Implications for Understanding Neolithic Society: Violence as Communication

Any analysis of the past suffers the burden of ideologies, moralities and expectations shaped by present experience. Most people today would probably evaluate the use of physical force against others as a last resort, while throughout much of human history physical violence would have been seen as an acceptable and societally integrated course of action.

This does not mean its detrimental consequences for the individual and the group - from impairment to death, from economic hardship to loss of personal or political independence - were experienced less profoundly, though on the flipside others would have benefited. The final phases of the Linearbandkeramik at the end of the sixth millennium/beginning of the fifth millennium bc e provide a good case study to illustrate the difficulties faced when trying to integrate disparate data sets and theories while trying to ascribe origins and meaning to individual and collective incidences of violence.

While the normative skeletal record for the Linearbandkeramik does not provide evidence for an increase in violent interaction, the previously mentioned mass fatality sites certainly do, since most or all date to the closing stages of the LBK period (see Chapter 14 in this volume). This has in turn evoked the notion of a large-scale crisis, sometimes supported by other destructive acts accompanying instances of interpersonal violence (such as the deliberate smashing of artefacts seen at Herxheim). There is agreement that neither climatological data (which, at any rate, cannot be chronologically fine-tuned to be convincingly correlated with individual mass graves) nor socio-economic data (which do not indicate discontinuity when compared to the earlier LBK) can serve as a single catalyst or explanation. Violence, whether against people (and other animals?) or things, may also be viewed as societally sanctioned, planned and executed, another argument for considering it within societal norms at the time, whether resulting from a perceived crisis or not.

More importantly, though, societal norms change and adapt to lived experience, and widespread physical manifestations of violence, like those seen in a number of late LBK mass graves, or indeed the endemic levels of violence seemingly present throughout the Middle and Late Neolithic of Denmark, did not exist in a vacuum. The late LBK mass fatality sites form a distinct and unusual temporal and to some extent geographically constrained cluster, while the Danish evidence suggests more stable levels of small-scale acts of violence over time, though this picture could change in the future with a single find of a ‘massacre' site. Whether or not resulting from an ideological or otherwise constituted crisis or perceptions of what constitutes the accepted norm in terms of violent interaction may not be as important as the fact that evidence for real, physical violence does exist. In the case of the LBK, larger-scale violent events were arguably more prevalent than in the immediately preceding and succeeding periods.

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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

Implications for Understanding Neolithic Society: Violence as Communication

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