R Schulting

War without warriors? The nature of interpersonal conflict before the emergence of formalised warrior élites

DRAFT PAPER FOR THE SESSION:

The experiential role of violence and combat in the creation of social

identities

the Sixth World Archaeological Congress 29 June - 4 July 2008

University College Dublin

Session organisers: Barry Molloy and Angelos Papadopoulos

Rick J Schulting School of Archaeology

University of Oxford

Not for citation without author’s written permission

Abstract The appearance of ‘warrior élites’ marks a well-defined, or well-imagined, role that emerges at various times and places around the world. In prehistoric Europe, this image first appears most clearly in the Bronze Age, yet there is abundant evidence for earlier violence, from both the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. Who was carrying these acts out, and how did they figure into the creation of social identities? ‘Warrior’ identity in these earlier periods was arguably indistinguishable from ‘adult male’ identity. Understanding the conditions preceding the emergence of more formal and specialised warriors should shed light on the nature of conflict and identity, and the place of material culture in the formation and maintenance of specialised social roles.

Introduction

Many of the papers in this session address the nature of élite warrior status in the

context of chiefdoms and early states. But what about before this? Certainly there was

no absence of interpersonal violence, as demonstrated by many sites exhibiting

skeletal injuries. The earliest example with evidence for multiple injuries that can be

attributed to large-scale, inter-group conflict comes from the oft-cited Epipalaeolithic

cemetery 117 at Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, dating to ca. 13,000 years ago. A sufficient

number of Mesolithic skeletons are found across Europe with embedded projectile

points, and blows to the head, to strongly suggest more than occasional violence. For

much of Europe, the frequency and scale of conflict may increase further with the

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appearance of the Neolithic, though the comparison is not a straightforward one, and

is greatly hampered by the relative paucity and uneven distribution of Mesolithic

human remains. But in none of these cases is there unequivocal evidence for the

emergence of a specialised warrior identity: there are few indications of formal

weapons that could not equally serve other purposes, iconographic portrayals are rare,

and there are few if any contenders for distinct warrior graves. This paper addresses

the nature of ‘war without warriors’ from the perspective of Mesolithic and Neolithic

Europe. Ethnographic cases of band and tribal conflict are also drawn upon to help

elucidate the nature of warfare in these small-scale societies.

A discussion of this nature will inevitably rest on definitions. So to make these clear

from the outset, ‘warfare’ here refers to armed conflict of lethal intent between two or

more autonomous sociopolitical groups. This is distinct from feud, which occurs

within a single group, or homicide, which can occur between individuals either within

or between sociopolitical groups (though more often the former, through simple

physical proximity; the latter situation, unless quickly resolved, almost invariably

escalates into warfare). The notion of ‘warrior identity’ is perhaps slightly more

difficult, though less so in its more extreme forms, where it can be seen as a

specialised identity, often, though not always, associated with young/middle adult

males, and carrying with it the expectation that these are the individuals primarily

responsible for a group’s defence and offence directed against other groups (thus, to

state the obvious, the existence of warriors pre-supposes the existence of war). This

status will often be accompanied by a distinct material culture, including first and

foremost weaponry, which may not be generally available to other members of the

group; it may also include other insignia.

This definition points the way to my general thesis, that ‘warrior identity’ in

Mesolithic and Neolithic Europe was largely indistinguishable from ‘adult male’

identity. I will return to this after a consideration of the range of evidence for conflict

in the Mesolithic and Neolithic Europe.

Evidence for interpersonal conflict in the Mesolithic and Neolithic

Evidence for conflict in the European Mesolithic takes the form of embedded bone

and stone projectiles, and both healed and unhealed cranial trauma. For cranial

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trauma, healed injuries are in the majority, which may very well indicate a different

context for violence: an element of ritualised dispute resolution is often inferred when

faced with similar cases in other parts of the world. The major exception to this is the

site of Ofnet in Bavaria, with its two so-called ‘skull-nests’. Depending on the

analysis, between 25 and 50 percent of the skulls in these two pits show perimortem

injuries. The heads were removed while the bodies were still fleshed, with cutmarks

visible on a number of vertebrae, and deposited in a formal manner, in some cases

wearing animal tooth ornamentation, in two shallow pits in a cave. While the nature

of this event, or even whether it is a single event, has been debated, inter-group

hostilities would seem to offer a reasonable scenario.

