Andrew Clark - Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains

notes, the weight of the evidence has a literal meaning in our field that requires us to attend to that evidence, and war can leave dramatic traces that demand our attention if we are to approach a truthful account of the human past.

In part, understanding human choices about war and peace depends on what we mean by war. Formal war in the modern senseorganized violence sanctioned by explicit government decisions and involving combat between standing armiesreflects the organization of modern state societies and thus does not necessarily help us to understand organized social violence in other times and places. If we use a definition like this, we can simply define war out of existence for many past societies, despite the fact that these societies manifestly bore the immense costs of violence. Beyond an aversion to seeing war in the past, the major issue underlying the problem of defining war is the absence of formal decision-making hierarchies in many ancient and modern social groups. Furthermore, a view of war focused on such hierarchies misrepresents the variety even of modern patterns of social violence, which increasingly involve smaller-scale combat by non-state actors.

If we define war more broadly as community-level violence sanctioned by whatever recognized social or political units exist in a particular time and place, it is clear that it takes a variety of forms in non-state societies like those on the indigenous Great Plains. This variety includes raids by small groups (seeking captives or other specific targets, to avenge individual affronts, or in search of glory and status), largely ceremonial and low-casualty confrontations between more or less equally matched forces, and full-scale assaults by massed attackers that can result in the total destruction of large communities. Used in this way, the term war subsumes a continuum of violence and a range of relatively distinct kinds of conflict with differing logistic, social, and other implications and requirements. But it does not subsume all violence, and this is especially important in an archaeological context (as I discuss in more detail below).

All of these forms of war are and were important in the lives of people today and in the past. Observations of war in a range of recent societies leave no doubt that it shaped those lives in fundamental ways that we do not always take account of in our discussions of the human past (). Conflicts that produce small numbers of deaths in any single engagement can have serious aggregate demographic effects in small social groups; construction of even simple defenses takes time, resources, and labor that have significant opportunity costs; and the natural and constructed features that prevent attackers from entering settlements (and from escaping if they do enter and are discovered) are also inconvenient for the people who live in those settlements. Archaeologists typically consider human use of the landscape entirely or almost entirely in terms of the distribution of favorable settlement locations and needed resources, but proximity to enemies can keep residential groups from using even the best land that they might otherwise have access to. Aggregating into larger groups for defense also requires access to larger food supplies, demands longer travel to important locations (such as agricultural fields), and depends on social mechanisms for maintaining order that small social groups do not need. Such aggregations also often bring together previously geographically dispersed kin groups who, when dispersed, might have been able to share geographically dispersed resources in hard times. Fortified aggregations have larger social implications as well: independent defended communities are often isolated from one another, potentially inhibiting the formation of larger regional social groups, and effective fortifications make it possible for such communities to resist the formation of such groups if they choose to do so. Defeats in conflict, whether due to a series of cumulative small losses or to a single massive loss, can also result in the loss of social identity, as survivors integrate into other communities or subservient social groups, and the involuntary movement of captives among groups changes labor and other relations and can introduce new ideas and skills.