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PART I
CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING
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1
INTRODUCTION
The bioarchaeology of conflict
Christopher Knüsel and Martin J. Smith
Why study violence and warfare?
Warfare is often described as “senseless”, having no place in civilized society, yet it continues to feature in modern social relations, with a long and established history. Recurrent legacies of warfare are far from trifling. They include population displacement and forced migration, changed governance, demographic shifts, destruction of property and goods, and environmental degradation and destruction, as well as economic, educational and sociocultural disruption. Implicit — and unplanned — benefits include technical and medical innovations, infrastructural rebuilding, and attractive opportunities for social and economic advancement for surviving combatants, their kin and their leaders once hostilities have ceased. Warfare also provides for the acquisition of land, goods and a workforce, either as indoctrinated group members or as slaves. The last of these may especially characterize the motivation for earlier armed aggression when group sizes were small and thus under threat oflocal extirpation. Perhaps the least realized of the changes wrought by warfare is the demise of beliefs and associated social institutions entrusted with defence against or success in conflicts. Attacks on and destruction of cultural patrimony, such as buildings, places of worship, cemeteries, historic sites and culturally symbolic objects, are a consequence of modern warfare, which may have also been a motivation in earlier conflicts, when statuary and depictions of deities and leaders were targeted during periods of strife.
Given the momentous changes wrought by historical and contemporary conflicts, it is an enduring oddity that, in contemporary archaeological discourse, the place of warfare in social relations and societal change remains a minor, muted concern or, quite simply, omitted. A lack of synthesis of the physical evidence of violence with broader archaeological interpretation continues despite growing literature on violence and violence-related injuries. We have the enigma of a considerable number of inspired treatments of warriors, their representation and accoutrements (see Armit 2012; Baray et al. 2011; Carman and Harding 1999; Harding 2007; Jeunesse 1996; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005; Treherne 1995, among others) in the Old World with decidedly less evidence for warfare and bookshelves of volumes on historical battles and warfare with only occasional integration with the remains of the casualties of such conflicts (for exceptions, see Fiorato et al. 2000; Kjellström 2003). In the New World, the situation is similar but different in its expression. Where there has long been interest in ritual sacrifice and practices such as trepanation, these have only comparatively recently been explicitly linked to warfare (see Verano 2001, for an example), treatment for traumatic injuries sustained in conflict (Verano 2003) and warriors (Buikstra et al. 2004). This volume aims to fill this gap by considering the physical evidence for violence-related trauma within its social context. In the process, it provides the groundwork for distinguishing warfare from individual acts ofviolence, in the way that murder and bodily harm are distinguished from the premeditated and sustained, cooperative group action to inflict physical harm that defines warfare (see Ferguson 1984 and Milner 1995, as discussed in Knüsel 2005). It addresses the scale and frequency of violent encounters based on the physical traces left in the remains of human bodies and their depositional context.
This endeavour is greatly aided by a well-established literature on the diagnosis of skeletal injury from violent encounters. Through improvements in the understanding of bone fracture mechanics (see Berryman and Symes 1998; Galloway 1999; Kimmerle and Baraybar 2008; Knüsel 2005; Madea and Staak 1988; Novak 2000; Sauer 1998; Smith et al. 2007) and skeletal trauma identification, it is clear that violent assaults could have been an identifiable aspect of social life throughout human development. Identification of trauma is made through observing bone breakage patterns and their timing with respect to the collagen content of the bone. Researchers are greatly aided by the uniformitarian approach afforded by the anatomy of the human body and the standard anatomical terminology that comes with it. The human body is a rare example of a truly indisputable cross-cultural constant that has been present in all societies (Boric and Robb 2008; Joyce 2005; Sofaer 2006). As such, the study of the body as exposed to violence is part of a wider discourse in which the body becomes a sort of text — an artefact of nature that has been inscribed to convey messages that can be best understood within the social and cultural milieu of those producing such signs. Like the body, bone fracture — bone failure, in mechanical terms — represents a universal. Fractures result from the response of bone to applied stresses beyond the physiological norm. Because traumatic injuries are determined by local skeletal architecture, their patterning is not only cross-culturally but also diachronically analogous. However, where field observation and careful recovery of skeletal remains, followed by reconstruction of traumatized bones, is not undertaken, the extent to which trauma can be identified is greatly reduced.
We know that peoples in the distant past engaged in violence against each other at times, just as more recent people have, and that sometimes such hostilities were conducted in an organized manner involving groups rather than sole individuals. But in most cemetery data there is only sporadic evidence of healed trauma; these are the individuals injured in the course of their daily lives or who, having sustained weapon-related injuries, recovered and returned to their communities to die some time later from other causes. The challenge now facing investigators is to try to determine the social circumstances that exposed individuals to violence and the scale of its occurrence. In this, non-normative burials come to the fore. These oddly placed, often multiple burials result from a period of time when the social mores governing treatment of the dead were suspended or others imposed in the aftermath of conflict.