Neolithic evidence for conflict takes two main forms, skeletal trauma and

architecture, the latter in the form of enclosures. Though there is much debate

concerning the roles of Neolithic enclosures, itself a varied category, there is good

evidence that at least some were subjected to large-scale attacks, even if they were not

necessarily intended as defensive structure when first conceived and built. Foremost

among these for Britain are Hambledon Hill, Crickley Hill and Carn Brea. The large-

scale conflicts implied by attacks on these sites must quality as warfare by any

definition: the events are on a scale that is simply too large for them to represent in-

group fighting. Some 400 projectiles were found concentrated at the entrance into the

Crickley Hill promontory enclosure. Undoubtedly this represents only a fraction of

the missiles fired at and from the enclosure, as many would be retrieved at the time,

and many others would be lost in the intervening 5500 years since this event – and it

does seem to be a single event, as a recent dating programme by Alasdair Whittle and

Alex Bayliss has shown. The same can be said for the even more impressive figure of

800 arrowheads found by Roger Mercer at Carn Brea. Given the unknowns, trying to

estimate the number of people involved in such conflicts on the basis of the number of

recovered arrowheads is probably futile, but it does not seem unreasonable to suggest

the involvement of hundreds of antagonists.

Skeletal evidence is on occasion equally dramatic, best exemplified by the paradigm-

shifting late LBK mass grave at Talheim in SW Germany. Thirty-four men, women

and children were found here, unceremoniously thrown into a large pit, with many

showing perimortem cranial injuries. Evidence for even larger-scale violence comes

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from the late LBK enclosure ditches of Asparn-Schletz in Austria, where more than

120 individuals were found in the ditches, with many showing perimortem injuries.

Talheim is perhaps slightly more ambiguous than the British enclosures as regards

whether it can be said to relate to ‘warfare’; it could conceivably represent a feud

between, for example, lineages within a larger social group, though this might imply a

degree of supra-household or supra-village organisation beyond what is usually

attributed to the LBK. This is harder to argue for the dead in the ditches of Asparn-

Schletz, if these relate to a single episode, which is not inconsistent with the available 14C dates and stratigraphy. The relative dearth of young women here compared to an

expected normal demographic profile has been used to suggest their removal as

captives.

Then there are numerous other sites with a small number of individuals showing

skeletal injuries attributable to interpersonal violence. In many cases these are yet

more ambiguous, and it cannot be said with any certainty whether they reflect in-

group or out-group conflict. The overall pattern that emerges, however, is intriguing.

With very few exceptions, projectile injuries affect males, while both males and

females are more often equally affected by healed as well as unhealed cranial injuries.

This pattern demonstrably applies to the Mesolithic and the Neolithic, continuing into

the Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic (and presumably beyond this, though I do not

have specific data to hand for the Bronze Age). This implies at least two different

contexts for violence, one involving predominantly males fighting at distance with

bows, and the other involving close-quarters conflict that could equally affect males

and females. While it is perhaps tempting to infer that this marks the distinction

between out-group and in-group conflict, this is probably too simplistic a reading of

what was a more complex and varied situation, particularly in the case of the contexts

leading to cranial trauma.

However, the notion that projectile injuries do relate for the most part to organised

conflict between primarily men from different groups does appear a reasonable one.

What little iconographic evidence there is for conflict in the European

Mesolithic/Neolithic comes from a number of well-known rock art sites in the

Spanish Levant, and appears to support the role of bow conflict. The dating of these

panels as either Mesolithic or Neolithic is controversial, but for our purposes here this

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distinction does not really matter. The panels are interesting for a number of reasons,

one being that some seem to depict small groups of archers in battle line arrangements

that are not dissimilar to those known in a number of ethnographic tribal contexts,

such as seen for the Dani of New Guinea in the film Dead Birds.

