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War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, by Lawrence H. Keeley
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The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past").
Building on much fascinating archeological and historical research and offering an astute comparison of warfare in civilized and prehistoric societies, from modern European states to the Plains Indians of North America, War Before Civilization convincingly demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was in fact more deadly, more frequent, and more ruthless than modern war. To support this point, Keeley provides a wide-ranging look at warfare and brutality in the prehistoric world. He reveals, for instance, that prehistorical tactics favoring raids and ambushes, as opposed to formal battles, often yielded a high death-rate; that adult males falling into the hands of their enemies were almost universally killed; and that surprise raids seldom spared even women and children. Keeley cites evidence of ancient massacres in many areas of the world, including the discovery in South Dakota of a prehistoric mass grave containing the remains of over 500 scalped and mutilated men, women, and children (a slaughter that took place a century and a half before the arrival of Columbus). In addition, Keeley surveys the prevalence of looting, destruction, and trophy-taking in all kinds of warfare and again finds little moral distinction between ancient warriors and civilized armies. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, he examines the evidence of cannibalism among some preliterate peoples.
Keeley is a seasoned writer and his book is packed with vivid, eye-opening details (for instance, that the homicide rate of prehistoric Illinois villagers may have exceeded that of the modern United States by some 70 times). But he also goes beyond grisly facts to address the larger moral and philosophical issues raised by his work. What are the causes of war? Are human beings inherently violent? How can we ensure peace in our own time? Challenging some of our most dearly held beliefs, Keeley's conclusions are bound to stir controversy.
- Sales Rank: #68811 in Books
- Published on: 1997-12-18
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.30" h x .60" w x 7.90" l, .52 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Amazon.com Review
Throughout much of this century the notion has been gaining ground, bolstered by genocide and Holocaust, that modern warfare is more barbaric than war has ever been. Alongside this view has grown a romantic impression that primitive cultures were, and are, more peaceful. Lawrence Keeley, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, aims to dispel this inversion of the connotations of "civilization." He cites the historical evidence that humans have always been just as bloodthirsty as they are today, and that indeed in the days when death was less clinical it was often nastier. War, it seems, has always been with us.
Review
"The evidence that Mr. Keeley marshals is vivid, varied, and often complex."--The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Lawrence H. Keeley is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has contributed articles to Scientific American and Nature, and has appeared in documentaries that have run on P.B.S., The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel. He lives in Oak Park, Illinois with his wife and son.
Most helpful customer reviews
79 of 86 people found the following review helpful.
An Amazing Book
By Biology Reader
This amazing little book ( 244 pgs. including footnotes and index.) should utterly change the way anthropologists view man's prehistory and the remaining prestate societies in the world. Keeley thoroughly and meticulously documents that prehistoric warfare was in fact far more frequent and deadly than modern warfare between state societies. Keeley shows that prestate warriors often more than not held their own in battles against civilized armies and often defeated them. Their ultimate defeats at the hands of state societies were often more attributable to introduced diseases and the logistical superiorty of modern economies than to military strategy and tactics. One particularly illuminating passage involves a New Guinean tribal leader who after seeing an airplane for the first time, asked for a ride and then permission to take along some heavy rocks. These rocks he wanted to drop on an enemy village!! He had understood within minutes the military significance of aircraft that had eluded many generals and admirals for a generation. Some of the passages in the book make for gruesome reading, particularly the sections on cannibalism, enemy torture, and civilian massacres. Most importantly, Keeley documents how anthropologists have in his words "pacified the past" out of a sense of guilt over imperialism and the two world wars of the 20th century. He shows numerous examples of anthropologists and archaeologists grasping at straws to explain away unambiguous evidence of warfare at numerous sites in North America and Europe. He even points out as a young archaeologist that he also engaged in a lot of similar wishful thinking. This book should be required reading in anthropology classes throughout the world, but sadly it will probably be ignored because it challenges too many entrenched beliefs.
68 of 79 people found the following review helpful.
Keely slaughters the myth of the golden age of peace
By Scott C. Locklin
Keeley utterly demolishes the "golden age" idiotological mythos with hard anthropological, ethnographic and archaeological fact. He also, very cleverly to my mind, considering the biases of modern academics, gives "primitives" a great deal of credit for their fighting prowess. There were some flaws to his thesis, of course. But this is a sort of polemic; a bludgeon with which to beat home the unarguable fact that primitive man was a violent creature; not the Rousseauean "noble savage" of popular mythology.
It also contains some great black humor, such as his recounting of a Maori chief taunting the preserved head of an enemy chief: " You wanted to run away, did you? But my war club overtook you: and after you were cooked, you made food for my mouth. And where is your father? he is cooked:- and where is your brother? he is eaten:- and where is your wife? there she sits, a wife for me:- and where are your children? there they are, with loads on their backs, carrying food, as my slaves."
Humanity is ugly. The simple fact that we are unpleasant, violent apes seems to be lost on certain social classes of people. In my opinion, you can't begin to understand people without understanding that human beings are deeply flawed creatures. We are not made horrible by our social conditions, psychological trauma or any other such nonsense: humanity is just horrible. Any meaningful discussion of sociology, history or politics must start from these assumptions, or they are destructive folly.
103 of 129 people found the following review helpful.
Archeology vindicates civilized man
By Jean-Francois Virey
"In the aftermath of the Battle of Little Bighorn, Indian women used marrow-cracking mallets to pound the faces of dead soldiers into pulp." - Lawrence H. Keeley
For Lawrence Keeley, the study of prehistory (a period which, for some peoples, ended only a few dozen years ago) has been torn between two paradigms: the Hobbesian and the Rousseauian. According to the former, primitives are warlike, and need the institution of the state to put an end to the nastiness and brutishness of their lives. According to the latter, civilization is the corrupter, subverting the harmony and peacefulness of primitive life with overpopulation, greed and the encouragement of exploitative behaviour.
For several decades, the Rousseauian myth has ruled academia, where swords have been "beaten into metaphors": omnipresent fortifications are interpreted as expressions of "the symbolism of exclusion" and weapons as a form of money or status symbols, so that- to paraphrase Keeley- the obviously bellicose becomes the arcanely peaceable.
But what the civilization-bashers had not counted on was that their Big Lie would ultimately be exposed by objective scientists working on the basis of incontrovertible facts: the archeologists, whose patient, reality-oriented detective work completely refutes the fashionable whitewashing of primitive peoples.
What bones tell us is that wars were more common among the primitives than among modern nations, that proportionately more people were involved in them and died in them. Admittedly, those wars were waged on a smaller scale than modern man's, because primitive economies could neither support the large populations nor the impressive logistics that enable modern nations to sustain long-term and wide-ranging war efforts. But relative to their population figures, primitives are a much more violent breed than civilized men.
As always, of course, statistics tell only part of the story. Just as enlightening are the picture of the corpse of a U.S. cavalryman, horribly mutilated by the Cheyenne, or the simple description of what a Tahitian warrior would do to his vanquished enemy's corpse: crush it flat with his war club, then cut a slit through it and wear it as a poncho. (Horror is mitigated by irony when one considers that, in the 18th century, "the explorer Louis de Bougainville reported that Tahitians exactly fulfilled Rousseau's predictions"...)
*War Before Civilization* is an excellent illustration of what the application of logic to reality can do to dispel the myths woven by evaders and ideologically motivated revisionists, and so long as the author sticks to his own discipline, he shines as a beacon of perspicaciousness and objectivity. Outside of his own field, though, Keeley is less brilliant: his recommendations for the preservation of peace in our age (such as compromising with our enemies or letting foreign powers monopolize resources we could produce ourselves) are examples of fallacious induction; his choice of Hobbes as the antithesis of Rousseau creates an unsavory alternative between two proponents of absolute power (which is all the more regrettable as Locke would have served the author's purposes just as well); and his endorsement of the theory that "real" war is total war makes him mistake the moral constraints of civilized warfare for a lack of realism or even inefficiency. As for his analysis of the causes of the academic distortion of the prehistorical record, it would have benefited from a familiarity with Ayn Rand's Objectivism, and Gross and Levitt's debunking of the academic left in *Higher Superstition*.
If you are the kind of person who always feels compelled to put such words as "civilized" and "primitive" in quotes, Lawrence Keeley's book is the best therapy I can think of, along with Robert B. Edgerton's *Sick Societies* and Ayn Rand's *Return of the Primitive*.
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