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LeBlanc, Steven A. with Katherine E. Register.
Constant Battles.
New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2003.
ISBN 0-312-31090-0.
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Steven LeBlanc is the Director of Collections at Harvard
University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. When
he began his fieldwork career in the early 1970s, he shared the
opinion of most of the archaeologists and anthropologists of
his generation and present-day laymen that most traditional
societies in the hunter-gatherer and tribal farming eras
were mostly peaceful and lived in balance with their environments.
It was, according to this view, only with the emergence of large
chiefdoms and state-level societies that environmental degradation
began to appear and mass conflict emerge, culminating in the
industrialised slaughter of the 20th century.
But, to the author, as a dispassionate scientist, looking at the
evidence on the ground or dug up from beneath it in expeditions
in the American Southwest, Turkey, and Peru, and in the published
literature, there were many discrepancies from this consensus
narrative. In particular, why would “peaceful” farming
people build hilltop walled citadels far from their fields and
sources of water if not for defensibility? And why would
hard-working farmers obsess upon defence were there not an
active threat from their neighbours?
Further investigations argue convincingly that the human experience,
inherited directly from our simian ancestors, has been one of
relentless population growth beyond the carrying capacity of our
local environment, degradation of the ecosystem, and the inevitable
conflict with neighbouring bands over scarce resources. Ironically,
many of the reports of early ethnographers which appeared to
confirm perennially-wrong philosopher Rousseau's vision of the “noble
savage” were based upon observations of traditional societies which
had recently been impacted by contact with European civilisation:
population collapse due to exposure to European diseases to which they
had no immunity, and increases in carrying capacity of the land thanks
to introduction of European technologies such as horses, steel tools,
and domestic animals, which had temporarily eased the Malthusian
pressure upon these populations and suspended resource wars. But the
archaeological evidence is that such wars are the norm, not an
aberration.
In fact, notwithstanding the horrific death toll of twentieth century
warfare, the rate of violent death among the human population has
fallen to an all-time low in the nation-state era.
Hunter-gatherer (or, as the authors prefer to call them,
“forager”) and tribal farming societies typically lose
about 25% of their male population and 5% of the females to warfare
with neighbouring bands. Even the worst violence of the nation-state
era, averaged over a generation, has a death toll only one eighth
this level.
Are present-day humans (or, more specifically, industrialised
Western humans) unprecedented despoilers of our environment
and aggressors against inherently peaceful native people?
Nonsense argues this extensively documented book.
Unsustainable population growth, resource exhaustion,
environmental degradation, and lethal conflict with neighbours
are as human as bipedalism and speech. Conflict is not
inevitable, and civilisation, sustainable environmental
policy, and yield-improving and resource-conserving
technology are the best course to reducing the causes of
conflict. Dreaming of a nonexistent past of peaceful
people living in harmony with their environment isn't.
You can read any number of books about military history, from
antiquity to the present, without ever encountering a discussion
of “Why we fight”—that's the subtitle of this
book, and I've never encountered a better source to begin
to understand the answer to this question than you'll find here.
August 2007 