From the above discussion, it is clear that the weapon of choice for long-range

conflict in earlier prehistory was the bow and arrow, and probably most men, and

young boys, would own at least one. Of course the bow can also be used to hunt. But

for the British Neolithic at least, the large numbers of leaf-shaped arrowheads that

have been found can be seen as somewhat puzzling, given the paucity of hunted game

known from contemporary faunal assemblages. Indeed, there are no known examples

of embedded projectile injuries in wild fauna from the earlier Neolithic (though,

oddly, embedded point fragments are known from domestic cattle and pig at the Late

Neolithic site of Durrington Walls). Yet four cases of directly embedded projectile

fragments are known from Neolithic human remains in Britain (Ascott-under-

Wychwood, Tulloch of Assery, Penywyrlod and, most recently, Wayland’s Smithy),

with another case from Poulnabrone in Ireland. The existence of many other examples

is suggested through the close association of projectile points, often with broken tips,

with the skeleton (e.g., Hambledon Hill, Cat’s Water, Wayland’s Smithy, just to name

a few; a recent study of a Beaker age example from Feizor Nick Cave presents a rare

example of a female with a projectile injury). Even if wild game are underrepresented

because of the ‘ceremonial’ nature of many – though by no means all – of the sites, it

is unlikely that hunting played more than a minor economic role. What it might do,

however, is serve to train young men in proficiency with the bow. This training of

boys from a young age in both shooting and dodging arrows is a common feature of

the ethnographic literature for tribal societies ranging from Papua New Guinea to the

North American Pacific Northwest. It begins as a game, but is in deadly earnest in

later life, though sometimes retaining some of the qualities of a ‘sport’ – was the

shooting of domestic species at Durrington Walls perhaps part of a ceremonial hunt

with an underlying purpose of maintaining, and advertising, the bow skills of the

various participating groups?

Small-scale conflict and war without warriors

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Another important consideration in the present discussion is the general nature of

tribal conflict. Based largely on ethnographic accounts of tribal warfare, but informed

where possible by the archaeological record of Mesolithic and Neolithic Europe, some

suggestions in this direction can be made. One of the most common themes to emerge

is that in band and tribal conflict the first choice of encounter is almost invariably

ambush, preferably against an unarmed opponent. The night-time or early dawn raid

features prominently, maximising the likelihood of killing the enemy while

minimising the danger to one’s own group. Indeed, the enterprise would often be

abandoned if the alarm were raised. Open battles would sometimes be fought by some

groups ethnographically, and indeed might even be arranged beforehand, but ambush

and deception are found more often, and were probably more deadly in the long run.

Advantages, however they arose, were often relentlessly pursued, to the point of the

extermination of the opposing group. This rarely had anything to do with territorial

expansion, though this might follow on by default. One result of such climates of

uncertainty seen ethnographically is that during times of unrest, people would sharply

curtail their travel, and men would go about their days and nights fully armed, even

within their own communities.

Overtly economic motivations are often more evident in expansionist chiefdoms and

states. Nevertheless it is clear historically that some tribal groups are very

expansionist, such as the segmentary house societies of the Iban of Borneo, who

pursued an explicit policy of expanding into new territory by force. Many additional

examples could be found among African pastoralists. Then there are also many

different kinds of economic motives that can operate at a smaller scale. The question

is who decides that they are worth pursuing in a society lacking strong central

leadership, and how this ambition is realised. One of the features of bands and tribes

is that the constituent social units are relatively small, though in the case of tribes they

can amount to large numbers of individuals in aggregate. And, in both bands and

tribes one of the main structuring principles is kinship. These two points taken

together – small numbers of people, often closely related, whether fictitiously or not –

mean that any economic advantage would be easily perceived as beneficial both to

specific individuals and to the overall group. Carrying out the action, then, becomes a

matter of convincing enough individuals to join an expedition.

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In the case of the Mesolithic, one might mention the likelihood of stored food

reserves, particularly in coastal situations that were at least partly sedentary. This, and

conflict over access to particularly productive fishing locales may have been factors in

accounting for the high incidence of violence seen in Mesolithic Scandinavia and

along some of the large rivers of eastern Europe: the Iron Gates of the Danube, and

the rapids of the Dnieper River in the Ukraine. Food stores would of course also be

present in the Neolithic, in the form of stored grain, and perhaps more enticingly, in

the more mobile form of herds of domestic animals, and in particular cattle. The

economic and cultural value attributed to cattle in the Neolithic of northwest Europe

emerges fairly clearly from number of lines of evidence. Under such conditions, as I

and others have argued elsewhere, they make particularly attractive targets for

raiding. And such raids can be carried out by very small numbers of individuals.

