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

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.