were the instigators. They painted themselves white, formed a war party, and advised the Mandiiumbula of their intentions. A time was set for a meeting. When the two groups had gathered, both sides “exchanged a few insults and agreed to meet formally in an open space where there was plenty of room.” As night fell—to continue the account given by Arnold Pilling and C. W. Hart—individuals from the two groups exchanged visits, since the war parties included relatives on both sides and no one regarded every member of the other group as an enemy. At dawn the two groups lined up on opposite sides of the clearing. Hostilities began with some old men shouting out their grievances at one another. Two or three individuals were singled out for special attention.
Hence when spears began to be thrown, they were thrown by individuals for reasons based on individual disputes.
Since the old men did most of the spear throwing, marksmanship tended to be highly inaccurate.
Not infrequently the person hit was some innocent noncombattant or one of the screaming old women who weaved through the fighting men, yelling obscenities at everybody, and whose reflexes for dodging spears were not as fast as those of the men.… As soon as somebody was wounded, even a seemingly irrelevant crone, fighting stopped immediately until the implications of this new incident could be assessed by both sides.
I do not mean to liken hunter-collector warfare to slapstick comedy. W. Lloyd Warner reported high rates of fatalities for at least one other northern Australian hunter-collector group called the Murngin. According to Warner, 28 percent of adult male Murngin deaths were caused by wounds inflicted on the battlefield. Bear in mind that when a whole band contains only ten adult males, one death per battle every ten years is all it takes to rack up this kind of body count.
Warfare after the development of agriculture probably became more frequent and more deadly. Certainly the scale of combat increased. Permanent houses, food-processing equipment, and crops growing in the fields sharpened the sense of territorial identity. Villages tended to remain enemies across the generations, repeatedly attacking and plundering, seeking to rout each other from their territories. Among the village-dwelling Dani of West Irian, New Guinea, warfare has a regulated “nothing fight” phase, similar to that of the Tiwi, in which there are few casualties. But the Dani also launch all-out sneak attacks that result in the destruction and rout of whole villages and the deaths of several hundred people at a time. Karl Heider estimates that 29 percent of Dani men die as a result of injuriessustained during raids and ambushes. Among the Yanomamo village horticulturalists along the Brazil-Venezuela border, raids and ambushes account for 33 percent of adult male deaths from all causes. Since the Yanomamo are an important test case, I’ve set aside a whole chapter for them following this one.
The reason some anthropologists deny the reality of high levels of combat among band and village peoples is that the populations involved are so small and spread out as to make even one or two intergroup killings seem utterly irrational and wasteful. The Murngin and the Yanomamo, for example, have population densities of less than one person per square mile. But even groups with such low densities are subject to reproductive pressure. There is considerable evidence indicating that the balance between people and resources does in fact lie behind band and village warfare and that the origin of this scourge stems from the inability of preindustrial peoples to develop a less costly or more benign means of achieving low population densities and low rates of population growth.
Before I discuss this evidence, let me review some alternative explanations and show why I think none of these is adequate to the task. The major alternatives include
war as solidarity, war as play, war as human nature
,
Hence when spears began to be thrown, they were thrown by individuals for reasons based on individual disputes.
Since the old men did most of the spear throwing, marksmanship tended to be highly inaccurate.
Not infrequently the person hit was some innocent noncombattant or one of the screaming old women who weaved through the fighting men, yelling obscenities at everybody, and whose reflexes for dodging spears were not as fast as those of the men.… As soon as somebody was wounded, even a seemingly irrelevant crone, fighting stopped immediately until the implications of this new incident could be assessed by both sides.
I do not mean to liken hunter-collector warfare to slapstick comedy. W. Lloyd Warner reported high rates of fatalities for at least one other northern Australian hunter-collector group called the Murngin. According to Warner, 28 percent of adult male Murngin deaths were caused by wounds inflicted on the battlefield. Bear in mind that when a whole band contains only ten adult males, one death per battle every ten years is all it takes to rack up this kind of body count.
Warfare after the development of agriculture probably became more frequent and more deadly. Certainly the scale of combat increased. Permanent houses, food-processing equipment, and crops growing in the fields sharpened the sense of territorial identity. Villages tended to remain enemies across the generations, repeatedly attacking and plundering, seeking to rout each other from their territories. Among the village-dwelling Dani of West Irian, New Guinea, warfare has a regulated “nothing fight” phase, similar to that of the Tiwi, in which there are few casualties. But the Dani also launch all-out sneak attacks that result in the destruction and rout of whole villages and the deaths of several hundred people at a time. Karl Heider estimates that 29 percent of Dani men die as a result of injuriessustained during raids and ambushes. Among the Yanomamo village horticulturalists along the Brazil-Venezuela border, raids and ambushes account for 33 percent of adult male deaths from all causes. Since the Yanomamo are an important test case, I’ve set aside a whole chapter for them following this one.
The reason some anthropologists deny the reality of high levels of combat among band and village peoples is that the populations involved are so small and spread out as to make even one or two intergroup killings seem utterly irrational and wasteful. The Murngin and the Yanomamo, for example, have population densities of less than one person per square mile. But even groups with such low densities are subject to reproductive pressure. There is considerable evidence indicating that the balance between people and resources does in fact lie behind band and village warfare and that the origin of this scourge stems from the inability of preindustrial peoples to develop a less costly or more benign means of achieving low population densities and low rates of population growth.
Before I discuss this evidence, let me review some alternative explanations and show why I think none of these is adequate to the task. The major alternatives include
war as solidarity, war as play, war as human nature
,
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