Warfare and Violence in Prehistoric Europe: an Introduction

At the moment, one trend in both North American and European archaeology has been to un-pacify the past. The study of warfare and violence in past societies has long been problematic. The debate has been thrown into much sharper focus during the 1990s by a series of publications, notably Keeley's own War before Civilization (1996) in which he proposed that the past had been effectively pacified by modern anthropologists for broadly ideological reasons. Modern state societies may have an unparalleled ability to organise destructive mass violence; yet both ethnographic studies of groups, such as the Gebusi (Knauft 1987) and the Yanomamo (Chagnon 1968), and archaeological studies, like recent Anasazi reinterpretations, have shown that non-state societies are equally capable of using deadly force, sometimes with rates of homicide and war casualties exceeding any known in the modern West.