local policing powers. As this happened young men increasingly came to have access to guns, either through trade or through manufacture of zip guns. This, in turn led to a return of generalized disorder and intergroup conflict. As the state gained power it attempted to control this situation in the pursuit of development, but faced a much more formidable task due to the diffusion of guns. Recently (1991) the state has regained control. An interesting aspect of this process is that when state control is strong, and warfare relatively less common, incidents of sorcery accusations and killings increase. A second point is the inverse correlation of warfare and state strength.

The foregoing summaries of these contributions facilitate discussion of Ferguson and Whitehead's analysis of state-tribe interaction. Their chapter, aptly titled "The violent edge of empire," is the most important contribution to the collection. Their punch line is that the Hobbesian image of tribal peoples rests on three fallacies: (1) that post-contact conditions and relations are a continuation of precontact conditions and relations; (2) that ethnic divisions are survivals of precontact divisions; (3) that tribal warfare is unreasoned hostility. Implicit in their discussion is the observation that these fallacies rest on a deeper false assumption that ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and historians usually have full access to the relevant context of contact.

The first fallacy is demonstrated by the various reports in the volume. All these accounts show that warfare, both state-tribe and tribe-tribe, increased substantially after state contact. Note, the claim is for increased violence, not creation of violence. Ferguson, Whitehead, and company do not propose that some idyllic Rousseauian paradise existed before nasty state people appeared. Rather, more subtly, they propose that violence increased, intensified, and sometimes transformed previously extant forms of violence. Similarly, most of these accounts illustrate how ethnicity is created through interactions which can either amalgamate or fragment previously existing groups. Thus, ethnicity is not a primordial survival. Clearly, too, there is a logic behind tribal warfare. It is not "unreasoned hostility." Generally, tribal warfare is driven by a logic of access to resources, whether they be natural or provided through trade.

Finally, the context of contact is vitally important, but not determinative, in the level of violence. The kind of state making contact, the motive forces driving state expansion interact with local conditions to produce a myriad of local consequences. To focus solely on the state, or solely on local conditions, is to miss the point--it is the interaction of the two that shapes events. Unfortunately, scholars often have little access to information of precontact conditions on the tribal side of the encounter. Given the rapid, massive impacts of contact, the assumption that conditions noted by even the earliest observers reflect precontact conditions is rendered highly questionable, at best.

Ferguson and Whitehead criticize world-system theory for failing to come to grips with these issues due to an overly strong focus on core activities and processes. While this critique is, in the main, correct, it is not entirely correct. Readers familiar with American Indian Culture and Research Journal may recall several articles that attempt to deal with this issue (9:3; 11:2; 14:1; 14:4). The gap is due to differences in the traditions of scholars of the anthropology of war and scholars of Indian-White relations. One goal of this review is to increase the dialogue between these groups, it is hoped, to their mutual benefit.

Ferguson and Whitehead have assembled considerable material with which the history of Indian-White relations can be compared and contrasted. From their evidence it is clear that North America is far from unique. However, it does seem to be distinctive in the intensity of the effects of European actions on tribal peoples. Whether this is due to differences between ancient states and European states in recent centuries in technology, political and economic power, or the complexity of the European trade network remains to be studied. It is also possible that the difference may be merely an artifact of distance in time. From the perspective of two thousand years ago, a century may seem like relatively rapid conquest, whereas from the perspective of 1993, a century constitutes nearly half the history of the United States as an independent state.

Precisely because scholars of Indian-White relations have studied North America so intensively, they have much to contribute to the attempt to understand the patterns and processes of state-tribe interaction, and warfare generally. Conversely, the attempt to understand those patterns is a rich field for new insights and research hypotheses for students of Indian-White relations. War in the Tribal Zone is an important contribution and an invaluable asset to interchange among scholars interested in the patterns of interaction between states and tribes.

Milner - Warfare in prehistoric and early historic eastern North America

2011-03-24T22:35:00.001Z

Warfare in prehistoric and early historic eastern North America
George R. Milner1
(1) Department of Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University, 16802 University Park, Pennsylvania

Journal Journal of Archaeological Research
Publisher Springer Netherlands
ISSN 1059-0161 (Print) 1573-7756 (Online)
Issue Volume 7, Number 2 / June, 1999
DOI 10.1007/BF02446275
Pages 105-151
Subject Collection Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
SpringerLink Date Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Abstract
Recent criticisms of the use of historically and ethnographically recorded conflicts as models for warfare in prehistoric times force archaeologists to reexamine assumptions about the frequency, severity, and effects of intergroup fighting. In eastern North America, skeletons of victims and palisaded settlements—the only information consistently available on intergroup hostilities—indicate that the prevalence of conflicts varied greatly over time and space. Occasionally the attacks, typically ambushes of small 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.

Key Words eastern North America - prehistory - warfare - trauma - palisades

Tribal warfare

2011-03-23T23:09:00.001Z

Kamphaus - Usewear and Functional Analysis of Bronze Weapons and Armor

2011-03-23T23:03:00.001Z

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/51420993

Lessa and Mendonça de Souza - Violence in the Atacama Desert during the Tiwanaku Period: Social Tension?

2011-03-23T22:55:00.002Z

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/51421994

Tribal warfare

2011-03-23T22:47:00.003Z

Flores - A biologia na violência

2011-03-21T19:48:00.002Z

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/51245771

Taylor - Believing the ancients: quantitative and qualitative dimensions of slavery and the slave trade in later prehistoric Eurasia

2011-03-21T19:33:00.001Z

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/51244607

2001

2011-03-20T15:50:00.000Z

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2011-03-19T17:02:00.004Z

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Projecteis de funda - Sling missiles

2011-03-16T23:47:00.006Z

in LEBLANC, Steven A.; REGISTER, Katherine E. (2004) – Constant battles: the myth of the peaceful, noble savage. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Page 61

"These sling missiles demonstrate a widespread unwillingness to accept how common warfare was in the past. The cluster of sling missiles made of plaster (A) found in a 5000 B.C. site in Turkey are often believed to have been heated and used to boil water. Yet they (B) are identical in shape to the stones missiles from Hawaii used before European contact (C), and the lead missile made by the ancient Greeks (D) around 500 B.C."

Jorge (ed) - Existe uma Idade do Bronze Atlântico? - Sociedade: Hierarquização e Conflito

2011-03-16T23:30:00.006Z

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/50900035

Myers - War Before History: A Critical Survey

2011-03-15T21:28:00.004Z

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/50818300

Neolithic farmers not so peaceful after all

2011-03-15T21:10:00.002Z

in The Archaeology News Network Neolithic
Posted by IoanG ArchaeoHeritage, Archaeology, Breakingnews, Europe, UK, Western Europe 8:11 PM

A large number of New Stone Age men, women and children may have suffered serious violent attacks and died from their injuries, scientists believe.

Human skulls buried in Orkney's famous Tomb of the Eagles displayed signs of serious wounds inflicted by weapons, according to ground-breaking research.

Archaelogists who studied all 85 skulls from in and around the 5,000-year-old tomb said 16 contain ‘clear evidence’ of trauma.

The findings give the lie to the long-held belief that the people who lived in Scotland in the New Stone Age were peaceful farmers and that the human race did not turn murderous and warlike until later in pre-history.

The skulls - both male and female, children and adults - showed injuries caused by one or more severe blows to the head inflicted by a weapon.

Some of these severe head wounds healed - leaving some people with painful head injuries.

But Orkney-based archaeologist David Lawrence, who led the investigation and revealed his preliminary findings, said it was likely that many died of their injuries.

Mr Lawrence undertook the research in a collaborative project between the University of Bradford and Orkney Museum, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The results are to be peer-reviewed and formally published 'shortly'.

Mr Lawrence said: ‘By checking if the wounds were healed or not, we can see if someone suffered from severe head trauma just around the time if their death.

‘To say with absolute certainty if they actually died from it, is very hard, but some attacks were so severe that the whole skull has split in two horizontally. Other wounds are very subtle and are most easily observed inside the skull, where splinters have been bent inwards. Some were caused by a blunt force, like a stone or a mace.

"'Other cases were caused by pointed objects, like a bone headed arrow and there were also traumas caused by edged objects, like an axe. Some wounds did heal. There is a skull of a woman that has three healed wounds which were caused by blows from a blunt object."

"She also had a dislocated jaw which was badly healed. She must have suffered terribly, as it would have been very difficult for her to chew properly. It is likely she also had problems speaking."

The study's main finding - that Scotland's early settlers were not the friendly farmers that historians for a long time thought them to be - is in line with recent results from studies and finds in Europe.

Mr Lawrence said: "For a long time it was thought Neolithic people were friendly farmers, but in recent years it has been proven that this was not necessarily the case. ‘My study shows this again, but this time on an apparently remote island."

Mr Lawrence is convinced that the people in the Tomb of the Eagles were not ritually killed.

He said: : "There was a great variety in the places where people were hit and the instruments used: there is no simple pattern."

"This variety makes it very unlikely that they were killed in some kind of ritual. Some wounds are too directed to be an accident either. Some went straight through the skull. Many were very likely caused by a mace, or even just stones but certainly caused with intent."

"I think it is very likely that some of the head injuries were suffered during fights face to face. I can't say if they were fighting each other or different tribes."

"It is hard to tell who these particular people were, and why they were buried in this tomb. There is still a lot of carbon dating to do, but most of the bones seem to date from the fourth millennium BC, though some are from the third."

"This tomb was in use for a very long time - maybe even more than a thousand years - and in that time, 85 burials is not that much. It is therefore unlikely it was used as a general burial tomb, though it being just for some hereditary elite is also very unlikely, as the numbers are much too low for that."

"One plausible theory is that it was a grave for people who had suffered 'unaccepted' deaths - people who were murdered, died by accident or who were from other tribes."

Photo 1

'Clear evidence': A large number of New Stone Age men, women and children suffered serious violent attacks and died from their injuries, scientists believe

Photo 2

Isbister Chambered Cairn - better known as the Tomb of the Eagles - sits on the south-eastern tip of South Ronaldsay

Source: Mail Online [March 09, 2011]
Posted by IoanG on 8:11 PM. Filed under ArchaeoHeritage, Archaeology, Breakingnews, Europe, UK, Western Europe . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0

Zollikofer et al - Evidence for interpersonal violence in the St. Césaire Neanderthal

2011-03-15T20:36:00.002Z

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/50815964

Geophysical survey from Perdigões site in Portugal (4th and 3rd millennia BC).

2011-03-14T01:31:00.005Z

in Perdigões. Um projecto de Arqueologia em Construção

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Perdig%C3%B5es-Um-projecto-de-Arqueologia-em-Constru%C3%A7%C3%A3o/138543690952#!/pages/Perdig%C3%B5es-Um-projecto-de-Arqueologia-em-Constru%C3%A7%C3%A3o/138543690952?closeTheater=1

Nash - Rock-art from the Spanish Levant

2011-03-14T00:49:00.004Z

http://pt.scribd.com/full/50671456?access_key=key-sz7q0x4c7nqutzdt2yt

More on Buried Roman Soldiers of Dura May Be Victims of Ancient Iranian Chemical Weapon

2011-03-11T13:18:00.002Z

March, 10 2011

The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies

http://www.archaeologydaily.com/news/201103106249/More-on-Buried-Roman-Soldiers-of-Dura-May-Be-Victims-of-Ancient-Iranian-Chemical-Weapon.html

Almost 2,000 years ago, 19 Roman soldiers rushed into a cramped underground tunnel, sent to defend the Roman occupied Syrian city of Dura Europos from an army of Persians digging to undermine the city's mudbrick walls.

But instead of Persian soldiers, the Romans met with a wall of noxious black smoke that turned to acid in their lungs. Their crystal-pummelled swords were no match for this weapon; the Romans choked and died in moments, many with their last pay of coins still slung in purses on their belts.
Nearby, a Persian soldier - perhaps the one who started the toxic underground fire - suffered his own death throes, grasping desperately at his chain mail shirt as he choked. [Image of skeleton of Persian soldier]

These 20 men, who died in 256 CE, may be the first victims of chemical warfare to leave any archaeological evidence of their passing, according to a new investigation. The case is a cold one, with little physical evidence left behind beyond drawings and archaeological excavation notes from the 1930s. But a new analysis of those materials published in January in the American Journal of Archaeology finds that the soldiers likely did not die by the sword as the original excavator believed. Instead, they were gassed.

Where there's smoke

In the 250s, the Persian Sasanian Empire set its sights on re-taking the city of Dura from Romans. The city, which backs up against the Euphrates River, was by this time under Roman occupation used as a military base, well-fortified with meters-thick walls.

The Persians set about tunnelling underneath those walls in an effort to bring them down so troops could rush into the city. They likely started their excavations 130 feet (40 meters) away from the city, in a tomb in Dura's underground necropolis. Meanwhile, the Roman defenders dug their own countermines in hopes of intercepting the tunnelling Persians.

The outlines of this underground cat-and-mouse game was first sketched out by French archaeologist Robert du Mesnil du Buisson, who first excavated these siege tunnels in the 1920s and 30s. Du Mesnil also found the piled bodies of at least 19 Roman soldiers and one lone Persian in the tunnels beneath the city walls. He envisioned fierce hand-to-hand combat underground, during which the Persians drove back the Romans and then set fire to the Roman tunnel. Crystals of sulphur and bitumen, a naturally occurring, tar-like petrochemical, were found in the tunnel, suggesting that the Persians made the fire fast and hot.

Something about that scenario didn't make sense to Simon James, an archaeologist and historian from the University of Leicester in England. For one thing, it would have been difficult to engage in hand-to-hand combat in the tunnels, which could barely accommodate a man standing upright. For another, the position of the bodies on du Mesnil's sketches didn't match a scenario in which the Romans were run through or burned to death.

"This wasn't a pile of people who had been crowded into a small space and collapsed where they stood," James told LiveScience. "This was a deliberate pile of bodies."

Using old reports and sketches, James reconstructed the events in the tunnel on that deadly day. At first, he said, he thought the Romans had trampled each other while trying to escape the tunnel. But when he suggested that idea to his colleagues, one suggested an alternative: What about smoke?

Fumes of hell

Chemical warfare was well established by the time the Persians besieged Dura, said Adrienne Mayor, a historian at Stanford University.

"There was a lot of chemical warfare [in the ancient world]," Mayor, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience. "Few people are aware of how much there is documented in the ancient historians about this."

One of the earliest examples, Mayor said, was a battle in 189 B.C.E., when Greeks burnt chicken feathers and used bellows to blow the smoke into Roman invaders' siege tunnels. Petrochemical fires were a common tool in the Middle East, where flammable naphtha and oily bitumen were easy to find. Ancient militaries were endlessly creative: When the Macedonian warlord, Alexander II attacked the Phoenician city of Tyre in the fourth century B.C.E., Phoenician defenders had a surprise waiting for him.

"They heated fine grains of sand in shields, heated it until it was red-hot, and then catapulted it down onto Alexander's army," Mayor said. "These tiny pieces of red-hot sand went right under their armour and a couple inches into their skin, burning them."

So the idea that the Persians knew how to make toxic smoke is, "totally plausible," Mayor said.

"I think [James] really figured out what happened," she said.

In the new interpretation of the clash in the tunnels of Dura, the Romans heard the Persians working beneath the ground and steered their tunnel to intercept their enemies. The Roman tunnel was shallower than the Persian one, so the Romans planned to break in on the Persians from above. But there was no element of surprise for either side: The Persians could also hear the Romans coming.

