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War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage

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Review

"The evidence that Mr. Keeley marshals is vivid, varied, and often complex."--The New York Times Book Review

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About the Author

Lawrence H. Keeley is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has contributed articles to Scientific American and Nature, and has appeared in documentaries that have run on PBS, The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel. He lives in Oak Park, Illinois with his wife and son.

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Product details

Paperback: 272 pages

Publisher: Oxford University Press; Reprint edition (December 18, 1997)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0195119126

ISBN-13: 978-0195119121

Product Dimensions:

7.9 x 0.6 x 5.3 inches

Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.4 out of 5 stars

77 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#303,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

The thesis of this book is simple. Those who have written about how warfare among primitive peoples was seldom and largely symbolic are wrong.. Keeley demolishes the contention that the noble savages' seldom fought.Some other reviewers think he should have had more references - but that's absurd. Nearly one third of the pages are notes, references and appendices. This is a serious and well documented book.Although this book is not very old the idea that hunter-gatherers were peaceful is already out of favor. So in a way the whole purpose of the book is a little obsolete. I can clearly remember when the Maya for example were conceived of as a race of philosophers who sat around in the jungle contemplating the stars and thinking sweet thoughts about life, the nature of man and immortality. But almost no still believes that kind of horse-pucky anymore. Keeley's approach is probably now the mainstream.

The default position of much social science has been that the societies existing prior to human history were largely peaceful and cooperative. When they did fight with one another the `fighting' was more a kind of ritual or rough play. Ultra-violence was something practiced by modern, `civilized' man. Hobbes's views were, in effect, trumped by Rousseau's.Lawrence H. Keeley's book was written to counter that view and it does so with hard facts and common sense. Not only was the warfare of prehistory often nearly constant; it was extremely violent and vast in its effects. The percentage of a population that could be obliterated was far greater than the percentages resulting from modern, `civilized' warfare.To tell his story, Keeley utilizes a worldwide canvas, studying warfare from New Guinea to the American northern plains. He discusses the anthropology of war, the prevalence of war and its importance, the tactics and weapons employed in war, the forms of combat, the differences between primitive and civilized war, casualty rates, profits and losses, the potential causes of war, the desirability and fragility of peace and the manner in which the ancient images and ethnographic evidence have been transmuted by contemporary (and earlier) social science. Subsidiary material such as cannibalism is also given due attention.The book is readable, the evidence compelling. This is a book that should be part of the repertoire of every practicing social scientist and every political commentator. I became aware of it when one of the latter recommended it on a news broadcast. This is not a screed or a half-baked bit of special pleading. This is an extensive, nearly exhaustive Oxford University Press monograph. Check it out.

This is one of the best books on the topic I have ever read. It is well written and accompanied by a profusion of charts and tables with lots of data that supports the thesis that the author proposes, i.e., that there was war before civilization, contrary to the opinion of many many researchers and scholars. The prevailing trend was based on a worldview that considered the emergence of war as a consequence (unintended, anyway) of the complexities that the new forms of organization (protostates and empires) brought with them. With the empires appeared the war and with the war the armies, in an infinite and unstable cycle of peace and war.Now, what professor Keeley did, or better, what he discovered at some moment during the exercise of his career as an archaeologist, was that he was wrong in following the prevalent opinion. In his words: "Like most archaeologists trained in the postwar period, I emerged from the first stage of my education so inculcated with the assumption that warfare and prehistory did not mix that I was willing to dismiss unambiguous 'physical' evidence to the contrary."After some findings in Stuttgart - Germany that revealed that several "men, women and children," have been "killed by blows to the head inflicted by characteristicly Early Neolithic axes," the prevalent opinion began to stagger. "The resistance," he adds, "that we archaeologists showed to the notion of prehistoric war, and the ease whit which it was overcome when the relevant evidence was recognized, impressed me and convinced me that a book on this subject would be worthwhile."Thus, after twelve chapters you got everything you need in order to decide what to think. Anyway, the problem with accepting that the epoch we live in right now has been the most pacific of all is really hard to assimilate. Just think about it for a moment and then you can say to yourself "this is impossible." But is it?Page after page, the author exposes you to the intricacies and multi layered aspects of the human behavior, so the book is more than counting corpses and bones with holes and injury marks in them. In fact, it is about the reason behind our tendency to fight before talking. The impulse that pushes us into fight everywhere and every time. That's why the narration covers a full spectrum that goes from evolution to biology to sociology to politics and the like.If you are interested in history, in warfare, in topics about violence, aggressiveness, "human condition in extremes," "political intrigues," and so on, this is your book. Also if you want to know about that idealized world that existed before the cities (and the wars between them) destroyed the pastoral landscapes, this is your book.If you teach or if you study about war or strategy, this is your book also.You won't forget it for a long time, I guess. In fact I finished the reading some months ago but the book is still with me.And a final advice: read it after or before "Sex and war" by Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden. Both of them are genuine contributions.Five stars.

Keeley provides the best available book on the nature of war in primitive societies. The scholarship cited is extraordinarily detailed and yet very readably presented. It would do an injustice to the balance and knowledge of the author to attempt to inadequately summarize many of his conclusions in this review, but the main one may be attempted: devastating levels of chronic warfare were present in the vast majority of primitive societies on which data is available from archeological and ethnographic analysis. Warfare was actually, adjusted for population size, more destructive of life in many primitive societies than even such horrible events in modern societies as the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. The peaceful savage is indeed a myth. Mankind's propensity for war seems deeply embedded in human nature, but so too is the desire for peace. War is not invariably inevitable. Keeley offers thoughts on factors that may predispose to warfare and possible mechanisms for reducing its occurrence, but there are no simple answers to one of the greatest of human challenges - the avoidance or mitigation of war.

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