Again, stealth and ambush are the ideals.

The preference for this kind of conflict itself may militate against elaborate and

showy weaponry. It might also be argued to provide little incentive for the

development of an élite warrior identity.

In addition to the preference for ambush, a critical factor is the combination of a high

degree of both autonomy and responsibility placed on the individual in small-scale

societies. The relevance of this here relates to the central importance of revenge,

which emerges again and again as one of the strongest motivators for both within-

group feuding and between-group warfare. The duty of vengeance falls most directly

on close kin, and next, in the case of between-group conflict, on the aggrieved

community and its allies as a whole. While help would certainly be sought, neither the

means nor the responsibility for revenge are delegated to any authority. One of the

consequences of this is that it is very difficult to cease hostilities once begun – none

have the clear and binding authority to do so, though attempts might be made. In

societies with more centralised authority, the personal/family responsibility for

vengeance is less emphasised, with the decision for, and means of, retribution coming

under firmer control by the central authority.

Thus, the reason that we do not see a specialised warrior identity in the Mesolithic or

Neolithic is that every able-bodied male would be expected to perform this role

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alongside his other roles: hunter, farmer, herder, fisher, weaver, potter, etc. This is

part of the autonomy and responsibility of small-scale, acephalous societies. This is

not to say that all would be equally proficient in warfare, and no doubt some would

display a greater aptitude and become recognised as leaders, though if the

ethnographic accounts are anything to go by, such leadership roles would usually be

restricted to the duration of the immediate conflict at hand, and would not extend into

other fields of activity. Nevertheless, it is possible that success here, as with any

important endeavour, might offer one avenue to elevated status, particularly when it

presented the opportunity to add to the group’s valuable cattle herds. The ability to

obtain the necessary support and organise a retaliation or raiding party against another

group would, whatever the ideal, probably not be an option open to all.

The question of whether warfare proper appears only with the Neolithic is not one I

propose to go into in any detail here, though it warrants a brief mention. Raymond

Kelly’s argument to this effect hinges on the useful notion of social substitution – that

is, warfare exists when group identity is such that one individual can be made to stand

in for another. Thus, in the case of revenge for a killing, rather than seeking the killer

him- or herself, any member of the killer’s group is seen as an appropriate target,

satisfying the requirements of blood vengeance. Kelly argues that this only occurs

with the appearance of agriculture in the Neolithic. It is this point that is contestable,

as it adopts a rather stereotypical view emphasising one extreme of the gamut of

hunter-gatherer societies, seeing them as egalitarian, highly mobile, and with shifting

group membership such that no real notion of group identity emerges. Not only are

there numerous ethnographic counterexamples, but the archaeological record of

Mesolithic Europe strongly suggests that in many areas people had much more

developed notions of territoriality, and that differences were marked by material

culture on a relatively small spatial scale, strongly indicative of the emergence of

group identities. But the thesis of the crucial role of social substitution itself seems

sound. There is also a strong element of mutual reinforcement here, since inter-group

conflict encourages, or even necessitates, the taking of sides, which further

encourages the use of material culture to demarcate those sides.

A paradox

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It is with the Chalcolithic (ca. 3200-2500 BC) that we first seem to see the image of a

specialised male warrior, on carved stelae in the Alpine region, and, from ca. 2500

BC, the widespread appearance of Beaker ‘warrior graves’, with fine arrowheads,

stone wristguards, copper or flint daggers and the Beaker drinking vessel itself (the

stereotypical, hard fighting, hard drinking warrior). Of course, as has been often

emphasised, this is an image, one constructed in death by those doing the burying, and

is undoubtedly an idealised one. But, regardless of its ‘reality’ in individual cases, the

simple fact that adult male identity is being constructed and portrayed in this way

indicates the importance of the warrior image. This is precisely what is lacking in the

earlier Neolithic. It could be said that the emphasis on commingled burial in mortuary

monuments that dominates the ‘Early’ Neolithic of northwestern Europe (Britain,

northwest France, southern Scandinavia) precludes any kind of particular

identification in death other than an overall community membership. But, aside from

the fact that this is in itself says something about the structure of this society, this

would not apply to the single flat graves that predominate in the LBK of central

Europe. Male graves here do tend to be associated with stone axes and projectile

points, but because of the ambiguous nature of these implements these are not seen as

warrior graves. Given the clear evidence for the use of stone axes to inflict horrific

head injuries at Talheim and other sites, it may be time to re-consider this. Perhaps

part of the male identity being marked in death here does relate to roles in warfare, as

much as to carpentry, exchange and hunting.