So the Persians set a trap. Just as the Romans broke through, James said, they lit a fire in their own tunnel. Perhaps they had a bellows to direct the smoke, or perhaps they relied on the natural chimney effect of the shaft between the two tunnels. Either way, they threw sulphur and bitumen on the flames. One of the Persian soldiers was overcome and died, sacrificed himself to fir the weapon. The Romans met with the choking gas, which turned to sulphuric acid in their lungs.

"It would have almost been literally the fumes of hell coming out of the Roman tunnel," James said.

Any Roman soldiers waiting to enter the tunnels would have hesitated, seeing the smoke and hearing their fellow soldiers dying, James said. Meanwhile, the Persians waited for the tunnel to clear, and then hurried to collapse the Roman tunnel. They dragged the bodies into the stacked position in which du Mesnil would later find them. Since corpse particularly either hazardous, or of the aniranians (non-Aryans = uncivilised/savages) considered by Zoroastrian Persians as 'unclean', left the Roman corpses and their coins, armour and weapons untouched.

Professor Sam Lieu believes the operation for retaking Dura was conducted by Sasanian intelligence, the world's first intelligence organisation.

Horrors of war

After du Mesnil finished excavations, he had the tunnels filled in. Presumably, the skeletons of the soldiers remain where he found them. That makes proving the chemical warfare theory difficult, if not impossible, James said.

"It's a circumstantial case," he said. "But what it does do is it doesn't invent anything. We've got the actual stuff [the sulphur and bitumen] on the ground. It's an established technique."

If the Persians were using chemical warfare at this time, it shows that their military operations were extremely sophisticated, James said.

The story also brings home the reality of ancient warfare, James said.

"It's easy to regard this very clinically and look at this as artefacts & Here at Dura you really have got this incredibly vivid evidence of the horrors of ancient warfare," he said. "It was horrendously dangerous, brutal, and one hardly has words for it, really,"

"Arqueología de la Guerra Civil Española. Excavaciones arqueológicas en el Campo de Concentración de Castuera".

2011-03-11T13:03:00.003Z

CONFERENCIA EN EL MUSEO ARQUEOLÓGICO PROVINCIAL DE BADAJOZ. SÁBADO 26 DE
MARZO A LAS 11,30 h.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=gmail&attid=0.1&thid=12ea4b43c58577e3&mt=application/msword&url=https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui%3D2%26ik%3Dcc95c0d847%26view%3Datt%26th%3D12ea4b43c58577e3%26attid%3D0.1%26disp%3Dattd%26zw&sig=AHIEtbR0nDkYswXH4miGY64sGRDNscR1Pw&pli=1

Defence Sites: Heritage and Future 2012

2011-03-11T12:50:00.002Z

1st International Conference on Defence Sites: Heritage and Future
6 - 8 June, 2012
Portsmouth, UK

Introduction
Redundant army, naval and air force sites offer a range of opportunities to planners, developers, architects and local communities to redevelop large areas, bringing new life to often neglected parts of town. These opportunities are common to many countries and this first International Conference on Defence Sites: Heritage and Future will help to stress their common features and share experiences of their transformation to civilian uses all over the world.

The conference aims to raise the knowledge of the scale, design and functions of military, naval and air force sites. It will bring a better understanding to the issues raised by their redundancy, and the implications of different disposal processes for state owned land. It is also important to understand the interaction of different stakeholders and their influence on the outcome. They include government agencies, developers, planners, architects, historians and members of local communities. Special issues related to historical naval ships and other maritime infrastructure will also be discussed.

Delegates attending Defence Sites: Heritage and Future 2012 will be invited to submit an extended version of their paper for possible publication in the International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning one of the six International Journals edited by the Wessex Institute.

There is also a need to achieve sustainable development, which involves issues related to maintenance, conservation, as well as built and natural environmental controls, while responding to the needs and aspirations of local communities.

The re-use of defence sites also raises questions regarding the need to recover brownfields and contaminated land, which can have far-reaching legal responsibilities and environmental consequences.

The conference encourages the presentation of case studies, highlighting examples of good practices that can help to transfer knowledge between different partners across the world.

http://www.wessex.ac.uk/12-conferences/defence-sites-heritage-and-future-2012.html

Otterbein - Internal war: a cross-cultural study

2011-03-07T13:01:00.002Z

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/50190715

Leblanc - Prehistory of Warfare

2011-03-07T12:42:00.003Z

Title: Prehistory of Warfare

By: LeBlanc, Steven A., Archaeology, 0003-8113, May 1, 2003, Vol. 56, Issue 3
Database: Academic Search Premier

Humans have been at each others' throats since the dawn of the species.
IN THE EARLY 1970S, working in the El Morro Valley of west-central New Mexico, I encountered the remains of seven large prehistoric pueblos that had once housed upwards of a thousand people each. Surrounded by two-story-high walls, the villages were perched on steep-sided mesas, suggesting that their inhabitants built them with defense in mind. At the time, the possibility that warfare occurred among the Anasazi was of little interest to me and my colleagues. Rather, we were trying to figure out what the people in these 700-year-old communities farmed and hunted, the impact of climate change, and the nature of their social systems--not the possibility of violent conflict.
One of these pueblos, it turned out, had been burned to the ground; its people had clearly fled for their lives. Pottery and valuables had been left on the floors, and bushels of burned corn still lay in the storerooms. We eventually determined that this site had been abandoned, and that immediately afterward a fortress had been built nearby. Something catastrophic had occurred at this ancient Anasazi settlement, and the survivors had almost immediately, and at great speed, set about to prevent it from happening again.
Thirty years ago, archaeologists were certainly aware that violent, organized conflicts occurred in the prehistoric cultures they studied, but they considered these incidents almost irrelevant to our understanding of past events and people. Today, some of my colleagues are realizing that the evidence I helped uncover in the El Morro Valley is indicative of warfare endemic throughout the entire Southwest, with its attendant massacres, population decline, and area abandonments that forever changed the Anasazi way of life.
When excavating eight-millennia-old farm villages in southeastern Turkey in 1970, I initially marveled how similar modern villages were to ancient ones, which were occupied at a time when an abundance of plants and animals made warfare quite unnecessary. Or so I thought. I knew we had discovered some plaster sling missiles (one of our workmen showed me how shepherds used slings to hurl stones at predators threatening their sheep). Such missiles were found at many of these sites, often in great quantities, and were clearly not intended for protecting flocks of sheep; they were exactly the same size and shape as later Greek and Roman sling stones used for warfare.
The so-called "donut stones" we had uncovered at these sites were assumed to be weights for digging sticks, presumably threaded on a pole to make it heavier for digging holes to plant crops. I failed to note how much they resembled the round stone heads attached to wooden clubs--maces--used in many places of the world exclusively for fighting and still used ceremonially to signify power. Thirty years ago, I was holding mace heads and sling missiles in my hands, unaware of their use as weapons of war.
We now know that defensive walls once ringed many villages of this era, as they did the Anasazi settlements. Rooms were massed together behind solid outside walls and were entered from the roof. Other sites had mud-brick defensive walls, some with elaborately defended gates. Furthermore, many of these villages had been burned to the ground, their inhabitants massacred, as indicated by nearby mass graves.
Certainly for those civilizations that kept written records or had descriptive narrative art traditions, warfare is so clearly present that no one can deny it. Think of Homer's Iliad or the Vedas of South India, or scenes of prisoner sacrifice on Moche pottery. There is no reason to think that warfare played any less of a role in prehistoric societies for which we have no such records, whether they be hunter-gatherers or farmers. But most scholars studying these cultures still are not seeing it. They should assume warfare occurred among the people they study, just as they assume religion and art were a normal part of human culture. Then they could ask more interesting questions, such as: What form did warfare take? Can warfare explain some of the material found in the archaeological record? What were people fighting over and why did the conflicts end?
Today, some scholars know me as Dr. Warfare. To them, I have the annoying habit of asking un-politic questions about their research. I am the one who asks why the houses at a particular site were jammed so close together and many catastrophically burned. When I suggest that the houses were crowded behind defensive walls that were not found because no one was looking for them, I am not terribly appreciated. And I don't win any popularity contests when I suggest that twenty-mile-wide zones with no sites in them imply no-man's lands--clear evidence for warfare--to archaeologists who have explained a region's history without mention of conflict.
Virtually all the basic textbooks on archaeology ignore the prevalence or significance of past warfare, which is usually not discussed until the formation of state-level civilizations such as ancient Sumer. Most texts either assume or actually state that for most of human history there was an abundance of available resources. There was no resource stress, and people had the means to control population, though how they accomplished this is never explained. The one archaeologist who has most explicitly railed against this hidden but pervasive attitude is Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois, who studies the earliest farmers in Western Europe. He has found ample evidence of warfare as farmers spread west, yet most of his colleagues still believe the expansion was peaceful and his evidence a minor aberration, as seen in the various papers in Barry Cunliffe's The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe (1994) or Douglas Price's Europe's First Farmers (2000). Keeley contends that "pre-historians have increasingly pacified the past," presuming peace or thinking up every possible alternative explanation for the evidence they cannot ignore. In his War Before Civilization (1996) he accused archaeologists of being in denial on the subject.
Witness archaeologist Lisa Valkenier suggesting in 1997 that hilltop constructions along the Peruvian coast are significant because peaks are sacred in Andean cosmology. Their enclosing walls and narrow guarded entries may have more to do with restricting access to the huacas, or sacred shrines, on top of the hills than protecting defenders and barring entry to any potential attackers. How else but by empathy can one formulate such an interpretation in an area with a long defensive wall and hundreds of defensively located fortresses, some still containing piles of sling missiles ready to be used; where a common artistic motif is the parading and execution of defeated enemies; where hundreds were sacrificed; and where there is ample evidence of conquest, no-man's lands, specialized weapons, and so on?
A talk I gave at the Mesa Verde National Park last summer, in which I pointed out that the over 700-year-old cliff dwellings were built in response to warfare, raised the hackles of National Park Service personnel unwilling to accept anything but the peaceful Anasazi message peddled by their superiors. In fact, in the classic book Indians of Mesa Verde, published in 1961 by the park service, author Don Watson first describes the Mesa Verde people as "peaceful farming Indians," and admits that the cliff dwellings had a defensive aspect, but since he had already decided that the inhabitants were peaceful, the threat must have been from a new enemy--marauding nomadic Indians. This, in spite of the fact that there is ample evidence of Southwestern warfare for more than a thousand years before the cliff dwellings were built, and there is no evidence for the intrusion of nomadic peoples at this time.
Of the hundreds of research projects in the Southwest, only one--led by Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer of the Field Museum and Northern Illinois University, respectively--deliberately set out to research prehistoric warfare. They demonstrated quite convincingly that the Arizona cliff dwellings of the Tsegi Canyon area (known best for Betatakin and Kiet Siel ruins) were defensive, and their locations were not selected for ideology or because they were breezier and cooler in summer and warmer in the winter, as was previously argued by almost all Southwestern archaeologists.
For most prehistoric cultures, one has to piece together the evidence for warfare from artifactual bits and pieces. Most human history involved foragers, and so they are particularly relevant. They too were not peaceful. We know from ethnography that the Inuit (Eskimo) and Australian Aborigines engaged in warfare. We've also discovered remains of prehistoric bone armor in the Arctic, and skeletal evidence of deadly blows to the head are well documented among the prehistoric Aborigines. Surprising to some is the skeletal evidence for warfare in prehistoric California, once thought of as a land of peaceful acorn gatherers. The prehistoric people who lived in southern California had the highest incident of warfare deaths known anywhere in the world. Thirty percent of a large sample of males dating to the first centuries A.D. had wounds or died violent deaths. About half that number of women had similar histories. When we remember that not all warfare deaths leave skeletal evidence, this is a staggering number.
There was nothing unique about the farmers of the Southwest. From the Neolithic farmers of the Middle East and Europe to the New Guinea highlanders in the twentieth century, tribally organized farmers probably had the most intense warfare of any type of society. Early villages in China, the Yucatán, present-day Pakistan, and Micronesia were well fortified. Ancient farmers in coastal Peru had plenty of forts. All Polynesian societies had warfare, from the smallest islands like Tikopia, to Tahiti, New Zealand (more than four thousand prehistoric forts), and Hawaii. No-man's lands separated farming settlements in Okinawa, Oaxaca, and the southeastern United States. Such societies took trophy heads and cannibalized their enemies. Their skeletal remains show ample evidence of violent deaths. All well-studied prehistoric farming societies had warfare. They may have had intervals of peace, but over the span of hundreds of years there is plenty of evidence for real, deadly warfare.
When farmers initially took over the world, they did so as warriors, grabbing land as they spread out from the Levant through the Middle East into Europe, or from South China down through Southeast Asia. Later, complex societies like the Maya, the Inca, the Sumerians, and the Hawaiians were no less belligerent. Here, conflict took on a new dimension. Fortresses, defensive walls hundreds of miles long, and weapons and armor expertly crafted by specialists all gave the warfare of these societies a heightened visibility.
There is a danger in making too much of the increased visibility of warfare we see in these complex societies. This is especially true for societies with writing. When there are no texts, it is easy to see no warfare. But the opposite is true. As soon as societies can write, they write about warfare. It is not a case of literate societies having warfare for the first time, but their being able to write about what had been going on for a long time. Also, many of these literate societies link to European civilization in one way or another, and so this raises the specter of Europeans being warlike and spreading war to inherently peaceful people elsewhere, a patently false but prevalent notion. Viewing warfare from the perspective of literate societies tells us nothing about the thousands of years of human societies that were not civilizations--that is, almost all of human history. So we must not rely too much on the small time slice represented by literate societies if we want to understand warfare in the past.
The Maya were once considered a peaceful society led by scholarly priests. That all changed when the texts written by their leaders could be read, revealing a long history of warfare and conquest. Most Mayanists now accept that there was warfare, but many still resist dealing with its scale or implications. Was there population growth that resulted in resource depletion, as throughout the rest of the world? We would expect the Maya to have been fighting each other over valuable farmlands as a consequence, but Mayanist Linda Schele concluded in 1984 that "I do not think it [warfare] was territorial for the most part," this even though texts discuss conquest, and fortifications are present at sites like El Mirador, Calakmul, Tikal, Yaxuná, Uxmal, and many others from all time periods. Why fortify them, if no one wanted to capture them?
Today, more Maya archaeologists are looking at warfare in a systematic way, by mapping defensive features, finding images of destruction, and dating these events. A new breed of younger scholars is finding evidence of warfare throughout the Maya past. Where are the no-man's lands that almost always open up between competing states because they are too dangerous to live in? Warfare must have been intimately involved in the development of Maya civilization, and resource stress must have been widespread.
Demonstrating the prevalence of warfare is not an end in itself. It is only the first step in understanding why there was so much, why it was "rational" for everyone to engage in it all the time. I believe the question of warfare links to the availability of resources.
During the 1960s, I lived in Western Samoa as a Peace Corps volunteer on what seemed to be an idyllic South Pacific Island--exactly like those painted by Paul Gauguin. Breadfruit and coconut groves grew all around my village, and I resided in a thatched-roof house with no walls beneath a giant mango tree. If ever there was a Garden of Eden, this was it. I lived with a family headed by an extremely intelligent elderly chief named Sila. One day, Sila happened to mention that the island's trees did not bear fruit as they had when he was a child. He attributed the decline to the possibility that the presence of radio transmissions had affected production, since Western Samoa (now known as Samoa) had its own radio station by then. I suggested that what had changed was not that there was less fruit but that there were more mouths to feed. Upon reflection, Sila decided I was probably right. Being an astute manager, he was already taking the precaution of expanding his farm plots into some of the last remaining farmable land on the island, at considerable cost and effort, to ensure adequate food for his growing family. Sila was aware of his escalating provisioning problems but was not quite able to grasp the overall demographic situation. Why was this?
The simple answer is that the rate of population change in our small Samoan village was so gradual that during an adult life span growth was not dramatic enough to be fully comprehended. The same thing happens to us all the time. Communities grow and change composition, and often only after the process is well advanced do we recognize just how significant the changes have been--and we have the benefit of historic documents, old photographs, long life spans, and government census surveys. All human societies can grow substantially over time, and all did whenever resources permitted. The change may seem small in one person's lifetime, but over a couple of hundred years, populations can and do double, triple, or quadruple in size.
The consequences of these changes become evident only when there is a crisis. The same can be said for environmental changes. The forests of Central America were being denuded and encroached upon for many years, but it took Hurricane Mitch, which ravaged most of the region in late October 1998, to produce the dramatic flooding and devastation that fully demonstrated the magnitude of the problem: too many people cutting down the forest and farming steep hillsides to survive. The natural environment is resilient and at the same time delicate, as modern society keeps finding out. And it was just so in the past.
These observations about Mother Nature are incompatible with popular myths about peaceful people living in ecological balance with nature in the past. A peaceful past is possible only if you live in ecological balance. If you live in a Garden of Eden surrounded by plenty, why fight? By this logic, warfare is a sure thing when natural resources run dry. If someone as smart as Sila couldn't perceive population growth, and if humans all over Earth continue to degrade their environments, could people living in the past have been any different?
A study by Canadian social scientists Christina Mesquida and Neil Wiener has shown that the greater the proportion of a society is composed of unmarried young men, the greater the likelihood of war. Why such a correlation? It is not because the young men are not married; it is because they cannot get married. They are too poor to support wives and families. The idea that poverty breeds war is far from original. The reason poverty exists has remained the same since the beginning of time: humans have invariably overexploited their resources because they have always outgrown them.
There is another lesson from past warfare. It stops. From foragers to farmers, to more complex societies, when people no longer have resource stress they stop fighting. When the climate greatly improves, warfare declines. For example, in a variety of places the medieval warm interval of ca. 900-1100 improved farming conditions. The great towns of Chaco Canyon were built at this time, and it was the time of archaeologist Stephen Lekson's Pax Chaco--the longest period of peace in the Southwest. It is no accident that the era of Gothic cathedrals was a response to similar climate improvement. Another surprising fact is that the amount of warfare has declined over time. If we count the proportion of a society that died from warfare, and not the size of the armies, as the true measure of warfare, then we find that foragers and farmers have much higher death rates--often approaching 25 percent of the men--than more recent complex societies. No complex society, including modern states, ever approached this level of warfare.
If warfare has ultimately been a constant battle over scarce resources, then solving the resource problem will enable us to become better at ridding ourselves of conflict.
There have been several great "revolutions" in human history: control of fire, the acquisition of speech, the agricultural revolution, the development of complex societies. One of the most recent, the Industrial Revolution, has lowered the birth rate and increased available resources. History shows that peoples with strong animosities stop fighting after adequate resources are established and the benefits of cooperation recognized. The Hopi today are some of the most peaceful people on earth, yet their history is filled with warfare. The Gebusi of lowland New Guinea, the African !Kung Bushmen, the Mbuti Pygmies of central Africa, the Sanpoi and their neighbors of the southern Columbia River, and the Sirionno of Amazonia are all peoples who are noted for being peaceful, yet archaeology and historical accounts provide ample evidence of past warfare. Sometimes things changed in a generation; at other times it took longer. Adequate food and opportunity does not instantly translate into peace, but it will, given time.
The fact that it can take several generations or longer to establish peace between warring factions is little comfort for those engaged in the world's present conflicts. Add to this a recent change in the decision-making process that leads to war. In most traditional societies, be they forager bands, tribal farmers, or even complex chiefdoms, no individual held enough power to start a war on his own. A consensus was needed; pros and cons were carefully weighed and hotheads were not tolerated. The risks to all were too great. Moreover, failure of leadership was quickly recognized, and poor leaders were replaced. No Hitler or Saddam Hussein would have been tolerated. Past wars were necessary for survival, and therefore were rational; too often today this is not the case. We cannot go back to forager-band-type consensus, but the world must work harder at keeping single individuals from gaining the power to start wars. We know from archaeology that the amount of warfare has declined markedly over the course of human history and that peace can prevail under the right circumstances. In spite of the conflict we see around us, we are doing better, and there is less warfare in the world today than there ever has been. Ending it may be a slow process, but we are making headway.

PHOTO (COLOR): Maya warriors fight with spear and atlatl over the body of a fallen comrade in this Classic Period (A.D. 600-900) cylinder vase. Some scholars still underrate the role that warfare played in the Maya past.

PHOTO (COLOR): Anasazi fortifications at the Hovenweep site in southeastern Utah. These defensive structures were built between A.D. 1200 and 1300, a period of climate change that put severe stress on the Anasazi population and may have sparked a resumption of warfare as a means of securing food. Above right, a row of storage jars and burned corn and roof beams in a hastily abandoned room at a pueblo site in the El Morro Valley of west central New Mexico. The site was attacked in 1279 but its inhabitants survived and quickly built a fortress nearby.
PHOTO (COLOR): Sling missiles from a 7,000-year-old site in Turkey were once thought to have been heated and used to boil water. The Turkish missile (top) is identical in shape to a stone missile (center) from Hawaii and a lead one (bottom) used by the ancient Greeks. Below, fragment of a stone monolith (ca. A.D. 1500) from southern Peru depicts a body dismembered by warrriors.
PHOTOS (COLOR): Betatakin cliff dwelling sits within a natural alcove, top, in Arizona's Tsegi Canyon. Long thought to have afforded protection from the elements, the site was more likely chosen with defensive purposes in mind. Built ca. 1260, it was abandoned by 1300.
PHOTO (COLOR): Arctic Eskimos wore bone armor, below, as protection against surprise raids by unfriendly neighbors. New Guinea highlanders made arrow-stopping armor from inner tree bark fibers and woven cane, right.
PHOTO (COLOR): Samoan chief Sila and his wife and grandchildren. Population growth and dwindling resources led Sila to expand his farm plots to ensure an adequate food supply.
PHOTO (COLOR): Victorious Maya warriors (in short sleeves) present captives to a ruler, far right, on this Classic Period (A.D. 600-900) cylinder vase. Such depictions provide evidence for warfare that is sometimes difficult to recognize from excavations in the Mesoamerican jungle.

By Steven A. LeBlanc
©2003 by STEVEN A. LEBLANC. Portions of this article were taken from his book Constant Battles, published this spring by St. Martin's Press. LeBlanc is director of collections at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. For further reading visit www.archaeology.org.

Armadura de Dendra - Dendra armour

2011-03-05T22:21:00.001Z

Violent chimpanzee attack - Planet Earth - BBC wildlife

2011-03-04T21:14:00.000Z

Chimps Attacking Leopard

2011-03-04T20:54:00.001Z

Andrushko et al - Trophy-Taking and Dismemberment as Warfare Strategies in Prehistoric Central California

2011-03-04T19:58:00.001Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/50043936

Somit - Humans, Chimps and Bonobos. The biological bases of aggression war and peacemaking.

2011-03-04T19:52:00.005Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/50042878/Albert-Somit-Humans-Chimps-and-Bonobos-The-biological-bases-of-aggression-war-and-peacemaking

Chimpanzees team up to attack a monkey in the wild - BBC wildlife

2011-02-19T23:35:00.001Z

Violência e Etnografia: os Zulu.

2011-02-19T22:51:00.000Z

A tribo dos Nguni emigrou no séc. XIV para a costa Sudoeste de África e deu origem ao chefado dos Zulu.

Este povo de pastores já conhecia uma guerra ritual e geralmente por causa dos pastos. Os grupos em disputa começavam por se insultar passando de seguida ao lançamento de projécteis de madeira (com a ponta endurecida pelo fogo). Estes lançamentos provocavam algumas fatalidades que terminavam o combate. Os guerreiros que conseguiam matar um inimigo tinham de sair do combate para serem purificados. As disputas eram resolvidas com poucas baixas e o grupo derrotado ficava com as terras menos interessantes (Keegan, 1994, p. 28-29).

No fim do séc. XVIII tudo mudou, o número de cabeças de gado aumentou e o espaço físico não permitiu mais migrações. A cultura do milho trazido da Europa levou ao aumento da densidade populacional. Houve uma tentativa de diminuir a natalidade formando grupos de guerreiros por idades que ficavam separados das potenciais noiva. Isto levou à diminuição da taxa de natalidade e ao aumento do poder do soberano uma vez que tinha estes guerreiros ao seu dispor. (Otterbein, 1997, p. 26-27).

No início do séc. XIX surgiu o chefe Saka, este institucionalizou os regimentos de guerreiros da mesma idade que se tornaram permanentes (Keegan, 1994, p. 28-32). Saka criou uma nova arma (assegai), uma lança curta e já com uma ponta de ferro. Esta arma destinava-se a espetar o tronco do inimigo num combate de curta distância (Keeley, 1997, p. 130). Segundo Otterbein (2004, p. 215) os regimentos de Saka foram treinados a combater juntos formando quatro grupos: centro, duas alas e reserva. O centro atacava o inimigo fixando-o, as alas atacavam os flancos cercando o inimigo e a reserva acabava o trabalho.

A forma de fazer a guerra mudou completamente, passámos de combates rituais, à distância e com poucas baixas para combates de proximidade, realizados por um exército profissional, treinado, disciplinado e que exterminava o inimigo.

O caso dos Zulu é estudado por Otterbein (1997, p. 25-32), para este autor uma nova organização militar, novas armas de choque e novas tácticas mudaram a forma de fazer a guerra. Como consequência aumentou o número de baixas resultante dos conflitos, o exército Zulu cresceu em número, o território deste chefado cresceu em conjunto com o número de tribos assimiladas dando origem a um estado (Saka exterminou populações inteiras e levou a migrações num quinto do território africano). Quando este estado se consolidou iniciou-se um período de campanhas externas com o objectivo de ocupar o exército e saquear recursos.

Bibliografia:
KEEGAN, John (1994) – A history of warfare. London: Pimlico.
KEELEY, Lawrence (1997) - War before civilization: The myth of the
peaceful savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OTTERBEIN, Keith F.(1997) – Feuding and warfare. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers.

Ancient Cannibals Crafted Cups from Human Skulls

2011-02-16T23:58:00.002Z

LiveScience

February, 16 2011

It seems as though ancient cannibals had a "waste not, want not" attitude, suggests the discovery of Ice Age cups made from human skulls what may be the earliest ones known, scientists say.

Human skulls have been made into macabre cups and bowls for thousands of years. For instance, in the fifth century B.C., ancient Greek historian Herodotus portrayed the Scythians as people who drank from the skulls of their enemies, and similar traditions have been described by the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian sometime in the first or second centuries B.C.
Still, archaeological evidence of how skull cups were made is extremely rare. Now scientists have discovered three skull cups in England that are roughly 14,700 years old, the earliest ones that researchers have confirmed ages for and the only ones known so far from the British Isles.

In a site known as Gough's Cave in Somerset, England, skull fragments from at least five people were found - a young child about 3 years old, two adolescents, an adult and an older adult. There were signs that their lower jaws had the marrow sucked out, suggesting cannibalism occurred.

Cut marks and dents on the bones suggest they were scalped and scrupulously scraped clean of skin and flesh with flint tools shortly after death. The crafters then removed the face bones and bases of the skulls from the adults and the 3-year-old, meticulously chipping at the broken edges of the resulting cups, possibly to straighten their rims.

"Possibly the most surprising thing is how skilled at manipulating human bodies these early humans were," researcher Silvia Bello, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, told LiveScience. "It was a very meticulous process that just proves how technologically advanced this population was. It also demonstrates a very complex funerary behavior."

"It's impossible to know how the skull cups were used back then," said researcher Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum. "But in recent examples, they may hold blood, wine or food during rituals."

A precise cast of the skull cup from the adult individual will go on display at the Natural History Museum in London on March 1 for three months.

The scientists detailed their findings online Feb. 16 in the journal PLoS ONE.

Numbers

2011-02-15T14:38:00.005Z

10 000 visits
in 722 days

from 82 countries

217 posts

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86 likes on facebook

Conferencia: "Sacrificio humano y canibalismo".

2011-02-08T23:57:00.000Z

Les recordamos que el próximo SÁBADO día 12 de FEBRERO, a las 11,30 HORAS, se impartirá otra CONFERENCIA en este museo dentro del ciclo 2011. Les ampliamos la información:

CONFERENCIANTE :

Prof. Dr. D. Miguel Botella López
Director del Laboratorio de Antropología de la Universidad de Granada.

Notas.

El canibalismo era una actividad sistemática y ritual en el México prehispánico y durante el Neolítico, prácticamente en toda Europa, según han constatado diversos antropólogos tras el estudio de las marcas que esta práctica dejaba en los huesos humanos.

Desde finales del 3.000 al 2.500 antes de Cristo, el canibalismo era común en toda la cuenca mediterránea europea y en Finlandia, y la carne de los fallecidos se consumía, tal vez para asimilar las virtudes o características del difunto.

Los huesos estudiados, con marcas de cuchillos y de dientes humanos y procedentes de hombres, mujeres y niños, aparecieron en basureros mezclados con restos de los animales que conformaban su dieta, lo que constata el canibalismo en el Neolítico, especialmente en un periodo del que apenas se han encontrado sepulturas. Sólo en Granada se han encontrado once lugares, algunos de ellos en Alfacar, Píñar o Moclín, donde esta práctica era "habitual", pero también son numerosos en la fachada mediterránea del resto de España y en Europa.

La manipulación de los cuerpos humanos para su ingesta (cortes, desuello, descarnado o cocción, entre otros) dejó marcas en los huesos, que han sido analizadas por estos expertos y han permitido determinar "toda la metodología utilizada en lo que constituían acontecimientos ritualizados".

En cuanto a las culturas mesoamericanas, los más de 20.000 restos óseos estudiados por estos expertos han demostrado que el canibalismo era "sistemático" en toda América, lo que "posiblemente indica que lo llevaron los humanos que pasaron el estrecho de Bering cuando ocuparon el continente por primera vez".

Reseña Curricular

Miguel Botella López es Director del Laboratorio de Antropología Física de la Universidad de Granada, de la que es profesor, si bien ha impartido clases en otros centros universitarios como Burdeos e imparte cursos de forma asidua en centros de investigación antropológica de España, Chile, México, Perú, Venezuela etc. Es a su vez coordinador del Programa de Postgrado en evolución humana y antropología física forense de la Universidad de Granada, en el que se matriculan habitualmente alumnos procedentes de diversos países del Mundo. Está considerado como uno de los mejores especialistas del país en estudios de marcas en restos óseos y ha realizado diversos proyectos de investigación , además de en España, en Chile, México, Perú, Venezuela, Egipto y Sudán. Es autor de un gran número de artículos y monografías sobre medicina, antropología física y paleoeconomia.

Prehistoric Dun Eochla fort in the irish Aran islands

2011-01-31T23:27:00.002Z

USA Grant on prehistoric warfare

2011-01-31T22:38:00.004Z

George Milner and George Chaplin receive an NSF grant to study warfare in prehistoric eastern North America

in PennState, Department of Anthropology

By BETTY L BLAIR on January 20, 2011 3:43

George Milner and George Chaplin recently received a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for a project that will produce the first comprehensive account of conflict in prehistoric eastern North America, with an emphasis on the last 1500 years of prehistory (prior to ca. AD 1500). Dramatic cultural changes occurred during that time as early food-producing communities characterized by relatively egalitarian social relations were transformed into larger agricultural societies, many of which were dominated by hereditary chiefs. The project completes a multi-year effort to assemble the archaeological (settlements surrounded by palisades) and osteological (skeletons with conflict-related trauma such as arrow injuries) necessary to understand how warfare was conducted, who was involved (casualties), and how the intensity of conflict varied over time and across prehistoric eastern North America.

