Doctoral Dissertation Research: War During the Early Agricultural Period in the North American Southwest: Evaluating the Role of Material Need and Status

在布鲁斯·哈克尔博士的指导下，菲尔·盖布将研究北美西南部(约公元前2000年至公元500年)农耕首次出现期间战争的原因。重点是科罗拉多高原的震前材料，被指定为BasketMaker II，但这项研究也将考虑该地区的战争如何适应大西南地区。被杀的可能性显然是战争的高昂代价，但对土地或食物的需求是充分和必要的权衡吗？这样的解释在直觉上似乎令人满意，因为生存手段可能会引发群体间的冲突。然而，物质利益的逻辑可能不会推动乐队和部落之间的斗争。即使在资源丰富的情况下，群体内部对地位和支配地位的竞争依然存在，因为个人在社会中的相对地位会影响生育成功。虽然资源短缺是间歇性的，但社会地位需要无休止的断言。战争可能是这种努力的舞台；甚至可能是承认成年和获得配偶的必要条件。这项拟议的研究将收集新的和现有的数据，与解释特定情况下的战争有关，进而更广泛地理解战争的原因。这项研究有两个主要目标：(1)评估Basketaker案件中对战争的唯物主义描述；(2)评估地位竞争作为动机的作用。这项研究将确定群体间冲突的直接证据(大屠杀集合)与三个与资源压力相关的因素之间的时间关系：干旱和阿罗约砍伐，营养压力的骨架指标，以及相对人口水平。评估地位竞争的作用将是一种推论练习，涉及岩石艺术、墓葬协会和其他材料遗骸。特别的重点将放在特殊的木制文物上，这些文物可能被用作防御工具，在仪式化的战斗中用来转移飞镖的防御棒。这项研究的一个重要部分将涉及对这些棍子的分析和直接AMS年代测定，以及通过使用-佩戴了解到的功能的解释。合作和冲突是人类社会在各个层面上普遍存在的特征，战争正处于它们的交汇点：最极端的竞争形式，成功需要平等程度的合作。人类近代史的恐怖充分表明，战争值得认真的人类学分析。过去没有简单的答案来防止现代世界的战争，但它应该让人们更好地认识到引发战争的因素。拟议中的研究承诺在广泛的理论意义上有助于解释战争，同时阐明战争是如何以及为什么出现在特定案例中的。在所考虑的时间间隔内，没有对战争进行系统的调查，考古记录很少被用来将战争作为一个因变量来检查。考古学可以为人类学对战争的理解做出重要贡献，因为只有考古学才能访问复杂社会形态兴起之前很长一段时间内的遥远过去的记录。考古学也为关于简单社会中战争的有争议的民族志记录提供了一个有用的对立面。

Under Dr. Bruce Huckell's supervision, Phil Geib will examine the causes of war during the interval when farming was first practiced in the North American Southwest (ca. 2000 BC - AD 500). The emphasis is on preceramic materials from the Colorado Plateau designated as Basketmaker II, but the study will also consider how warfare in this area fits into the greater Southwest. The potential to be killed is an obvious high cost of war, but is a need for land or food a sufficient and necessary trade off? Such an explanation seems intuitively satisfying because the means of survival could motivate intergroup conflict. Yet the logic of material gain may not drive band and tribal fights. Even when resources are abundant, within-group competition for status and dominance persists because an individual's relative position within society impacts reproductive success. Whereas resource shortages are episodic, social position requires endless assertion. War may serve as an arena for such striving; perhaps even a requisite for recognition of adulthood and attaining a mate. The proposed research will assemble new and existing data relevant to explaining war in a particular case and by extension to an understanding of war's causes more generally.This research has two main goals: (1) assess a materialistic account for war in the Basketmaker case and (2) evaluate the role of status competition as a motive. This research will establish the temporal relationship between direct evidence for intergroup conflict (massacre assemblages) and three factors relevant to resource stress as a causative role: droughts and arroyo cutting, skeletal indicators of nutritional stress, and relative population levels. Assessing the role of status competition will be an inferential exercise involving rock art, burial associations, and other material remains. Particular emphasis will be placed on specialized wooden artifacts that may have served as defensive tools used to deflect atlatl darts in ritualized battles 'fending sticks.' A significant part of the research will involve the analysis and direct AMS dating of these sticks with the interpretation of function informed through use-wear.Cooperation and conflict are pervasive features of human society at all scales and war is at their intersection: the most extreme form of competition where success requires cooperation in equal measure. The horrors of recent human history amply demonstrate that war deserves serious anthropological analysis. The past holds no simple answers to prevent war in the modern world, but it should allow better appreciation of the precipitating factors. The proposed research promises to contribute in a broad, theoretical sense towards explaining war while simultaneously illuminating how and why war appeared in a specific case. War has not been systematically investigated for the interval considered and seldom has the archaeological record been used to examine war as a dependent variable. Archaeology can make an important contribution toward an anthropological understanding of war because it alone accesses records from long intervals of the distant past prior to the rise of complex social formations. Archaeology also provides a useful counterpoint to the contentious ethnographic record about war in simple societies.