What saves scientific propositions from being mere intellectual fashions is their ability to withstand testing against critical evidence. As is true of all ideas everywhere, scientific understanding is usually rooted in the values and attitudes of a particular era or culture. The anthropologists whose interpretations have helped artificially to pacify the past were in a sense merely possessed by the spirit of their times. The resulting fashionable ideas concerning precivilized warfare are the products of discrimination, then, not ignorance or prevarication. Archaeologists, relying on the time-honored method of “ethnographic analogy,” have contributed to the pacification of the past by blithely ignoring the problem of prehistoric violence.

Similarly, the advocates of prehistoric peace ignore the very archaeological evidence that disproves their case.

They have devoted special attention to the murky question of motives. These proponents have evaluated the effectiveness of tribal war entirely on the ethnocentric grounds of how similar its conduct was to modern warfare rather than on the basis of its actual effects. Thus the proponents of safe and ineffective primitive war have focused on stylized and low-casualty battles in preference to the rarer massacres and much more frequent raids that killed most people. They relied on available evidence, but often the data cited were quiteirrelevant to their key ideas. But the concepts of primitive war and prehistoric peace were not the products of pure imagination or conscious falsehood. In the postwar atmosphere of anxiety, malaise, and dissatisfaction with Western civilization, anthropologists have introduced doctrines concerning precivilized violence consistent with this mood.

Lawrence h keeley