La batalla de Himera emerge de las fosas de sus guerreros

2011-01-31T22:33:00.001Z

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/batalla/Himera/emerge/fosas/guerreros/elpepicul/20110130elpepicul_5/Tes
JACINTO ANTÓN - Barcelona - 30/01/2011

El hallazgo de los restos ilumina el decisivo combate que ganaron los griegos a los cartagineses hace 2.500 años

Fue una de las batallas más tremendas y decisivas libradas por los antiguos griegos, y en ella también se jugó la suerte de la civilización occidental como la conocemos. Todo el mundo ha oído hablar de Salamina y, sin embargo, ¿quién recuerda Himera? Esa batalla tuvo lugar, según Heródoto (Libro VII), el mismo día que la de Salamina, durante la última semana de septiembre del 480 antes de Cristo, si bien en tierra y muy lejos hacia el oeste. Si junto a la isla de Salamina, cerca de Atenas, los griegos derrotaron a los persas y conjugaron el peligro de caer bajo el yugo del poderoso imperio oriental, hundiendo la incontable flota de Jerjes, frente a Himera, en la costa norte de Sicilia, cerca de Palermo, una coalición de colonos griegos -mandados por Terón, tirano de Agrigento, y Gelón, rey de Siracusa- venció a otros peligrosísimos enemigos, otros "bárbaros", estos occidentales, los cartagineses, salvaguardando uno de los territorios helenos más importantes.

Ante la derrota el comandante cartaginés se arrojó a las llamas
La coincidencia de los ataques, el persa y el cartaginés, hizo pensar a los griegos en un pacto de sus dos grandes enemigos para hacerles la pinza desde el este y el oeste. Las fuentes de la antigüedad -comparan Himera con Platea- hablan de una batalla grandiosa, que ahora confirma la arqueología, y que acabó con el enorme ejército cartaginés completamente derrotado y el suicidio de su comandante, Amilcar (un Magónida, nada que ver con los Bárcidas), que se habría lanzado a las llamas de una pira sacrificial, a lo Dido, evitando la captura.
El combate tuvo algo de guerra de Troya, pero al revés: los griegos asediados, que al principio llevaban la peor parte, hasta el punto de que tapiaron las puertas de la ciudad y asaltaron con un ardid -haciéndose pasar por caballería enemiga- el campamento en la playa de los atacantes cartagineses incendiando sus naves varadas. La contienda prosiguió en la llanura entre la playa y la ciudad, donde el campo de batalla ha sido ahora localizado.
De la ferocidad de la lucha -"fue grande la carnicería", escribe Diodoro Sículo- nos da fe el descubrimiento de los enterramientos de los guerreros griegos caídos en la batalla. Los arqueólogos han hallado incluso varias sepulturas colectivas, verdaderas fosas comunes, con los soldados alineados en una última y espectral revista y todos con heridas escalofriantes, en las que se escucha el eco metálico de la guerra antigua con toda su ferocidad. Desde el punto de vista científico pueden representar la mayor fuente de información sobre cómo luchaban y morían los griegos.
"Hemos excavado siete fosas comunes de la batalla con un centenar de cadáveres, pero hay muchísimas sepulturas individuales más de guerreros y 26 tumbas de caballos, muy raras en el mundo griego y que deben tener que ver con ese papel protagonista de la caballería en la batalla, para recordarlo", explica el director científico de las excavaciones, el arqueólogo Stefano Vassallo. El estudioso, que ha participado en un curso del Instituto Catalán de Arqueología Clásica (ICAC), recuerda que la necrópolis de Himera es una de las más grandes de Italia y en ella han excavado ¡9.000 tumbas! de diferentes épocas durante los trabajos preventivos de la construcción de la línea ferroviaria Palermo-Mesina, iniciados en 2008 y recién concluidos.
Vassallo señala que los guerreros griegos de las fosas comunes yacen todos en posición dorsal, son hombres de edades entre los 25 y los 30 años y presentan traumatismos violentos debidos a heridas de armas de tajo o lanza. Muchos conservan trozos del arma que les causó la muerte: puntas de flecha o de lanza que penetraron tan profundamente que no se pudieron extraer del cuerpo.
El arqueólogo no cree que la coincidencia con Salamina sea literal (para Diodoro Sículo, Himera se libró el mismo día que la batalla de las Termópilas), pero tampoco que Heródoto se lo inventara. "No es un mito, hubo sin duda sincronía entre ambas campañas".
Himera tiene un epílogo amargo. Si bien los griegos pararon definitivamente a los persas en las guerras médicas, los cartagineses volvieron 70 años después y la revancha fue completa. En la segunda batalla de Himera (409 antes de Cristo), el nieto de Amílcar, Aníbal (otro, no el terror de los romanos), venció a los griegos y arrasó la ciudad. Himera no volvió a ser ocupada. "Fue una vendetta tremenda", asegura Vassallo. También de esta notable batalla se han excavado otras dos fosas comunes, una con 59 cadáveres. Vassallo cree que otra fosa con centenares de esqueletos muy desordenados podría albergar los restos de las víctimas de la masacre de civiles ordenada por Aníbal tras la toma de la ciudad para apaciguar el fantasma de su abuelo.

The Centre for Battlefield Archaeology postgraduate conference

2011-01-29T23:51:00.000Z

‘We go to gain a little patch of ground’: postgraduate research in conflict archaeology

First call for Papers
7th - 9th October 2011, University of Glasgow
Email: conflictpg@gmail.com

The Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow will be hosting a three-day postgraduate conference bringing together researchers working within the field of conflict archaeology. It is intended that this conference be a postgraduate answer to the Fields of Conflict conference cycle. The first Fields of Conflict conference, held in Glasgow in 2000, represented a significant horizon for those eager for the opportunity to share pioneering research in the burgeoning field of conflict archaeology. In the last decade, conflict archaeology has transformed from a radical sub-discipline into an established, yet dynamic, academic subject covering a myriad of research avenues.

This postgraduate conference will bring together postgraduate researchers with the aim of providing a platform to present a new generation of research in the field of conflict archaeology. It will provide a venue for postgraduates to present their work, offering a chance not only to be informed of the latest research trends, but also to give students the opportunity to connect with others within this rapidly developing field of specialisation. It is hoped that this conference will address a perceived lack of forum for the discussion and presentation of postgraduate work in all facets of conflict archaeology and will in turn foster a vibrant postgraduate research community that forges intellectual, international and interdisciplinary connections. We go, therefore, ‘to gain a little patch of ground’ (Hamlet IV.iv.18).

Papers will cover a wide range of research interests, reflecting the multifaceted nature of conflict archaeology, covering all time periods from the ancient to the contemporary.

We welcome submissions including, but not limited to, topics such as:

• Methodologies and new approaches
• Landscapes of conflict
• Warfare, violence, resistance
• Politics and propaganda
• Memorialisation, remembrance and forgetting
• Imprisonment / internment
• Colonial encounter
• Heritage management of sites of conflict and public engagement
• Battlefield tourism, thanatourism
• Recreation, re-enactment and ersatz experience
• Ethics of studying violence and conflict
• Investigating and interpreting uncomfortable / problematic histories
• Recovery of remains

We invite 20-minute papers that touch upon any of the themes raised above. Papers on related topics or those that offer comparative perspectives are also welcome, as are A0- and A1-sized research posters. Please send a 250-300 word abstract to conflictpg@gmail.com by 1 July 2011. Selected papers will be published in a special edition of the Journal of Conflict Archaeology.

For further information contact Natasha Ferguson, Jennifer Novotny or Jonathan Trigg.
Centre for Battlefield Archaeology
University of Glasgow
Gregory Building
Lilybank Gardens
Glasgow G12 8QQ
+44 (0)141 330 2304
conflictpg@gmail.com

Batalha campal na Arte Rupestre Levantina - Field battle in Iberian Rock Art

2011-01-24T00:01:00.006Z

Violência e Etnografia: os Maori.

2011-01-23T23:54:00.005Z

A Polinésia é constituída por milhares de ilhas dispersas por um mar imenso. O Homem conseguiu povoar estas ilhas e manter uma unidade cultural, apesar das distâncias, sem uma língua escrita e com tecnologia ainda lítica. A sociedade Polinésia é constituída por chefados Teocrático formada por clãs em que o chefe é descendente directo dos Deuses e o seu maná maior se for um bom guerreiro.

Os Maori ocuparam a Nova Zelândia em 800 d.C., trouxeram a cultura polinésia atingindo os 200 000 habitantes. Os chefes descendentes dos deuses constituíam uma classe social superior e militarmente especializada. Tinham o poder de taxar e dirigir os trabalhos, podiam assim organizar exércitos, reunir abastecimentos e fornecer transporte, realizando assim verdadeiras campanhas militares de longa distância. Apesar do infanticídio, da intensificação da produção (com o desbravar de novos terrenos e trabalhos de irrigação, por exemplo), do viajar (migrações em busca de novas ilhas) e da guerra os maori não conseguiram parar o crescimento populacional.

O nome dado aos guerreiros é toa, o mesmo das árvores de que são feitas as mocas com que são resolvidas as disputas por insultos, mulheres, propriedade ou liderança (Keegan, 1994, p. 102). A principal função da guerra entre os Maori parece ter sido a distribuição de terras, outros investigadores apontam para a vingança.

A guerra tornou-se de extermínio com o uso de mocas e lanças aguçadas com líticos, osso, conchas ou coral uma vez que os Maori não possuíam metalurgia (Keegan, 1994, p. 103-105). Os combates tinham como objectivo a derrota total e aniquilação do inimigo, o canibalismo e a captura de troféus tornaram-se uma prática comum entre os Maori (Keeley, 1997, p. 100).

Deu-se então uma evolução tecnológica e começaram a aparecer fortificações, já foram identificadas cerca de 4000. Estas fortificações eram construídas em sítios altos, e constituídas por paliçadas, fossos, ladeiras e armazéns de comida. Não são conhecidas armas de cerco, podendo as fortificações ter funcionado como um elemento estabilizador.

Independentemente da função as fortificações evitaram não só um caminho para a destruição total como a própria supremacia de um chefado sobre os restantes (Keegan, 1994, p. 105-106).

Bibliografia:
KEEGAN, John (1994) – A history of warfare. London: Pimlico.
KEELEY, Lawrence (1997) - War before civilization: The myth of the
peaceful savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Valcamonica Rock Art I

2011-01-16T13:44:00.002Z

in Rupestre.net

Site: Naquane National Park (Capo di Ponte)

Subject: duelling warriors

Period: Late Iron Age

Description: the two warrios are duelling in a simmetric position with sword and shield. This scene can be dated to the Iron Age by the weapons represented and mostly by the theme itself. The duel is the first iconographic subject in the Iron Age Valcamonica rock art

To notice: the parallel oblique scratches are the result of the last glacial period, ended in the Alps about 14-12.000 BP

Antunes, Correia, Moura, Lopes, Cunha - Violence Among Mesolithic Men From Muge Biochemical Evidence

2011-01-11T15:19:00.003Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46658762

Violência e Etnografia: os Maring.

2011-01-11T15:04:00.003Z

Os Maring habitam os planaltos centrais da Nova Guiné, são uma sociedade formada por clãs tribais, com grande densidade populacional e com um total de 7000 indivíduos. Possuem pequenas hortas e porcos domesticados, dedicam-se também à caça e recolecção, possuem uma tecnologia ainda lítica.

Nos anos 60 foram efectuados estudos de campo pelo antropólogo Andrew Vayda que identificou quatro formas de guerra (Keegan, 1994, p. 99-100). Na primeira forma, chamado de nothing fights, os grupos adversários enfrentam-se à distância do alcance de tiro de flecha e trocam projécteis escondendo-se por detrás de escudos, estes combates podem durar vários dias e as baixas são raras. Na segunda forma, chamado de true fights, além das trocas de projécteis, os grupos aproximam-se à distância de luta corpo a corpo e lutam com machados de pedra e lanças, no entanto as baixas continuam raras apesar dos combates durarem dias. O raid é a terceira forma de guerra, aqui é efectuado um curto ataque de surpresa ao território inimigo com um número maior de baixa. A quarta e mais mortífera forma de guerra é o rout, aqui é efectuado um ataque ao acampamento inimigo em que são mortos vários elementos, incluindo mulheres e crianças.

Segundo Vayda (Keegan, 1994, p. 101-103) na forma de nohing fights a causa pode ser desde insultos a homicídio, tem como função testar as forças do adversário e tentar negociar as reparações com a ajuda de vizinhos. A forma de true fights e o raid representam o escalonamento de problemas que não foram resolvidos com o primeiro tipo de guerra, tem como função o equilíbrio de poder. O rout tem como função a aniquilação do inimigo e conquista dos seus recursos, mas esta explicação está envolta em controvérsia pois o território do inimigo nem sempre é ocupado e a densidade populacional dos Maring tem vindo a diminuir.

Nota: Keeley (1997, p. 93) considera a forma de rout dentro da forma do raid.

Bibliografia:

KEEGAN, John (1994) – A history of warfare. London: Pimlico.
KEELEY, Lawrence (1997) - War before civilization: The myth of the
peaceful savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thorpe - Anthropology, archaeology, and the origin of warfare

2011-01-11T14:53:00.000Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46656844

Walker - A BIOARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

2011-01-11T14:37:00.000Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46656030

Wrangham - Evolution of Coalitionary Killing

2011-01-10T00:55:00.002Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46569544

Jackes - Osteological evidence for Mesolithic and Neolithic violence: problems of interpretation

2011-01-10T00:19:00.006Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46568972

Violência e Etnografia: os Yanomamo.

2011-01-09T23:53:00.004Z

Os Yanomamo habitam nas florestas tropicais do Brasil e da Venezuela, numa área de 40000 milhas quadradas banhadas pelo Rio Orinoco, são cerca de 10000 indivíduos em aldeias tribais de 40 a 250 indivíduos que possuem já uma agricultura de pequenas hortas.

O antropólogo Chagnon viveu em 1964 entre os Yanomamo, estudou os seus hábitos e concluiu que estes se encontram em guerra permanente, povo conhecido como feroz, incentiva a agressividade (waiteri) dentro da sua comunidade e tenta atemorizar os vizinhos (Keegan, 1994, p. 94).

Segundo Frigolé Reichax (1988, p. 66-68) os Yanomamo têm vários níveis de violência interpessoal na sua cultura, estes níveis crescem do individual para o colectivo, vão aumentando em intensidade e variam as armas usadas. Segundo o mesmo autor este sistema começa por ser regulamentado e ritualista, usado como forma de escape de situações mais graves ou como forma de compensação de danos sofridos, todo o povoado ou grupos vizinhos participam e normalmente os combates não levam à morte.

Chagnon (Otterbein, 2004, p. 202) refere como primeiro nível de luta interpessoal o chest-pouding, combate entre dois indivíduos com golpes no peito, de seguida temos o side-slapping, com golpes na zona lateral do tronco, depois passamos ao clubs-fights, aqui já entram armas e golpes na cabeça que podem ser mortais. Segundo o mesmo autor no combate entre grupos, a primeira forma é a luta com lanças, a primeira forma de guerra são os raids aos acampamentos dos vizinhos, temos também ataques à traição, estes acontecem durante uma suposta festa, com a ajuda de um terceiro grupo, e tornam-se em verdadeiros massacres.

Além da guerra interna os Yanomamo dedicam-se também à guerra externa atacando tribos vizinhas não relacionadas por casamento, estas são consideradas como inferiores e exterminadas num movimento de expansão (Chagnon apud Keegan, 1994, p. 97).