All this begs the question, then, of whether the appearance of more formal and

unambiguous weaponry, seen particularly with the advent of first copper but more

particularly bronze metallurgy, is associated with an increase in actual levels of

violence. As is so often the case, the question is not a straightforward one, partly

because the skeletal evidence has not yet been systematically reviewed. Experience

with the Neolithic evidence suggests that many early published accounts of injuries

are unreliable in both directions; that is, claimed injuries are often not sustained when

reviewed with modern forensic criteria, while many real injuries are missed. Yet, on

present information, it seems that there may actually be less skeletal evidence for

interpersonal violence in the Beaker period and Early Bronze Age, at least in Britain.

This has been argued by Roger Mercer and Nick Thorpe. John Robb has drawn

attention to a comparable phenomenon in Italian prehistory, where periods with

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greater material elaboration of conflict imagery actually show a lower prevalence of

skeletal injuries than periods lacking such imagery.

What happens to shift the role of conflict from the many to the few? Does this even

happen with the appearance of formalised weaponry, or does this only mark the

emergence of élite leaders, with most adult males still participating in warfare, but

using more mundane forms of weaponry – bows and arrows, wooden clubs, etc.

A traditional Marxist approach offers one approach to this question. Increasingly

conspicuous differences in wealth within communities in the Beaker period and EBA

may have increased tensions that were either largely absent or latent in the preceding

Neolithic. At the same time, as has often been suggested, it may be that traditional

kin-based networks were breaking down, and allegiances could be more easily

shifted. Under such circumstances, it may have been prudent to control the means of

violence, since the threat might come internally as much as externally. This is all

rather hypothetical, as there is no clear evidence for such within-group conflict

(though how would it be recognised?), but it may be worth exploring further.

Pacific Northwest Coast chiefs to a large extent controlled, or tried to control,

specialised weaponry, though these were often just elaborated versions of weapons –

clubs and daggers – more widely available. Firearms were an obvious exception when

they became available through the Fur Trade, and a very concerted effort was made

by chiefs to control these and distribute them to chosen followers.

The development of metallurgy and its increasing importance in the creation of

bronze weapons provides obvious possibilities for control. But this implies that such

weapons really were the state of the art, and the means by which warfare was

conducted. Yet, unless the nature of warfare changed significantly from earlier period,

projectile weapons would remain the most effective long-distance weapon, and it

would matter less whether these were stone- or metal-tipped. For close-range fighting,

the ethnographic preference is almost invariably for surprise attack rather than melee,

and again wood, antler and stone clubs would arguably be as effective for this purpose

as metal weapons. This could imply that the nature of warfare did indeed change, or

that, as many have argued, the main purpose of bronze weaponry was for display

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rather than real combat. This position, however, seems difficult to sustain in the light

of research demonstrating that bronze swords often do exhibit edge damage consistent

with use in combat, and experimental archaeology shows that objects such as halberds

previously thought to be unwieldy and ineffective, actually work quite well (at least

on stationary sheep’s heads).

Conclusion

Neither violence in general nor warfare specifically, are marked by the appearance of

specialised, formal weaponry in the European Bronze Age. Abundant and compelling

archaeological evidence demonstrates that warfare was a feature of human societies

long before this. The nature of small-scale societies – their small size, the paucity of

specialised roles, and, perhaps most importantly, the generally high degree of

autonomy and personal responsibility – is such that all men were ‘warriors’ as the

situation arose, in addition to all their other roles. This flexibility and lack of

specialisation extends to the ‘weapons’ of this time, which are for the most part

indistinguishable from tools used for other purposes. A most interesting question is

whether the emergence of formalised weaponry sees an increase or decrease in the

actual prevalence of violence, or changes in the forms it takes. Some intriguing

preliminary suggestions are that the two are inversely correlated. But further work is

required, both on use-traces on the weapons themselves, and on the skeletons that

bear the brunt of human violence.