NOTES

Lawrence H. Keeley, 1996, War Before Civilization, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Archaeologist Keeley provides the first major, single-author, book-length synthesis of the anthropology of war in nearly 50 years, since H. Turney-High's Primitive War: Its Practice and Concepts (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1949). Keeley draws on evidence from archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, and history.

Keeley's purpose is to expose and rebut the "pacification of the past" by liberal anthropologists by challenging a series of widespread myths about the supposedly peaceful nature of prehistoric and "primitive" societies prior to contact with Western civilization. (For Keeley, "primitive" means a society without writing, cities, state, and industry).

In the process Keeley identifies many of the major problems and issues in the anthropological study of war:

1. temporal and spatial distribution of war (asserts universal, and more frequent in nonstate than state societies, but mostly small raids and ambush, sometimes massacres)

2. limitations on warfare (limited manpower, economic surplus, and technology--- materialist approach)

3. limitations of direct evidence (rare for ethnographers to actually witness warfare, most tribes pacified by colonials before fieldwork)

4. explaining the existence of nonviolent and peaceful societies (dismissed as refugees)

5. no single cause of war (a complex set of interacting causal factors)

6. need for comparable categories for cross-cultural comparisons of past and modern war (e.g., percentage of casualties among warrior and civilian segments of population).

7. role of the state in conflict management and resolution

Instead of the myths of the "pacification of the past" Keeley asserts the realities of prehistoric and "primitive" warfare:

1. more frequent, ruthless, deadly, and important than modern warfare (adult males were inevitably killed rather than taken as prisoner, and women and children were seldom spared, unlike modern warfare)

2. serious and efficient (weapons weren't simply symbolic and fighting was not merely ritualistic)

3. economic and political, not just personal and psychological, includes territorial expansion as goal and result for winners

4. superior to civilized military warfare (e.g. guerrilla)
(winning depends on not being caught in the open without fortifications and on not be being overwhelmed by larger numbers)

5. not reduced by trade and inter-marriage

Problems with Keeley's analysis: broad definition of war, neglect of peaceful societies, advocacy, limitations of evidence, and interpretations.