A guerra entre os Yanomamo (Harris, 2004, p. 431) é uma forma de conseguir mulheres (aqueles que já mataram têm mais mulheres e filhos), é também uma forma de conseguir status, dentro e fora do grupo (usar a agressividade como dissuasor de possíveis ataques dos vizinhos), conseguir recursos (o importante recurso que é a carne, desenvolvido por Harris em 1990 na p. 73-83) e vingança.

No entanto as causas e funções da guerra entre os Yanomamo não são consensuais, alguns autores acrescentam mesmo o controle de rotas comerciais ou o resultado do contacto com os europeus à discussão (Thorpe, 2003, p. 149-150).

A principal causa de morte entre este povo é a guerra, o total de mortos na guerra atinge percentagens muito altas entre a população masculina (Keeley, 1997, p. 68).

Bibliografia:
FRIGOLÉ REIXACH, Juan; ed. (1988) – As raças humanas. Resomnia Editores.
HARRIS, Marvin (2004) – Introducción a la Antropologia general. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 7.ª Edición.
KEEGAN, John (1994) – A history of warfare. London: Pimlico.
KEELEY, Lawrence (1997) - War before civilization: The myth of the
peaceful savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OTTERBEIN, Keith F. (2004) – How war began. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
THORPE, I. J. N. (2003) – Anthropology, archaeology and the origin of warfare. World Archaeology (The Social Commemoration of Warfare). 35: 1, p.145-165.

Almagro-Gorbea, Lorrio - War and Society in the Celtiberian World

2011-01-08T16:05:00.001Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46514608/Almagro-Gorbea-Lorrio-War-and-Society-in-the-Celtiberian-World

Harding - The development of warrior identities in the European Bronze Age

2011-01-08T16:03:00.000Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46514337/Harding-The-development-of-warrior-identities-in-the-European-Bronze-Age

Violência e Etnografia: Aborígenes Australianos

2011-01-08T15:20:00.003Z

Os Aborígenes habitam as terras mais inóspitas da Austrália, formam bandos de caçadores-recolectores que não tinham conhecimento metalúrgicos até à chegada dos ingleses.
Entre os grupos aborígenes australianos encontram-se várias formas de violência interpessoal como duelos, raids e batalhas campais (Harris, 2004; Keeley, 1997; Leblanc e Register, 2004, Otterbein, 2004).
O Etnógrafo Warner, no princípio do séc.XX, estudou os Murger e recolheu terminologia para seis tipos de guerra diferentes entre este povo (Leblanc e Register, 2004, p. 123).
Os duelos que têm como objectivo resolver situações individuais e impedir atritos mais graves, funcionam como válvula de escape, por vezes acabam por escalar para batalhas campais pois os jovens dos grupos não se conseguem controlar (Warner apud Keeley, 1997, p. 149).
Buckley, que viveu 32 anos entre os Wathaurong no início do séc. XIX, descreve a existência de feuds, batalhas campais, massacres na forma de raids nocturnos, o medo constante de ataques, a necessidade de alianças e traições dos aliados (Leblanc e Register, 2004, p. 114-115 e 122-123). Entre os Murngin do Norte da Austrália, 28% das mortes de homens adultos deviam-se a baixas no campo de batalha (Warner apud Harris, 2004, p. 426).
Nas expedições contra grupos vizinhos os guerreiros são eleitos por um conselho de anciões, estas expedições têm como objectivo a vingança, conseguir mulheres, disputas por território ou lugares sagrados, conquista de recursos nomeadamente água.
Existe uma forma de homicídio ritual, em que são os próprios companheiros da vítima que a assassinam ou chamam um grupo vizinho para o fazer, funciona então como um sistema de justiça.
Segundo Leblanc e Register (2004, p. 121), os Aborígenes têm vários artefactos exclusivos para a violência interpessoal. Temos armas defensivas, muitos tipos de escudos que variam consoante a região, variam também na forma e função. As armas ofensivas de arremesso, um tipo de bumerangue mais pesado que termina em forma de garra, lanças e propulsores (woomera). Temos também uma arma ofensiva de mão, uma moca de madeira que por vezes tem um pico de pedra.
Os Aborígenes mostram ter algumas tácticas nos seus raids, existe mesmo o registo de um grupo simular uma fuga num confronto, levando os perseguidores para uma emboscada, onde esperavam mais elementos escondidos.
Segundo Tacon e Chippendale apud Otterbein (2004, p. 73), a Arte rupestre é uma fonte de informação para a guerra entre os Aborígenes, esta abarca um período de 6000 anos e permite reconhecer uma evolução na maneira de lutar deste povo.
A Arqueologia tem ajudado a demonstrar que os Aborígenes tinham territórios que defendiam, existiam mesmo terras de ninguém entre esses territórios que serviam também como zonas de trocas (Leblanc e Register, 2004, p. 122).

Bibliografia:
HARRIS, Marvin (2004) – Introducción a la Antropologia general. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 7.ª Edición.
KEELEY, Lawrence (1997) - War before civilization: The myth of the
peaceful savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LEBLANC, Steven A.; REGISTER, Katherine E. (2004) – Constant battles: the myth of the peaceful, noble savage. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

OTTERBEIN, Keith F. (2004) – How war began. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.

Roksandic - Violence in the Mesolithic

2011-01-08T02:44:00.001Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46494625/Roksandic-Violence-in-the-Mesolithic

Keeley - Archaeology of Conflict and War

2011-01-08T02:32:00.003Z

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46494214/Keeley-Archaeology-of-Conflict-and-War

Violência e Etnografia: os Kung.

2011-01-07T00:12:00.004Z

Os Kung! são caçadores-recolectores e habitam o deserto do Kalahari na África do Sul, são também chamados de San (Bushman), vivem em pequenos bandos espalhados por vários acampamentos. Possuem um conjunto de artefactos mínimo e não conheciam a metalurgia até ao contacto com os europeus.
Jonh e Lorna Marshal iniciaram os estudos sobre os Kung!, concluíram que estes têm que trabalhar apenas algumas horas por dia para sobreviver, no entanto estes estudos não tiveram em conta uma série de variáveis: não incluíram as viagens até aos recursos (como os poços de água), o processamento dos recursos no acampamento, os tempos de escassez, as influências das sociedades estatais (como por exemplo o uso de ferramentas de metal ou roupas de algodão), o controlo populacional também não foi tido em conta (num ambiente em que se a população cresce temos logo desequilíbrio) , a vida dos Kung! não é fácil nem pacífica (Leblanc e Register, 2004, p. 106-116).
Os Kung! tiveram taxas de homicídio muito superiores às dos países industrializados nos anos 20 a 60 (Keeley, 1997, p. 29).
Antes do estabelecimento da polícia do Bechuanaland \ Botswna, os Kung! efectuavam raids e feuds entre bandos (guerra interna) e atacavam os povos vizinhos (guerra externa) de pastores para roubar gado, os Khoikhoi e dos Tswana usavam mesmo os prefixos Ma (tribo inimiga) e San (bandido) para designar os Kung! (Keeley, 1997, p. 133-135).
As capacidades militares dos Bushmen (os que falam San) foram registadas por ingleses e holandeses, estes referem mesmo que os líderes dos Bantu (povos de agricultores) usavam os Kung! na sua guarda pessoal (Leblanc e Register, 2004, p. 106).
Além da tradição oral, as desavenças dos Kung! com os povos vizinhos ficaram inscritas também na Arte rupestre, aqui temos combates entre os arqueiros Kung! e os pastores vizinhos armados com escudos, lanças e mocas (Keeley, 1997, p. 133).
Os povos de pastores efectuavam raids aos acampamentos Kung!, como vingança pelo roubo de gado, que levaram ao extermínio total de inúmeros bandos. Os Kung! apesar da desvantagem numérica e terem pior armamento conseguiram um equilíbrio na guerra com os pastores, tinham temidas setas envenenadas, a vantagem táctica de conhecerem melhor o terreno e maior mobilidade (Keeley, 1996, p. 133).

Bibliografia:
KEELEY, Lawrence (1997) - War before civilization: The myth of the
peaceful savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LEBLANC, Steven A.; REGISTER, Katherine E. (2004) – Constant battles: the myth of the peaceful, noble savage. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Violência e Etnografia: os Inuit (Esquimós)

2011-01-06T23:58:00.005Z

Os Inuit habitam zonas parcas em recursos e extremamente hostis para a sobrevivência humana como a Gronelândia, Norte do Canadá e Alasca. Este povo de caçadores-recolectores nunca teve grande densidade populacional e os seus pequenos bandos encontram-se separados por grandes distâncias. Os Inuit não conheciam a Metalurgia antes do contacto com os europeus. Este cenário não é favorável à existência de formas de guerra e a sobrevivência parece ser a única preocupação.

Ao contrário do que se esperava os Inuit tinham formas de guerra, preocupações defensivas na escolha e construção dos habitats e armas defensivas (Leblanc e Register, 2004; Keeley, 1997, Harris 2004).

Os Inuit possuíam uma armadura feita de placas de osso cozidas umas às outras formando uma protecção que é usada debaixo da roupa, esta arma é altamente especializada e tem utilidade apenas na guerra (Leblanc e Register, 2004, p. 63 e 117).

Antes do aparecimento da Real Polícia Montada do Canadá, os Inuit tinham altas taxas de homicídio, várias vezes superiores às das sociedades estatais contemporâneas, o feud, os raids e batalhas campais eram práticas comuns (Keeley, 1997, p. 29).

Num acampamento Inuit todos os homens já tinham morto alguém, a maior parte das disputas eram por mulheres, apesar do costume deste povo de partilhar as mulheres (Keeley, 1997, p. 120).

A guerra interna era comum na forma de raids, várias histórias foram recolhidas entre os anciões dos Esquimós do Noroeste do Alasca (Burch, 1974 apud Leblanc e Register, 2004, p. 67), estes descrevem o raid (massacre) ao pormenor.

A guerra externa existiu, temos o registo dos Cree do Este do Quebec que matavam todos os Inuit que encontravam e ficavam apenas com as crianças (Keeley, 1997, p. 67).

Em acampamentos Inuit escavados pelos arqueólogos, foram encontrados artefactos preciosos pertencentes a culturas nórdicas vizinhas, nos acampamentos dos vizinhos nórdicos existem poucos artefactos Inuit, é pouco provável que estes tenham sido adquiridos pelo comércio, existe a probabilidade de terem sido saqueados pelos Inuit aos vizinhos (Keeley, 1997, p. 126).

A frequência da guerra era anual, os grupos de guerreiros podiam atingir os cinquenta indivíduos, existindo mesmo um termo que tem como tradução o grande guerreiro (Burch, 1974 apud Leblanc e Register, 2004, p. 118).

Os habitats Inuit eram escolhidos tendo em conta a defesa, em locais com barreiras naturais, em pequena línguas de terra, existiam mesmo túneis nas casas que permitiam a fuga em caso de necessidade, os cães eram usados como alarme (Burch, 1974 apud Leblanc e Register, 2004, p. 118).

Os Inuit têm uma competição de canções que serve para resolver disputas pessoais e atenuar a tensão entre grupos vizinhos, este concurso no entanto pode acabar em batalha campal (Harris, 2004, p. 416).

Arqueólogos encontraram valas comuns no sítio Inuit de Sautanaktuk, nestas as ossadas apresentavam sinais de morte violenta e desmembramento (Melbye e Fairgreive, 1994 apud Leblanc e Register, 2004, p. 118).

Bibliografia:

HARRIS, Marvin (2004) – Introducción a la Antropologia general. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 7.ª Edición.
KEELEY, Lawrence (1997) - War before civilization: The myth of the
peaceful savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LEBLANC, Steven A.; REGISTER, Katherine E. (2004) – Constant battles: the myth of the peaceful, noble savage. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

El enigma de las 19 novias del Dolmen de Montelirio

2011-01-01T16:22:00.000Z

por Santiago Belausteguigoitia
em http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/enigma/novias/Dolmen/Montelirio/elpepucul/20100318elpepicul_4/Tes
Los arqueólogos hallan indicios de un macabro ritual de enterramiento en un yacimiento prehistórico sevillano

Las mujeres de un tipo poderoso tenían que morir con él. Y corrían su misma suerte tras ser envenenadas. Muy probablemente lo hacían por voluntad propia; por acompañar al gran personaje al más allá. También se dejaban matar algunos hombres si deseaban servir a su señor en los mundos de ultratumba. Suena a leyenda, pero es la conclusión a la que ha llegado un grupo de arqueólogos, que apunta a que estos rituales funerarios prehistóricos se producían muy cerca de la actual ciudad de Sevilla hace más de 4.500 años.

Han hallado restos del enterramiento de un grupo de 19 mujeres, de entre 20 y 30 años, junto a alguien lleno de poder, de unos 40 años, en las excavaciones del Dolmen de Montelirio, situado en el municipio de Castilleja de Guzmán. Las excavaciones, promovidas por la Junta de Andalucía, empezaron el pasado julio y terminaron a principios de este año. Especialistas de las universidades de Sevilla y Huelva analizan ahora los huesos, pigmentos, flora y otros materiales hallados en la tumba.

El Dolmen de Montelirio se sitúa en el punto más alto de una zona de la comarca del Aljarafe. Una tumba que domina el río Guadalquivir. Se enclava, pues, en un lugar lleno de simbolismo y fuerza espiritual. La superficie de la zona de excavación es de algo más de 200 metros cuadrados. La cámara grande del enterramiento tiene un diámetro máximo de 4,75 metros (en ella están enterradas las 19 mujeres). La cámara pequeña (lugar donde descansó para siempre el jefe, reyezuelo u hombre principal) cuenta con un diámetro máximo de 2,70 metros. El corredor que da acceso a las cámaras tiene 32 metros de largo (allí fueron enterrados tres guardianes).

El arqueólogo y director de la excavación, Javier Verdugo, no puede ocultar el asombro que le ha producido este hallazgo. "Entre los años 2900 y 2500 antes de Cristo había una sociedad que habitaba lo que ahora es el Aljarafe. Esta sociedad llevó a cabo la construcción de un monumento funerario y una ceremonia de enterramiento de un señor muy importante y su séquito. Este hombre fue enterrado junto a su séquito, sus esposas, sus concubinas o como queramos llamar a este grupo", explica Verdugo, que es jefe del Servicio de Planificación y Evaluación de Bienes Culturales de la Consejería de Cultura de la Junta.

"Cuando se produjo la muerte del señor, éste fue enterrado con su ritual. Pero aquí, en Sevilla, lo que es sorprendente es que aparece algo que nunca habíamos visto en una cultura megalítica occidental, cuyos vestigios se extienden por Irlanda, Inglaterra, la península Ibérica y el norte de África. Y es que aparecen dos cámaras. Una de ellas con un señor principal. Y otra tumba en la que hay 19 mujeres. No teníamos pruebas de este ritual en la cultura megalítica occidental", comenta Verdugo, que ve "paralelismos" entre el dolmen y la tumba de Ur (Mesopotamia).

Uno de los grandes enigmas es cómo murieron las 19 mujeres y los tres guardianes. "Los indicios apuntan a que no los mataron de forma violenta. Lo más normal es que los dejaran dormidos en el sueño eterno con una droga", afirma Verdugo. Y, de esta forma, 19 mujeres y tres hombres murieron voluntariamente (o los mataron) en honor de alguien lleno de poder.

