The World Until Yesterday

Sources of information

Chapter 3’s account of Dani warfare might suggest that it’s straightforward to study traditional war: send out graduate students and a film crew, observe and film battles, count the wounded and dead warriors being carried back, and interview participants for more details. That’s the evidence available to us for Dani warfare. If we had hundreds of such studies, there would be no arguments about traditional war’s reality.

In fact, for several obvious reasons, direct observations of traditional war by scholars carrying cameras are exceptional, and there is some controversy about its extent in the absence of European influence. As Europeans expanded over the globe from AD 1492 onwards and encountered and conquered non-European peoples, one of the first things that European governments did was to suppress traditional warfare: for the safety of Europeans themselves, and to administer the conquered areas, and as part of a perceived civilizing mission. By the time that the science of anthropology entered the era of abundant well-funded field studies and graduate students after World War II, warfare among traditional small-scale societies had become largely confined to the island of New Guinea and to parts of South America. It had ended much earlier in other Pacific islands, North America, Aboriginal Australia, Africa, and Eurasia, although modern forms of it have recently been resurfacing in some areas, especially in Africa and New Guinea.

Even in New Guinea and South America, recent opportunities for anthropologists to observe traditional warfare first-hand have been limited. Governments don’t want the problems and publicity resulting from unarmed vulnerable outsiders being attacked by warring tribespeople. Governments also don’t want anthropologists to be armed, to be the first representatives of state societies to enter an unpacified tribal area, and to try to end fighting by force themselves. Hence both in New Guinea and in South America there have been government restrictions on travel until an area is considered officially pacified and safe for anyone to visit. Nevertheless, some scholars and missionaries have succeeded in working in areas where fighting was still going on. Notable examples were the observers in 1961 in the Dani area, where there already was a Dutch patrol post established in the Baliem Valley, but where the Harvard Expedition was permitted to operate beyond the area of government control; the Kuegler family’s work among the Fayu people of western New Guinea beginning in 1979; and Napoleon Chagnon’s work among the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela and Brazil. Even in those studies that did yield some first-hand observations of warfare, however, much or most of the detail was still not observed directly by the Westerner writing about it, but was instead acquired second-hand from local informants: e.g., Jan Broekhuijse’s detailed accounts of who in each Dani battle was wounded under what circumstances in which part of the body.

Most of our information about traditional warfare is entirely second-hand and based on accounts given by participants to Western visitors, or else is based on first-hand observations by Europeans (such as government officers, explorers, and traders) who were not trained scientists gathering data for doctoral dissertations. For instance, many New Guineans have reported to me their own experiences in traditional warfare. However, in all my visits to Australian-administered eastern New Guinea (now independent Papua New Guinea) and Indonesian- administered western New Guinea, I have never personally witnessed New Guineans attacking other New Guineans. The Australian and Indonesian governments would never have permitted me to enter areas where fighting was still going on, even if I had wanted to do so, which I didn’t.

Most of the Westerners who did observe and describe traditional warfare have not been professional scholars. For instance, Sabine Kuegler, daughter of missionaries Klaus and Doris Kuegler, described in her popular book Child of the Jungle how, when she was six years old, a fight with bows and arrows erupted between the Tigre clan of the Fayu (among whom her family was living) and visitors from the Sefoidi clan, and how she saw arrows flying around her and wounded men being carried away in canoes. Similarly, the Spanish priest Juan Crespi, a member of the Gaspar de Portola Expedition, which was the first overland European expedition to reach the Chumash Indians on the coast of southern California, in 1769–1770, wrote in detail about groups of Chumash shooting arrows at each other.

A problem associated with all of these accounts of traditional warfare by outside (usually European) observers, whether anthropologists or laypeople, is reminiscent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of physics: the observation itself perturbs the phenomenon observed. In anthropology this means that the mere presence of outsiders inevitably has large effects on previously “untouched” peoples. State governments routinely adopt a conscious policy of ending traditional warfare: for example, the first goal of 20th-century Australian patrol officers in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, on entering a new area, was to stop warfare and cannibalism. Non- government outsiders may achieve that same result in different ways. For instance, Klaus Kuegler eventually had to insist that his host Fayu clan stop fighting around his house and go somewhere else to shoot each other, otherwise he and his family would have to leave for their own safety and peace of mind. The Fayu agreed, and gradually stopped fighting altogether.

Those are examples of Europeans intentionally ending or decreasing tribal fighting, but there are also claims of Europeans intentionally provoking tribal fighting. There are also many ways in which outsiders, through their activities or mere presence, may unintentionally increase or decrease fighting. Thus, whenever an outside visitor reports observations of traditional warfare (or lack of warfare), there is inevitable uncertainty about how much fighting there would have been if no outside observer had been present. I shall return to this question later in this chapter.

An alternative approach has been to scrutinize evidence of tribal fighting preserved in the archaeological record laid down before the arrival of outsiders. This approach carries the advantage of removing the influence of contemporary outside observers entirely. However, in analogy with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, we gain that advantage at the cost of a disadvantage: increased uncertainty about the facts, because fighting was not observed directly nor was it described on the basis of reports of local eyewitnesses, but it instead had to be inferred from archaeological evidence, which is subject to various uncertainties. One undeniable type of archaeological evidence for fighting is piles of skeletons, thrown together without the usual hallmarks of intentional proper burial, with cut marks or breaks on bones recognizably made by weapons or tools. Such marks include bones with imbedded arrow points, bones with cut marks made by a sharp weapon such as an ax, skulls with long straight cut marks indicative of scalping, or skulls with the first two vertebrae attached as normally results from decapitation (e.g., for head-hunting). For instance, at Talheim in southwestern Germany, Joachim Wahl and Hans Konig studied 34 skeletons of what turned out to be identifiable as 18 adults (nine men, seven women, and two of uncertain sex) and 16 children. They had been heaped haphazardly around 5000 BC in a pit without the usual grave goods associated with respectful burial by relatives. Unhealed cut marks on the right rear surfaces of 18 skulls showed that those people had died of blows administered from behind by at least six different axes, evidently wielded by right-handed assailants. The victims were of all ages from young children to a man of about 60. Evidently, an entire group consisting of half a dozen families had been massacred simultaneously by a much larger group of attackers.

Other types of archaeological evidence for warfare include finds of weapons, armor and shields, and fortifications. While some weapons aren’t unequivocal signs of war, because spears and bows and arrows can be used to hunt animals as well as to kill people, battle axes and piles of large slingshot missiles do provide evidence of war, because they are used only or mainly against people, not against animals. Armor and shields are similarly employed only in war, not in hunting animals. Their use in war has been described ethnographically among many living traditional peoples, including New Guineans, Aboriginal Australians, and Inuit. Hence finds of similar armor and shields in archaeological sites are evidence of fighting in the past. Further archaeological signs of warfare are fortifications, such as walls, moats, defensible gates, and towers for launching missiles against enemy attempts to scale walls. For instance, when Europeans began to settle in New Zealand in the early 1800s, New Zealand’s indigenous Maori population had hill forts, called pa, used initially to fight each other and then eventually also to fight Europeans. About a thousand Maori pa are known, many of them excavated archaeologically and dated to many centuries before European arrival, but similar to the ones that Europeans saw in use. Hence there is no doubt that Maori were fighting each other long before European arrival.

Finally, other archaeological settlement sites are on hilltop, cliff-top, or cliff-face locations that make no sense except for defense against enemy assault. Familiar examples include Anasazi Indian settlements at Mesa Verde and elsewhere in the U.S. Southwest, on cliff ledges and overhangs accessible only by ladders. Their positions