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 Crespí, a member of the Gaspar de Portolá 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 König 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 high above the valley floor meant that water and other supplies had to be carried hundreds of feet up to them. When Europeans arrived in the Southwest, Indians used such sites as retreats to hide or protect themselves against European attackers. It’s therefore assumed that cliff dwellings dated archaeologically to many centuries before European arrival were similarly used for defense against Indian attackers, especially as recourse to such sites increased with time as population density and evidence of violence were increasing. If all of this archaeological evidence weren’t enough, rock paintings dating back to the Upper Pleistocene show fighting between opposing groups, depict people being speared, and depict groups of people fighting each other with bows, arrows, shields, spears, and clubs. Sophisticated later but still pre-European art works in this tradition are the famous Maya wall paintings at Bonampak, from a society around AD 800, depicting battles and torture of prisoners in realistic gory detail.
Thus, we have three extensive bodies of information—from modern observers, from archaeologists, and from art historians—about traditional warfare, in small-scale societies of all sizes, ranging from small bands to large chiefdoms and early states.
Forms of traditional warfare
Warfare has assumed multiple forms, both in the past and today. Traditional warfare utilized all basic tactics that are now used by modern states and that were technologically possible for tribal societies. (Naturally, the means for aerial warfare were not available to tribes, and naval warfare with specialized warships is not documented until the emergence of state governments after 3000 BC.) One familiar and still-practised tactic is the pitched battle, in which large numbers of opposing combatants face off against each other and fight openly. This is the first tactic that comes to mind for us when we think of modern state warfare—famous examples including the Battles of Stalingrad, Gettysburg, and Waterloo. Except for scale and weapons, such battles would have been familiar to the Dani, whose battles developing spontaneously on June 7, August 2, and August 6, 1961, I described in Chapter 3.