Grisly Scene Gives Clues to Neandertal Family Structure

2011-01-01T16:19:00.002Z

by Ann Gibbons
in http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/12/grisly-scene-gives-clues-to-nean.html?ref=ra

In a cave in Northern Spain, researchers have discovered clues to the identity of the victims of a mass murder committed 49,000 years ago. The butchered bones of 12 men, women, and children protruding from the floor may be the remains of an extended Neandertal family that were killed and eaten by their fellow Neandertals. Now, DNA analysis of the bones is providing rare clues into the family structure of these close cousins of modern humans.

Researchers have long wondered why Neandertals went extinct. Some think they lacked the genetic diversity to survive deadly viruses or other challenges. Others have proposed that their social groups were smaller and less sophisticated than those of modern humans; if so, their networks for trading food, tools, or information critical for survival would not have been as reliable. It's been hard to test such hypotheses with fossils, but new methods to study ancient DNA are starting to produce clues.

The latest insight comes from a "tunnel of bones" in a cave in El Sidrón, Spain. Here, a team of Spanish researchers has extracted and analyzed mitochondrial DNA and fragments of Y chromosomes from the remarkably well-preserved bones of 12 Neandertals. The bones were cut by stone tools and smashed open for marrow, suggesting that the Neandertals were cannibalized before the ground collapsed beneath their remains and buried them soon after their death, 49,000 years ago. The researchers found that the individuals in the group were very similar genetically, confirming earlier reports that Neandertals had less genetic diversity than modern humans.

The team also found that three adult males, two teenage males, and one child carried the same lineage of mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from one's mother, suggesting a close relationship on the maternal side. By contrast, the three adult females carried mtDNA from three different lineages, showing that they were less closely related to each other maternally, says lead author Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona, Spain. The other Neandertals in the group included a teenager, a child, and an infant, all of whom carried a type of mtDNA found in one adult female, suggesting that they were her offspring or close relatives.

"This looks like a family," says Lalueza-Fox, whose team reports its findings, online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's similar to what you would find if you went to a wedding and sampled the people in the wedding party. If you sample 12 people in the street, you would never find so many people with the same mtDNA."

He thinks that the similarity in mtDNA among the males suggests that they lived in small groups of closely related males and that females moved in from other clans, a social system called patrilocality. That's similar to modern humans: about 70% of living hunter-gatherers live in patrilocal groups. "The world of the Neandertal was a very small world," says Lalueza-Fox. "They were in these small family groups. When they met each other, things could go from exchanging females to killing each other—even eating each other." In the case of this particular group, he says, it appears that they were the meal for other very hungry Neandertals since they cracked open every tiny bit of bone for marrow and smashed the skulls for brain parts.

Paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says the evidence that the group was patrilocal and that females moved more than males is "rather convincing." But molecular anthropologist Linda Vigilant, also of Max Planck, cautions that a study of a single group of 12 Neandertals isn't enough to generalize about the social structure of the species. Researchers need to know how often individuals who are not close relatives share mtDNA, as well as to check the findings with nuclear DNA to be sure of their conclusions, she says.

The Origins of War - Violence in Prehistory - Guilaine - Zammit

2010-10-30T11:46:00.002+01:00

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27009349/The-Origins-of-War-Violence-in-Prehistory-Guilaine-amp-Zammit

O Papel da Bioantropologia na Recolha de Evidências de Violência Interpessoal, Ritual e Guerra Primitiva nos Restos Osteológicos Humanos

2010-10-30T01:38:00.004+01:00

Luis Lobato de Faria - Eunice Gomes
http://www.scribd.com/doc/40454839/O-Papel-da-Bioantropologia-na-Recolha-de-Evidencias-de-Violencia-Interpessoal-Ritual-e-Guerra-Primitiva-nos-Restos-Osteologicos-Humanos

Journal of Conflict Archaeology

2010-10-29T13:39:00.000+01:00

John Carman to MILITARCH

As part of the recent move to Maney publishing, the Journal of Conflict Archaeology is commencing some new features:

1. Conference reviews - reviews are welcome of conflict-themed conferences, or sessions at a conference. Conference reviews should take a similar format to that of a book review in the journal.
2. Theses in progress - if you are a postgraduate, register your thesis with the Journal.
3. Recently completed theses - if you completed your thesis or dissertation recently and wish to share your results with the conflict community, notify us.

Material for the above sections and requests for further information can be submitted to Jonathan Trigg at jrtrigg@liv.ac.uk

Furthermore, next year the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology will be hosting a postgraduate conference highlighting ongoing research in the field of Conflict Archaeology. Further details can be obtained by contacting conflictpg@gmail.co.uk

Archaeology and Warfare

2010-10-14T19:39:00.001+01:00

Friday, October 15 and Saturday, October 16, 2010
Bagnani Hall, Traill College, Trent University

Bagnani Hall
Friday, October 15th, 6:15 p.m.
6:30 p.m. Welcome, Opening Remarks: Professor Thomas H.B. Symons, Founding President and Vanier Professor Emeritus, Trent University
Chair, the Ontario Heritage Trust.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. John Haldon - Computers and Medieval Logistics: the Manzikert Campaign (1071)
7:30 p.m. Reception, The Trend, Wallis Hall

Bagnani Hall
Saturday, October 16th
9:30 a.m. Coffee, The Trend, Wallis Hall
10:00 a.m. Welcome, Opening Remarks: Steven Franklin, President of Trent University

Session A New World
10:15 a.m. John Topic (Anthropology) - Terms of Engagement in Andean Warfare
10:45 a.m. Paul Healy (Anthropology) - The Ancient Maya: Evidence for Pre-Columbian Warfare
11:15 a.m. Susan Jamieson (Anthropology) - Moral Commitment and Northern Iroquoian Warfare

12:00 p.m. Lunch at The Trend, Wallis Hall

Session B Old World
2:00 p.m. Hugh Elton (Ancient History & Classics) - The Archaeology of Late Roman Warfare
2:30 p.m. Fiona Harris-Stoertz (History) - Learning to be a Warrior in the High Middle Ages
3:00 p.m. Amber Johnson ( History MA Graduate Student) - Medieval Castles
3:30 p.m. Tim Stapleton ( History) - Technology and Warfare in Sub-Saharan Africa

4:00 p.m. Bar Open in The Trend

Bagnani Hall
5:00 p.m. Keynote Speaker: Dr. Phil Sabin - Novel Techniques in the Reconstruction of Ancient Warfare
7:30 p.m. Banquet (By invitation only) The Trend, Wallis Hall
9:00 p.m. Closing Remarks Hugh Elton

Archaeology and Warfare Keynote Speakers

John Haldon, Princeton (jhaldon@princeton.edu)
John Haldon is professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies. His research centers on the socioeconomic, institutional, political and cultural history of the early and middle Byzantine empire from the seventh to the eleventh centuries. He also works on political systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times and has explored how resources were produced, distributed and consumed, especially in warfare, during the late ancient and medieval periods. Professor Haldon is the author and co-author of more than two dozen books. His most recent books are The social history of Byzantium (Blackwell, Oxford 2008) and Byzantium in the iconoclast period: a history, with L. Brubaker (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010). Professor Haldon is the director of the Euchaita/Avkat Project - an archaeological and historical survey in north central Turkey. As well as traditional methods of field survey and historical research, this long-term project employs cutting edge survey, mapping and digital modelling techniques to enrich our understanding of the society, economy, land use, demography, paleo-environmental history and resources of the late Roman, Byzantine and Seljuk/Ottoman periods. He is also co-director of the international Medieval Logistics Project - an international project deploying Geographical Information Systems and sophisticated modelling software to analyze the logistics of East Roman, early medieval Western European and Early Islamic warfare and structures of resource allocation. (http://www.medievallogistics.bham.ac.uk/)

Phil Sabin, King’s College London (philip.sabin@kcl.ac.uk)Phil Sabin studied History and Natural Sciences at Queens’ College Cambridge, and did his PhD in the War Studies Department. He held research fellowships at Harvard University and the International Institute for
Strategic Studies. He played a leading role in establishing King’s academic partnerships with the Joint Services Command and Staff College and the Royal College of Defence Studies, as well as chairing the University of London’s Military Education Committee. He is a long-standing member of the Chief of the Air Staff’s Air Power Workshop, appears regularly on radio and television, and has lectured throughout Europe and the USA as well as further afield in countries ranging from Japan and Korea to Chile. His past research interests have included British defence planning and public opinion about defence, but his main focus now is on the analytical modelling of warfare as a dynamic strategic and tactical contest. He has used this analytical approach to study two areas in particular - the air power contests of the 20th century, and the great land battles of the ancient world. His highly innovative use of simulation and gaming techniques for the modelling of past conflicts extends also to his teaching, especially in his MA option which is detailed further on the Conflict Simulation page.
(http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/ws/people/academic/professors/sabin/conflictsimulation.html)

JOHN KEEGAN - A HISTORY OF WARFARE

2010-10-06T02:06:00.002+01:00

in Odyssey's

"The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife, or struggles for independence."

CONTENTS

00 - Introduction
01 - War In Human History
02 - Stone
03 - Flesh
04 - Iron
05 - Fire
06 - Conclusion
EX - Beyond The Book

INTRODUCTION

Soldiers are not as other men - that is the lesson that I have learned from a life cast among warriors.

War is wholly unlike diplomacy or politics because it must be fought by men whose values and skills are not those of politicians or diplomats. They are those of a world apart, a very ancient world, which exists in parallel with the everyday world but does not belong to it. Both worlds change over time, and the warrior world adapts in step to the civilian. It follows it, however, at a distance. The distance can never be closed, for the culture of the warrior can never be that of civilisation itself. All civilisations owe their origins to the warrior; their cultures nurture the warriors who defend them.

Ultimately, however, there is only one warrior culture. Its evolution and transformation over time and place, from man's beginnings to his arrival in the contemporary world, is the history of warfare.

The British army is tribal to an extreme degree; some of its regiments have histories which go back to the 17th century, when modern armies were only beginning to take shape from the feudal hosts of warriors whose forebears had entered western Europe during the invasion that overthrew the Roman empire.

#1 WAR IN HUMAN HISTORY

War is not the continuation of policy by other means. The world would be a simpler place to understand if this dictum of Clausewitz's were true.

War antedates the state, diplomacy and strategy by many millennia. Warfare is almost as old as man himself, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational purpose, where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount, where instinct is king. 'Man is a political animal', said Aristotle. Clausewitz, a child of Aristotle, went no further than to say that a political animal is a warmaking animal. Neither dared confront the thought that man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill.

Shaka was a perfect Clausewitzian. He designed a military system to serve and protect a particular way of life, which it did with dramatic efficiency. Zulu culture, by making warrior values paramount, by linking those values to the preservation of a cattle-herding economy, and by locking up the energies and imagination of the most dynamic members of the community in sterile military bondage until well past maturity, denied itself the chance to evolve and adapt to the world around it.

Soldiers might, however, be slaves under the law in past times, however contradictory their status seems to us today. Slavery in the modern world implies the absolute deprivation of the individual's liberty, while possession of weaponry and mastery of their use are means to an individual's liberation. We do no perceive how a man may be armed and at the same time bereft of his freedom.

Culture is as powerful a force as politics in the choice of military means, and often more likely to prevail than either political or military logic.

Once Christendom was divided by the Reformation at the precise moment when technology made cannon mobile and personal firearms reliable, inhibitions against Christian shooting at Christian were dissolved. No such factors impinged on Japan. Domestically, the Japanese, though divided by class and faction, formed a single cultural unit. Gunpowder was therefore not essential to national security, nor was it sought as a means to victory by factions opposed to each other ideologically.
In ensuring that warriors had a monopoly on swords, the Tokugawa were guaranteeing the samurai at the pinnacle of Japanese society.

War may be, among many other things, the perpetuation of culture by its own means.

Poor states which fall into war with rich states are overwhelmed and humiliated. Poor states which fight each other, or are drawn into civil war, destroy their own well-being, and even the structures which make recovery from the experience of war possible.

"The institution of human slavery was created at the dawn of the human race, and many once felt it to be an elementary fact of existence. Yet between 1788 and 1888 the institution was substansially abolished... and this demise seems, so far, to be permanent. Similarly the venerable institutions of human sacrifice, infanticide and duelling seems also to have died out or been eliminated. It could be argued that war, at least war in the developed world, is following a similar trajectory."
- John Mueller

INTERLUDE #1 - LIMITATIONS ON WARMAKING

To look forward to a future in which recourse to war has been brought under rational limitation should not lead us into the false view that there have been no limitations on warmaking in the past.

The most important limitations on warmaking, however, have always lain beyond the will or power of man to command. They belong in the realm of what the Soviet General Staff used to call 'permanently operating factors' - weather, climate, seasons, terrain, vegetation etc.

70% of the globe's surface is covered by water, most of it open sea, and most large sea battles have taken place in all but a fraction of that area. What is remarkable is how close and often the sea battle cluster in the same corner of the map. Camperdown, Copenhagen and Jutland were all fought within 300 miles of each other; Salamis, Lepanto and Navarino, the first and last separated by 2300 years in time, took place at points scarecly more than a hundred miles apart. The Armada battle, Quiberon Bay and Trafalgar were fought within a hundred miles of Longitude Five West, between Latitudes Fifty and Thirty North, a comparitively tiny patch of the globe.

In all, about 70% of the world's 60,000,000 square miles of dry land is either too high, too cold or too waterless for the conduct of military operations.

Battles not only tend to recur on sites close to each other - the 'cockpit of Europe' in northern Belgium is one such area, the 'Quadrilateral' between Mantua, Verona, Peschiera and Legnano in northern Italy another - but have frequently been fought on exactly the same spot over a very long period of history. The most arresting example is Adrianople, now Edirne, in European Turkey, where 15 battles or sieges have been recorded, the first in AD 323 and the last in July 1913.

War is always limited, not because man chooses to make it so, but because nature determines that it shall be.

#2 STONE

Why do men fight? Did men wage war in the Stone Age, or was early man unaggressive? Men - but also women - fight, with ink and paper, very fiercely over these questions.

Observation demonstrates that animals kill members of other species but also fight among themselves; the males of some species fight to the death. It is necessary to deny all genetic connection between man and the rest of the animal world - a position now held only by strict Creationists - in order to discount the possibility that aggression may be part of man's genetic inheritance.

British anthropologists, leaders in ethnography because of the opportunities for fieldwork that the enormous extent of their empire offered, accepted the importance of the thrust of Cultural Determinism but recoiled from its intellectual imprecision; they were dissatisfied above all by the refusal of the Cultural Determinists to admit that human nature and man's material needs might be as important as freedom of choice in determining within which culture he lived.

The Aztecs who fought were warriors, not soldiers; that is to say, they expected and were expected to fight because of the place they held in the social order, not because of obligation or for pay.

We date 'history' from the moment when man began to write or, more precisely, from when he lefy traces of what we can recognise as writing. Such traces, left by the people of Sumer, in what is now Iraq, have been dated to about 3100 BC.

"He still retained all the faculties that civilization has blunted - rapid action and highly trained senses of sight and hearing, physical toughness in an extreme degree, a detailed, precise knowledge of the qualities and habits of game, and great skill in using with the greatest effect the rudimentary weapons available."
- Brueil & Lautier, "The Men of the Old Stone Age"

These, of course, are the qualities of the warrior across the ages, which modern military training schools of Special Forces seek to re-implant in their pupils at the cost of much time and money. Modern soldiers learn to hunt to live.

At the beginning of the New Stone Age, some 10000 years ago, there occured 'a revolution in weapons technology... four staggeringly powerful new weapons make their appearance... the bow, the sling, the dagger and the mace'.
Even in its simple form the bow transformed the relationship of man with the animal world. He no longer had to close to arm's length to dispatch his prey, pitting at the last moment flesh against flesh, life against life. In that departure ethologists like Lorenz and Audrey perceive the opening of a new moral dimension in man's relations with the rest of creation but also with his own kind.

Neither 'raiding' nor 'routing' is a true act of warfare. Each subsists below the military horizon and is better thought of as multiple murder than as an episode in a campaign.
The hunting men of the New Stone Age were no more than primitive warriors, members of groups without a distinguishable military class and without a 'modern' concept of warfare. Fight they no doubt did, ambush, raid and perhaps 'rout' as well; but organise themselves for conquest and occupation they almost certainly did not.

In a still largely empty world, homo sapiens was devoting his energies to colonisation rather than conflict.

Hunters and gatherers may have 'territory'; pastoralists have grazing and watering-places; agriculturalists have land. Once man invests expectations of a regular return on his seasonal efforts in a particular place - lambing, herding, planting, reaping - he rapidly develops the sense of rights and ownership. Toward those who trespass on the places where he invests his time and effort he must equally rapidly develop the hostility of the user and occupier for the usurper and interloper. Fixed expectations make for fixed responses. Pastoralism, and agriculture even more so, make for war.

After the excavation of Jericho it was clear that warfare at least - for what could be the point of walls, towers and moats without a purposeful, well-organised and strongly armed enemy? - had begun to trouble man long before the first great empires arose.

INTERLUDE #2 - FORTIFICATION

A stronghold is a place not merely of safety from attack but also of active defence, a centre where the defenders are secure from surprise or superior numbers, and also a base from which they may sally forth to hold predators at bay and to impose military control over the area in which their interests lie. A refuge is a place of short-term safety, of value only against an enemy who lacks the means to linger in the vicinity or who operates a crude strategy of raiding against soft targets.

One of the fascinations of Jericho is that its builders, in the dawn of fortification practice, appear to have perceived all the dangers by which it might be threatened and to have furnished it with protection against each.
To these three defensive features - walls, moat, tower - fortification engineers were to add little in the 8000 years between the building of Jericho and the introduction of gunpowder.

#3 FLESH

The modern thoroughbred is a force to be reckoned with, and the great thoroughbred may end his days more famous than most statesmen of his lifetime. The greatest of thoroughbreds may acquire regal and dynastic status.
A great horse, in a sense, becomes a king. It is not surprising that kings were made by the first great horses.

The horse that homo sapiens first knew was a poor thing; so poor indeed, that man hunted it for food. Equus, the ancestor of equus caballus, our modern horse, was actually hunted out of existence in the Americas by the Amerindians who crossed into the New World at the end of the last ice age.
Stone Age man choose to eat the horse rather than drive or ride it because the animal they knew was almost certainly not strong enough in the back to bear an adult male human, while men themselves had not yet designed a vehcile to which a draught animal might be harnessed.

Why should charioteers, or the pastoralists from whom they directly or indirectly descended, have been more warlike than their hunting ancestors or agricultural neighbours? The answers requires a consideration of factors not for the squeamish, all having to do with how man has killed - or not killed - fellow mammals.
The farmer lacks skill both as a butcher of slaughtered meat and as a killer of young, nimble animals likely to evade his lethal intentions. Primitive hunters, though no doubt excellent butchers, were probably no more skilled in the techniques of the kill; their preoccupations were rather with tracking and cornering their prey rather than with the precise method by which they struck the fatal blow.
Pastoralists, on the other hand, learn how to kill, and to select for killing, as a matter of course... it was flock management, as much as slaughter and butchery, which made the pastoralists so cold-bloodedly adept at confronting the sedentary agriculturalists of the civilised lands in battle.

They knew how to break a flock up into manageable sections, how to cut off a line of retreat by circling to a flank, how to compress scattered beasts into a compact mass, how to isolate flock-leaders, how to dominate superior numbers by threat and menace, how to kill the chosen few while leaving the mass inert and subject to control. All pastoralists' methods of battle described at later dates in history disclose just such a pattern.

Quite as much as the charioteers' equipment and their familiarity with animals, their ability to move and readiness to do so fitted them for aggressive warmaking. All war requires movement, but for settled peoples even short-range moves impose difficulties. The farmer is harder than the artisan - but even he is soft compared to the nomad. The nomad is constantly on the move, eats and drinks when he can, braves all weathers, is grateful for small mercies. Everything he possesses can be bundled up at a moment's notice and his food moves with him, as grass and water call his flocks, whenever he shifts camp.

The ancient nomads of the arid steppe, where tribe had to compete against tribe for what scraps of grazing there were, must have been among the toughest people in creation.

As the apogee of its effectiveness, the chariot was overtaken in importance by a single element in the chariot system, the horse itself... by the 8th century BC selective breeding had produced a horse that Assyrians could ride from the forward seat, with their weight over the shoulders, and a sufficient mutuality had developed between steed and rider for the man to use a bow while in motion.

The fall of the Assyrian empire was due to the irruption, at the end of the 7th century BC, of a horse people known to us as the Scythians.

What is the steppe? To those who live in settled and temperate lands, the steppe means the enormous expanse of empty space that fills the map between the Arctic Ocean to the north and the Himalayas to the south, between the irrigated river valleys of China to the east and the barriers of the Pripet marshes and Carpathian mountains to the west. On the civilised man's mental map, it appears as not only featureless but climatically undifferentiated, a zone of sparse and uniform vegetation, without mountains, rivers, lakes or forests, a sort of waterless ocean without known voyagers.

"Man's greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding and use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and support"
- Genghis Khan

The horse and human ruthlessness together thus transformed war, making if for the first time 'a thing in itself'. We can thenceforth speak of 'militarism', as aspect of societies in which there mere ability to make war, readily and profitably, becomes a reason for doing so. Yet militarism is a concept that cannot be applied to any horse people, since it presumes the existence of an army as an institution dominant over but separate from other social institutions.

Mongol sexuality was strict: adultery was punished by the death of both parties, and the taking of captive women was also disfavoured. This code eliminated quarrels over wife stealing so characteristic, and disruptive, of primitive societies. The Mongols, and Genghis Khan in particular, were nevertheless quick to take offence and brutal in taking revenge on outsiders; indeed, Genghis's life is largely a history of revenge-taking, and Mongol warfare mayb be viewed as an extension of the primitive urge to vengeance on an enormous scale.

The tools of warmaking already at Genghis's disposal - the horse warrior's mobility, the long range lethality of the composite bow, the do or die ethos of the ghazi, the social elan of exclusive tribalism - were formidable enough. When to those ingredients was added a pitiless paganism, untroubled by any of the monotheistic or Buddhist concerns with mercy to strangers or with personal perfection, it is not surprising that Genghis and the Mongols acquired a reputation for invincibility. Their minds as well as their weapons were agents of terror, and the terror they spread remains a memory to this day.

Arabs stood out among military peoples because they demonstrated an ability to transform not merely themselves but warfare itself. There had been military revolutions before, notably those brought by the chariot and cavalry horse. The Greeks had evolved the technique of the pitched battle, fought to the death on foot. The Arabs transfused warfare with a new force altogether, the force of an idea.
Their new religion, Islam, was a creed of conflict, that taught the necessity of submission to its revealed teachings and the right of its believers to take arms against those that opposed them. It was Islam that inspired the Arab conquests.
Though the Greeks took pride in their freedom and despised the subjects of Xerxes and Darius for their lack of it, their hatred of Persia was at root nationalistic.

INTERLUDE #3 - ARMIES

Bodyguards, regulars, feudatories, mercenaries, military colonists, conscripts, self militias, remnants of warrior tribes from the steppe - can we impose any order on this medley? What theories explain the variety?

Military sociologists take as their premise the proposition that any system of military organisation expresses the social order from which it springs - and that this holds true even when the bulk of the population is held in thrall by an alien military hierarchy, of the sort that dominated Norman England or Manchu China, for example.

The most elaborate of these theories is the work of Anglo-Polish sociologist Stanislav Andreski who is the best known for having suggested the existence of a Military Participation Ratio (MPR) by which, when other factors are taken into account, the degree to which a society is militarised may be measured.

Unfortunately, Professor Andreski's work is not 'accessible' - now, alas, an adjective of contempt in the academic world, where 'accessibility' is confused with shallowness - to the general reader, since he invented an elaborate vocabulary of new-coined words to define his terms.
Though he clearly prefers to live in a society with a low MPR, where the armed forces are subject to the rule of law, he is refreshingly free of the delusion that military dictatorships can be abolished by writing articles in journals of political science.

Our survey of military history so far reveals six main forms that military organisation may take: warrior, mercenary, slave, regular, conscript, and militia. The warrior group includes such groups as the samurai and the Western knightly class. Mercenaries are those who sell military service for money, grants of land, admission to citizenship or preferential treatment. Regulars are mercenaries who already enjoy citizenship or its equivalent but choose military service as a means of subsistence; in affluent states, regular service may take on some of the attributes of a profession. The militia principle lays the duty of performing military service on all fit male citizens; failure or refusal to do duty usually entails loss of citizenship. Conscription is a tax levied upon a male resident's time at a certain age of life, though to citizens payment of such a tax is also usually represented as a civic duty; selective conscription, especially if for long periods of service to an unrepresentative government - 20 years was the term in Russia before the emancipation of the serfs - is difficult to differentiate from the slave system.

It is a central element of the contract between ruler and regulars that they are fed, housed and paid in peace as well as war. Rich states with an efficient taxing power may succeed in doing so for long periods; if militarily over-ambitious they may nevertheless overtax their inhabitants, while it is frequently the case that the attempt to reduce the size of an expanded regular force at the end of a long war drives it to mutiny, as the Irish Free State found in 1923.

Conscription is for rich states which offer rights - or at least the appearance of rights - to all. The first state to meet those conditions in full was the First French Republic. In France the benefit was citizenship to all who served.

In the long run, the establishment of universal conscription in the advanced states of continental Europe was matched by the extension of the vote, though for parliaments generally less responsible than those of Anglo-Saxon countries, and by processes that had no direct and visible connection.

#4 IRON

Stone, bronze and the horse - the principal means through which war was waged in the era when states where being established and when they were being assaulted by warrior peoples living beyond the settled zone - were by nature limied limited resources, though in different ways.

Given the extreme brevity of time in which attack could be made effective in the Greek farming world - and at least 80% of those we call 'citizens' of the city states were countrymen and not town dwellers - and given also that the attackers left their own fields vulnerable to spoilation when they marched off campaigning, the highest premium was placed, or placed itself, in settling matters as quickly and decisively as possible.
The 'idea' of military decision thus planted itself in the Greek mind beside those other ideas of decision - by majority in politics, of outcome by the inevitability of plot in drama, of conclusion by logic in intellectual work - which we associate with our Greek heritage.

The values of the Roman professional soldier were those by which his fellows in the modern age continue to live: pride in a distinctive (and distinctively masculine) way of life, concern to enjoy the good opinion of comrades, satisfaction in the largely symbolic tokens of professional success, hope of promotion, expectation of a comfortable and honourable retirement.

INTERLUDE #4 - LOGISTICS AND SUPPLY

Stone, bronze and iron furnished the instruments of combat, which is the central act of warfare, from its beginnings until its nature was transformed by gunpowder a mere 20 generations ago. Combat may only be joined, however, if the combatants find the means to meet on a battlefield, and to supply them on their way to such meetings presented difficulties second only to those of achieving success in combat itself. The horse peoples alone escaped such difficulties.

Experience, borne out by modern field trials, has established that the soldier's load cannot on average be made to exceed 70 pounds' weight - of which clothes, equipment, arms and necessaries will form at least half; as a daily intake of solid food by a man doing heavy work weighs at least 3 pounds, it follows that a marching soldier cannot carry supplies for more than 10 or 11 days. These figures have not varied over centuries.

Moving at 20 miles a day, the very best speed to be achieved with regularity by men on foot - it was that of the legions of on the Roman internal lines of communication and of Von Kluck's army on the advance from Mons to the Marne in the French campaign of 1914.

The atomic bomb was the culmination of a process of technological development begun 500 years earlier, which sought to transfer demand for the energy needed for military purposes from the muscles of man and beast to a stored source. The search had begun with the discovery of gunpowder.

#5 FIRE

The modern frontiers of Europe are, indeed, largely the outcome of fortress-building, by which existing linguistic and the new, post-Reformation religious boundaries were teased and chivvied into neatness.

Even when a state possessed the means to identify its fit young males amd their place of work or residence, as by 1914 all European states did, the best police force could not have sufficed to bring an entire age group to barracks if they resisted and if society at large supported their resistance.
By 1914 an entirely unprecedented cultural mood was dominating European society, one which accepted the riht of the state to demand and the duty of every fit, male individual to render military service, which perceived in the performance of military service a necessary training in civic virtue and which rejected the age-old social distinction between the warrior - a man set apart whether by rank or no rank at all - and the rest, as an outdated prejudice.

The United States, least militarised of Western societies at mid-century, was the first to discover the danger of that movement. Plunged into civil war in 1861, neither North or South expected a long conflict.
Eventually the South was to assemble nearly 1,000,000 men under arms, the North 2,000,000 out of a pre-war population of 32,000,000; a military participation ratio of 10%, which these figures represented, is, as we have seen, about the maximum a society can tolerate while continuing to function at normal levels of efficiency.

By April 1865, when the North's strangulation of the South at last achieved its result, 620,000 Americans had died as a direct result of the war, more than the total number killed in the two world wars, Korea and Vietnam.
The emotional aftermath of the war innoculated several generations of Americans against the false romanticism of uniforms and training camps.

Perhaps the most powerful sentiment that supplied popular consent to militarisation was the thrill of the process itself. The proclamation of egalitarianism had provided the French Revolution was one of its headiest appeals. That appeal had been rooted in the identification of equality with arms bearing and had launched into the European consciousness the idea that to serve as a soldier made a man more not less of a citizen.

"Paradoxial as it may sound, escape from freedom was often a real liberation, especially among young men living under rapidly changing conditions, who had not yet been able to assume fully adult roles."
- William McNeill

This judgement implies that there was a measure of infantilism in Europe's enthusiastic espousal of militaristic tendencies, and that may well be: 'infantlism' and 'infantry' have the same root. If so, it was the infantilism of a thinking child. Clever men and responsible governments found wordy arguments to justify themselves.

'Every man a soldier', the philosophy which underlay conscription politics, rested on a fundamental misunderstanding of the potentiality of human nature.
Warrior peoples might have made every man a soldier, but they had taken care to fight only on terms that avoided direct or sustained conflict with the enemy, admitted disengagement and retreat as permissible and reasonable responses to determined resistance; made no fetish of hopeless courage, and took careful measure of the utility of violence. The Greeks had shown a bolder front; but, while inventing the institution of face-to-face battle, they had not pushed their ethic of warmaking to the point of demanding Clausewitzian overthrow as its necessary outcome. Their European descendants had limited the objects of their warmaking also, the Romans to that of consolidating but then chiefly assuring a defensible frontier for the civilisation - quintessentially the Chinese military philosophy also - while the Romans' successors had fought, incessantly though they did, chiefly for enjoyment of rights within quite closely circumscribed territories. In a different form, battles for rights had also characterised the wars of states in the gunpowder age.

In none of these contests, moreover, had the combatants yielded to the delusion that the whole male population must be mobilized to presecute the quarrel. No pre-1789 society considered soldiering a calling for any but the few. War was rightly seen as too brutal a business for any except those bred to it by social position or driven to enlist by lack of any social position whatsoever.
The exclusion of the industrious, the skilled, the learned and the modestly propertied from military service reflected a sensible appreciation of how war's nature bore on human nature.

#6 CONCLUSION

The whirlwind victory of the forces sent to punish Iraq and deprive it of its illegal sequestration of territory, achieved without the infliction of civilian casualties and authorised throughout by United Nations resolution, was the first genuine triumph of just war morality since Grotious had defined its guiding principles at the height of the Thirty Years' War in the 17th century.

