Bibliographic Essay

Since publication of Lawrence Keeley's War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), research has focused on the violent behaviour of prehistoric populations.

A number of books have been published on violence in recent years, and these combine various aspects of violent behaviour in different time periods and geographical areas: C. Knusel and M. J. Smith (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Human Conflict (London: Routledge, 2014); Debra L. Martin and David W. Frayer (eds.), War and Society, vol. iii, Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past (Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1997); and J. Carman and A. Harding (eds.), Ancient Warfare: Archaeological Perspectives (Stroud: Allan Sutton, 1999). Only in 2014 Mark W. Allen and Terry L. Jones edited Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press). A growing number of case studies have been published within the last years, but only a few articles and chapters have an overview character like V. H. Estabrook's ‘Violence and Warfare in the European Mesolithic and Palaeolithic', in Allen and Jones's (eds.), Violence and Warfare, or R. Brian Ferguson's ‘The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East', in Douglas P. Fry (ed.), War, Peace, and Human Nature. The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 191-240.

One of the earliest cases of violence dating to the Middle Pleistocene comes from the famous site of Atapuerca, Sima de los Huesos, described by N. Sala et al. in ‘Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene', PLoS ONE 10 (2015), https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0126589, and ‘The Sima de los Huesos Crania: Analysis of the Cranial Breakage Patterns', Journal of Archa.eologi.cal Science 72 (2016), 25-43.

A number of articles focus especially on Neanderthals, including T. D. Berger and E. Trinkaus, ‘Patterns of Trauma among the Neandertals', Journal of Archaeological Science 22.6 (1995), 841-52, and E. Trinkaus, ‘Neandertals, Early Modern Humans, and Rodeo Riders', Journal of Archaeological Science 39.12 (2012), 3691-3. The healed traumatic lesions on various skeletal elements from Krapina in Croatia are described by V. H. Estabrook and D. W. Frayer in ‘Trauma in the Krapina Neandertals: Violence in the Middle Palaeolithic?', in Knusel and Smith (eds.), Routledge Handbook, pp. 67-89.

Violent behaviour in the Upper Palaeolithic is only described in isolated case studies. The largest collection of cases is presented by E. Trinkaus, et al. in ‘Skeletal and Dental Palaeopathology', in E. Trinkaus and J. Svoboda (eds.), Early Modern Human Evolution in Central Europe: The People of Dolni Vestonice and Pavlov (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 419-65. The only study describing a lethal injury so far from the Upper Palaeolithic is the case of the Sunghir 1 burial presented by E. Trinkaus and A. P. Buzhilova in ‘The Death and Burial of Sunghir 1', International Journal of Osteoarcheology 22.6 (2011), 655-66. For the Late or Final Palaeolithic the most striking examples are cases from the cemetery of Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, which are described in F. Wendorf (ed.), The Prehistory of Nubia, vol. ii (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1968) and by M. Judd in ‘Jebel Sahaba Revisited', in K. Kroeper, M. Clodnicki and M. Kobusiewicz (eds.), Archaeology of Early Northeastern Africa, Studies in African Archaeology 9 (Poznan: Poznan Archaeological Museum, 2006), pp. 153-66. The Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene boundary is represented by the newly published site of Nataruk, analysed by Marta Lahr and colleagues in ‘Inter-group Violence among Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya', Nature 529 (2016), 394-8.

Only a few articles, chapters and books have so far produced an overview on the Mesolithic: see V.

H. Estabrook's ‘Violence and Warfare in the European Mesolithic and Palaeolithic', in Allen and Jones (eds.), Violence and Warfare among HunterGatherers; the volume edited by M. Roksandic, Violent Interactions in the Mesolithic, BAR International Series 1237 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2004); N. Thorpe, ‘Origins of War: Mesolithic Conflict in Europe', British Archaeology 52 (2000): 9-12; S. Vencl, ‘Stone Age Warfare', in J. Carman and A. Harding (eds.), Ancient Warfare: Archaeological Perspectives (Stroud: Allan Sutton, 1999), pp. 57-73; and S. Vencl, ‘Interpretation des blessures causees par les armes au Mesolithique', L'Anthropologie 95 (1995), 219-28. A special situation is indicated by the so-called head burials of the Mesolithic, and the treatment of these heads is described in a study of the Mannlefelsen remains in Alsace: B. Boulestin and D. Henry-Gambier, ‘Le crane mesolithique de l‘abri du Mannlefelsen I a Oberlarg (Haut-Rhin): Etude des modifications osseuses', in B. Boulestin and D. Henry-Gambier (eds.), Cranes trophees, cranes d'ancetres et autres pratiques autour de la tete: problemes d'interpretation

en archeologie, BAR International Series 2415 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012), pp. 77-88. For the sites of Ofnet and Hohlenstein-Stadel, in southern Germany, see D. W. Frayer in ‘Ofnet: Evidence for a Mesolithic Massacre', in Martin and Frayer (eds.), Troubled Times; and J. Orschiedt, ‘The Head Burials from Ofnet Cave: An Example of Warlike Conflict in the Mesolithic', in M. Parker Pearson and N. I. J. Thorpe (eds.), Warfare, Violence and Slavery in Prehistory, BAR International Series 1374 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), pp. 67-73.

<< | >>

↑

Source: Fagan Garrett G., Fibiger Linda, Hudson Mark, Trundle Matthew (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 756 p.. 2020

Bibliographic Essay

More on the topic Bibliographic Essay: