Current Issues Surrounding Warfare

Assuming we can get beyond the issue of the existence of significant warfare in the deep past, what are the major questions that we might address? Some of the more obvious ones are as follows.

Warfare's impact on societies could have been profound. Ian Morris argues, as does Peter Turchin, that as horrible as war is and was, it did produce positive social changes.^[68] I have argued that warfare may have been the primary means by which social systems jumped forward in terms of social complexity.^[69] To the extent that this type of argument is valid, warfare would have been a prime mover in the past for social change, a concept rarely considered for the pre-industrial age. Equally contentious are the causes of warfare. Of the many proposed, one to which archaeology can perhaps bring unique and important information is the role of climate change on changes in warfare intensity. It has long been proposed that changes in the Nile's flood­ing patterns led to some of the Egyptian kingdom collapses and the social chaos that followed, perhaps exposing Egypt to at least partial conquest. Similar arguments of climate change leading to social disruption and conflict have been made for historic period China.¹⁶ Climate has been implicated in societal collapse in the proto-historic Middle East, with less emphasis on warfare intensity change.1⁷ Less well known are various arguments that the beginnings of the Little Ice Age in North America led to increased conflict throughout the present-day United States.1⁸ Climate change has also been implicated in the Classic Mayan collapse, with its attendant increase in warfare.¹⁹ One strongly suspects there are many more such instances of climate impacting on social systems with the consequential intensification of warfare. However, to find such instances, one needs to recognise the existence of warfare, to have good enough climate data to be able to build a convincing argument about the linkage between the two, and to accept the logical relationship between them.²⁰