What Came Before

If early farming communities have until relatively recently been perceived as having been for the most part peaceful, this applies even more strongly to the hunter-gatherers of the preceding Mesolithic period.

Yet to some extent this impression can be argued to be little more than a semantic sleight of hand. Hunter-gatherer social organisation, including community membership, is often portrayed as highly fluid, so that the notion of distinct polities does not apply. This being the case, inter-group conflict, the sine qua non of warfare, becomes impossible, and all conflict is seen as occurring within the group and so is termed ‘homicide'. There are a number of problems with this character­isation, the most relevant of which for our purposes is that hunter-gatherer societies are highly variable and exhibit a wide spectrum of social organisa­tion. Group membership was not always so fluid, and indeed there is archaeological and isotopic evidence for territorial behaviours on a relatively small spatial scale. This evidence is complemented by a well-documented body of ethnographic evidence for territoriality and ‘sensitivity' to trespass as being extremely common among forager societies.^[142] Nor is there any shortage of evidence for violence-related trauma on Mesolithic skeletons; indeed, in some cases it exceeds that known for the Neolithic.^[143] There is also possible evidence for large-scale conflict, such as that seen in the ‘skull nests' found at Ofnet, Bavaria, where the heads of thirty-four men, women and children, many exhibiting lethal blows, were deposited into two pits in a cave. The presence of the uppermost cervical (neck) vertebrae, a number of which show stone tool cut marks, demonstrates the removal of fleshed heads rather than, for example, the ritual removal of crania once the flesh had decayed. Violence, then, was certainly present before the appearance of farming.

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