The question of origins
The origin of warfare remains a contentious topic due to its destructive, life-denying results and its presumed ethnic and, by extension, genetic links with specific peoples, or with our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens. More recent work might support such an association since humans and their closest living relative, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), appear to share common behaviours, and both actively and repeatedly hunt their own kind (see Mitani et al. 2010), but in hominins, perhaps uniquely, as a food source (Carbonell et al. 2010), which may also have symbolic, ritual and cosmological importance. In both cases, intra-specific aggression tends to be more often directed at younger individuals in the quest to expand group territories and create greater access to resources. This basic similarity alone cannot account for the historically recorded dynamics of armed aggression among human groups, however, if it can be perceived as a universal origin of such behaviour at all. As Mitani et al. note:
Human warfare is a heterogeneous phenomenon that varies with respect to who participates, what is involved, and why it occurs. Because of this, whether chimpanzee intergroup aggression can be employed to provide insights into the origins and causes of warfare is likely to remain moot. Using our results to address an enduring question about why humans are an unusually cooperative species may prove to be a more productive line of inquiry.
(Mitani et al. 2010: R508)
This observation directs attention to human social relations and social organization through which humans cooperate as a key source by which to study the origins and development of violent aggression.
Tomasello and colleagues (2012) observe that the manner and extent to which humans cooperate also distinguishes them from chimpanzees; humans evince heightened capacity for cooperation (collective intentionality as opposed to individual intentionality). They note that human cooperation is not always characterized by the general mammalian tendency for dominant individuals to hijack the spoils of group action. Instead, they argue for a two-step process that sees mutualistic cooperation in collaborative foraging followed by an increased group-mindedness that includes shared social conventions, norms (emotions such as guilt and shame), and institutions that grew out of population increase and intra-specific competition. Importantly, the features that distinguish human groups can be transmitted to descendant generations. Although Tomasello et al. (2012) do not specifically mention warfare, clearly it could be a facet of this group-mindedness. That hostility could be passed from one generation to another may be why some peoples become especially associated with violence and a warlike mentality that is “passed down” in the group, contributing to the notion that genetic predisposition is the ultimate cause for such behaviour. The archaeological record, with its unusual ability to plumb even the greatest depths of the human past, can address these social dimensions in physically manifest ways that other disciplines cannot, and it can also complement textually documented events, providing unique insights that cannot otherwise be achieved.
Although for long an interest of archaeological discourse, the interpretive place of warfare has tended to veer from viewing most, if not all, change in material culture as the result of population diffusion and invasion to emphasizing long-term continuity in societies dominated by peaceful mother goddess worshippers who lived in socially egalitarian prehistoric villages, as espoused famously by Marija Gimbutas (1989, 1991). In its more recent guise, archaeologists interpret the appearance of round structures in the early Neolithic of western Asia, including the famous Pre-Pottery Neolithic B tower at Jericho, as public monuments or communal buildings (“bâtiment communautaire”), the construction of which would have required concerted, collective labour, and which were not apparently domestic in function (Cauvin 2000; Mithen et al. 2011; Stordeur et al. 2000; Watkins 2010). Some see these as meeting spaces to resolve disputes to maintain social harmony that maintained egalitarian and apparently peaceful social relations in these early Neolithic societies (Kuijt 2000; Kuijt and Goring-Morris 2002). However, others see at least some of these as having been defensive in nature and some, including the tower at Jericho and the communal building at Jerf el-Ahmar (Syria), show evidence of burning (Kenyon and Holland 1981; Stordeur et al. 2000). At near contemporary aceramic ^atalhöyük in Anatolia, the largest village of its day, Testart (2008, 2009) argues that the scenes of decapitation in murals relate not to ritualized ancestor worship but to headhunting, which often suggests premeditated group aggression. This could be interpreted as cooperation in the pursuit of group dominance in a site with much to suggest relatively egalitarian social organization (cf.Hodder and Pels 2010).
One of the longest-running debates in archaeology surrounds the circumstances that gave rise to the appearance and expansion of the Indo-Europeans, either in the Neolithic or the Bronze Age. Some, such as Renfrew (1987), with more recent phylogeographic linguistic support coming from Bouckaert et al. (2012), posit that this linguistic group spread with agriculture through the yet to be fully understood mechanisms of “demic diffusion”, a process involving in-coming farmers bearing a Neolithic culture, who are said to have displaced or amalgamated indigenous hunting and gathering peoples (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1984; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). These researchers emphasize an apparent southeast to northwest movement of distinctive pottery types, animal and plant cultigens and blood group polymorphisms (as proxies for people) from the Near East, where farming has documented early manifestations. Others equate this linguistic spread with the arrival of male-dominated, weapon-toting, metal-smelting, equestrian warriors of the Bronze Age Eurasian steppes (Anthony 1986, 2007; Childe 1926; Kristiansen 1998; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005). These opposed scenarios, peaceful enculturation or violent acculturation, continue to have currency in many similar debates based on the significance and interpretive meaning of material culture patterning across time and geographic space.
This edited volume presents an overview of the nature and development of human conflict from prehistory to the present through the study of the remains of past people themselves. Rather than taking a generalized approach concentrating on the wider material record and w...