Man has a potentiality for violence; that cannot be denied, even if we concede that it is a minority, rather than a majority, in any society that is likely to carry potentiality into effect. Man has learned, over the course of 4000 years in which organised armies have existed, to identify in that minority those who will make soldiers, to train and equip them, to supply the funds they need for their support, and to endorse and applaud their behaviour at those times when the majority feel at threat. We must go further: a world without armies - disciplined, obedient and law abiding armies - would be uninhabitable. Armies of that quality are an instrument but also a mark of civilisationm and without their existence manking would have to reconcile itself either to live at primitive level, below the 'military horizon', or to a lawless chaos of masses warring, Hobbesian fashion, 'all against all'.

The civilised societies in which we best like to live are governed by law, which means that they are policed, and policing is a form of coercion. In our acceptance of policing we silently concede that man has a darker side to his nature which must be constrained by fear or superior force. Punishment is the sanction against those who will not be constrained and superior force is its instrument.

The Western way of warfare was to carry all before it in the years after Clausewitz died. During the 19th century all Asian peoples, with the exceptions of the Chinese, Japanese and Thais and the subjects of the Ottoman Turks, came under Western rule; the primitives of the Americas, Africa and the Pacific stood no chance at all. A few people of remote and inaccessible regions - Tibet, Nepal, Ethiopia - alone proved too difficult to bring under the sway of empire, though all experienced Western invasions. During the first half of the 20th century even China succumbed, at the hands of the Westernised Japanese, while most of the Ottoman lands were overrun by Western armies also.

The triumph of the Western way of warfare was, however, delusive. Directed against other military cultures it had proved irresistible. Turned in on itself it brought disaster and threatened catastrophe.
The First World War, fought almost exclusively between European states, terminated European dominance of the world, and through the suffering it inflicted on the participant populations, corrupted what was best in their civilisation - its liberalism and hopefulness - and conferred on militarists and totalitarians the role of proclaiming the future. The future they wanted brought about the Second World War which completed the ruin initiated by the First. It also brought about the development of nuclear weapons, the logical culmination of the technological trend in the Western way of warfare, and the ultimate denial of the proposition that war was, or might be, a continutation of politics by other means.

Politics must continue, war cannot. That is not to say that the role of the warrior is over. The world community needs, more than it has ever done, skillful and disciplined warriors who are ready to put themselves at the service of its authority. Such warriors must properly be seen as the protectors of civilisation, not its enemies. The style in which they fight for civilisation - against ethnic bigots, regional warlords, ideological intransigents, common pillagers and organised international criminals - cannot derive from the Western model of warmaking alone. Future peacekeepers and peacemakers have much to learn from alternative military cultures, not only that of the Orient but of the primitive world also. There is a wisdom in the principle of intellectual restraint and even of symbolic ritual that needs to be rediscovered. There is an even greater wisdom in the denial that politics and war belong on the same continuum. Unless we insist on denying it, our future, like that of the late Easter Islanders, may belong to the men with bloodied hands.

# BEYOND THE BOOK

>> In an interview with Booknotes, Keegan discussed the themes of the book and his beliefs:

"The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand. "

"Are you a pacifist?"
"Ninety-five percent."
"What's the five percent?"
"There are certain wicked people in the world that you can't deal with except by force."
"The most wicked in your lifetime?"
"Hitler, without doubt. I think Hitler was seriously, seriously wicked - not mad; twisted. A lot of the Bolsheviks were simply dreadful, too: Nazi, terminist, terrible. The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people."
"That 5 percent, then, allows what?"
"It allows the use of extreme force in a measured way - if possible, in a measured way in order to curtail or extinguish the activities of these wicked men we're talking about."

"I will never oppose the Vietnam War. I thought that the Americans were right to do it. I think it was a responsible effort by the United States. I think they fought it in the wrong way, it wasn't run as a proper war. It was run with one eye on public opinion the whole time. But I think that they were right to oppose the attempts by Ho Chi Minh and Giap to make the whole of Vietnam into a Marxist society. And looking to what's happened to the country since, I still believe that it was right to try and stop them.
I wouldn't have felt it was the end of the world if the Vietnam War hadn't been fought. It's not that kind of war. I don't think it's a war like fighting Hitler, but I think it was a correct war, a right war, and it had indirect effects of the greatest importance as well. I think it demonstrated to the Russians of the Russian leadership of the last years of communism that the Americans were serious when they said that they opposed communism. And I think it, therefore, eventually contributed to the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communist regimes all over central and eastern Europe."

>> In this short article for the "Daily Times", Keegan gives an extremely brief history of warfare:

"War, historically, is a predatory affair. The more likely explanation of its origin is in the attacks made by our hunter ancestors on our other ancestors who, after retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age, had begun to domesticate animals and cultivate the land. These early pastoralists and farmers made easy meat. It was only slowly that they learnt to protect themselves against the raiders who emerged without warning from the wilderness beyond the borders of the cultivated lands to pillage and slay. The first form of protection they adopted was that of fortification. When the limited value of fixed defences was recognized, they began to take the offensive to the enemy. Armies originated as counter-attack forces, funded out of the agricultural samples, which paid some of the early agricultural communities’ members to undertake specialist, perhaps full-time, duty as soldiers. By the third millennium BC, such military specialists were campaigning at long distances from cultivated land to check raiders at the borders and even carry war into their homelands.

It was to be a long step, however, between the inception of purposive warfare and the domination of human communities by specialist armed forces. Civilisation, which depends for its survival on the maintenance of law and order, within and without, is a fragile creation. Between the invention of the first regular armies in the first millennium BC and their universal adoption by the world’s advanced states only three hundred years ago, much disorder intervened. The Chinese empire, oldest and most durable of polities, underwent frequent periods of turmoil whenever its armies lost control of the border with Central Asia or of the population. Rome, which perfected the regular army in a form still influential today, succeeded in establishing stability and maintaining it for several hundred years. It did so, however, only by conducting an active defence of the frontiers as a permanent condition of the empire’s survival and, when the army eventually failed as an instrument of state, disorder broke in, to persist over wide areas of Europe for a thousand years.

In the wider world, untouched by the Roman or Chinese empires, warfare was endemic, motivated often by predation but also, as a society complexified, by quarrels over personal, family, or group prestige, territorial control, access to markets or commodities or by the need to achieve security. All these motives are discernible in the military history of the Greek world, with its passion for discord. Quarrel over rights, legal or dynastic, was a particular cause of warfare in post-Roman Europe. To these impulses to belligerence the rise of Islam, in the seventh century AD, added that of demand for religious conformity, not previously known as a military imperative. It would eventually become a major cause of conflict, as would, later still, political ideologies that claimed a similar orthodoxy.

The rise of the European maritime empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the indirect effect, meanwhile, of bringing local and traditional warfare over much of Asia and Africa to an end. Whatever its injustices, imperialism brought domestic peace to Europe’s colonies and possessions. Paradoxically, it was within Europe, after a comparatively untroubled nineteenth century, that war returned to rend civilized life with intensity never before known. The First World War shook the continent’s political structure to its foundations, destroying historic dynastic states and creating circumstances in which aggressive ideologies came to rule where comparatively benevolent monarchies had done before. The Second World War, essentially a conflict of those ideologies, broke continental borders to engulf eventually almost the whole world and to carry to its far corners the most destructive military technology human ingenuity could invent, of which the atomic bomb was the ultimate development. By 1945 the many transformations through war had passed had culminated in a form of war mankind could no longer risk waging. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not simply events but warnings that warfare was now a medium of human relations that would destroy all who tried to turn it to their use."

>> More Quotes from John Keegan

Men killing other men really is an extraordinary phenomenon. Why does it happen? And how long has it gone on? And have the motives changed?

The suspicion grows that battle has already abolished itself.

Good men who exercise power are really the most fascinating of all people.

I do despise the direction that university history writing has taken, in which enormous effort and years of work are given to writing books which really only interest a few hundred others.

I don't look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.

I've got a sort of an 18th century view of what being educated is, which is having read the major works of literature, having an understanding of the broad periods of history into which the world's past is divided, perhaps speaking another language.

Those who say if you put lawyers in charge, nothing ever happens. And that's the soldiers' view and the view of government in countries like the United States and Britain.

If they are trying to kill you, on the whole they're the people you have to kill, aren't they?

When I was at Princeton as a fellow in 1984, I became afflicted by cultural homesickness and I read the whole of Jane Austen in about two or three weeks.

>> From Declan Lynch's TV column in "The Irish Independent" during the 2003 Iraq invasion

There's no fooling John Keegan of "The Telegraph" who put up a marvellous display on Sky, speaking from the offices of the paper where he has been analysing wars since time immemorial. Keegan is a shrewd old buffer who looked like he would prefer to chow down with the chaps at Sandhurst as usual, except the bloody Telegraph dragged him away from an excellent lunch to talk to some cove on the goggle-box.
When it was put to him that he had perhaps been over-optimistic in his original prognostications, Keegan winced apparently in genuine pain at the foolishness he was hearing. He replied witheringly that the Sky cove must be getting his information from the media, from whose wretched number Keegan seems to exclude himself. Each daft new theory from the ranks of the reviled media johnnies brought the same expression of anguish to his craggy face, like an old war-wound acting up. He rubbished the suggestion that the Iraqis were putting up quite a good show. He thinks the Iraqi army is a complete load of cobblers actually, and maybe he's not wrong either.
But his finest hour came when he started referring to Iraq as Mesopotamia. It wasn't just the archaic usage which impressed, it was the fact that he did it without batting an eyelid as if no man of character or intelligence would dream of calling it anything else. But then, as Blair said to Bush a week into the war, "that's another fine Mesopotamia you've gotten me into".

Fields of Conflict Conference 2011 in Osnabrück and Kalkriese

2010-09-28T13:50:00.001+01:00

Dear All
Detailed information about the 6th Fields of Conflict Conference in Osnabrück and Kalkriese, 15. - 18. April 2011, is now available:

http://www.fieldsofconflict2011.uni-osnabrueck.de
If you know anybody who might be interested in the conference, too, please forward this email.
We look forward to meeting many of you next year.

Regards
Susanne

Dr. Susanne Wilbers-Rost
Leitung Abteilung Archäologie)
Varusschlacht im Osnabrücker Land GmbH
Museum und Park Kalkriese
Venner Str. 69
49565 Bramsche
Germany

Tel. +49 (0)5468/9204-11
Fax +49 (0)5468/9204-45
Email wilbers-rost@kalkriese-varusschlacht.de
www.kalkriese-varusschlacht.de

from John Carman in Militarch

Violência e Pré-História - Violence and Prehistory

The Archaeology of Violence and Conflict: From Prehistory to the Great War

A arqueologi​a forense sugere que em torno de 15% dos indivíduos nas sociedades "pré-estat​ais" morriam de maneira violenta

University of Glasgow :: Centre for Battlefield Archaeology :: Conference Programme

Tropical Civil War Correlated to El Niño.

‘We go to gain a little patch of ground’: postgraduate research in conflict archaeology'

The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes

Sexo e Violência: Realidades Antigas e Questões Contemporâneas

Interpersonal Violence in Paleolithic and Mesolithic Societies

Massacres during the late Linear Pottery Culture of Middle Europe

Arrow origins traced to Africa

Vitrified Forts

First Cannibals Ate Each Other for Extra Nutrition

A computer dating revolution (of the archaeological kind)

Conference Defence Sites: Heritage and Future 2012

Sex and Violence: Is Sex at the Psychological Root of War?

Teschler-Nicola et al - Evidence of Genocide 7000 BP: Neolithic Paradigm and Geo-climatic Reality

Early Bronze Age battle site found on German river bank

Standing Up to Fight: Does It Explain Why We Walk Upright and Why Women Like Tall Men?

Mass burial suggests massacre at Iron Age hill fort

La violence aux origines de l'humanité : Les temps préhistoriques

Tribal warfare

FERGUSON - THE CAUSES AND ORIGINS OF ‘‘PRIMITIVE WARFARE’’ ON EVOLVED MOTIVATIONS FOR WAR

GAT - THE CAUSES AND ORIGINS OF ‘‘PRIMITIVE WARFARE’’ : REPLY TO FERGUSON

New Report On First Death By Spearing In Australia

Primitive Warfare and Sports

Sutherland / BAJR - Battlefield Archaeology: a guide to the archaeology of conflict

Whitehead - Violence & the cultural order

Corbey - LAYING ASIDE THE SPEAR: HOBBESIAN WARRE AND THE MAUSSIAN GIFT

Scientists Trace Violent Death of Iron Age Man

War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. Edited by R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1992.

Milner - Warfare in prehistoric and early historic eastern North America

Tribal warfare

Kamphaus - Usewear and Functional Analysis of Bronze Weapons and Armor

Lessa and Mendonça de Souza - Violence in the Atacama Desert during the Tiwanaku Period: Social Tension?

Tribal warfare

Flores - A biologia na violência

Taylor - Believing the ancients: quantitative and qualitative dimensions of slavery and the slave trade in later prehistoric Eurasia

2001

Bibliografia - Bibliography

Projecteis de funda - Sling missiles

Jorge (ed) - Existe uma Idade do Bronze Atlântico? - Sociedade: Hierarquização e Conflito

Myers - War Before History: A Critical Survey

Neolithic farmers not so peaceful after all

Zollikofer et al - Evidence for interpersonal violence in the St. Césaire Neanderthal

Geophysical survey from Perdigões site in Portugal (4th and 3rd millennia BC).

Nash - Rock-art from the Spanish Levant

More on Buried Roman Soldiers of Dura May Be Victims of Ancient Iranian Chemical Weapon

"Arqueología de la Guerra Civil Española. Excavaciones arqueológicas en el Campo de Concentración de Castuera".

Defence Sites: Heritage and Future 2012

Otterbein - Internal war: a cross-cultural study

Leblanc - Prehistory of Warfare

Armadura de Dendra - Dendra armour

Violent chimpanzee attack - Planet Earth - BBC wildlife

Chimps Attacking Leopard

Andrushko et al - Trophy-Taking and Dismemberment as Warfare Strategies in Prehistoric Central California

Somit - Humans, Chimps and Bonobos. The biological bases of aggression war and peacemaking.

Chimpanzees team up to attack a monkey in the wild - BBC wildlife

Violência e Etnografia: os Zulu.

Ancient Cannibals Crafted Cups from Human Skulls

Numbers

Conferencia: "Sacrificio humano y canibalismo".

Prehistoric Dun Eochla fort in the irish Aran islands

USA Grant on prehistoric warfare

La batalla de Himera emerge de las fosas de sus guerreros

The Centre for Battlefield Archaeology postgraduate conference

Batalha campal na Arte Rupestre Levantina - Field battle in Iberian Rock Art

Violência e Etnografia: os Maori.

Valcamonica Rock Art I

Antunes, Correia, Moura, Lopes, Cunha - Violence Among Mesolithic Men From Muge Biochemical Evidence

Violência e Etnografia: os Maring.

Thorpe - Anthropology, archaeology, and the origin of warfare

Walker - A BIOARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

Wrangham - Evolution of Coalitionary Killing

Jackes - Osteological evidence for Mesolithic and Neolithic violence: problems of interpretation

Violência e Etnografia: os Yanomamo.

Almagro-Gorbea, Lorrio - War and Society in the Celtiberian World

Harding - The development of warrior identities in the European Bronze Age

Violência e Etnografia: Aborígenes Australianos

Roksandic - Violence in the Mesolithic

A arqueologia forense sugere que em torno de 15% dos indivíduos nas sociedades "pré-estatais" morriam de maneira violenta