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Warfare and Violence in Prehistoric Europe: an

Introduction

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WARFARE AND VIOLENCE IN PREHISTORIC EUROPE:

AN INTRODUCTION

IAN ARMIT, CHRIS KNÜSEL, JOHN ROBB AND

RICK SCHULTING

Academia, like everything else, has its fashions. At the moment, one trend
in both North American and European archaeology has been to un-pacify
the past. Over the past decade, archaeologists have turned away from a view
of the past, dominant through much of the 1970s and 1980s, in which vio-
lence occurred seldom and had minimal social effects. The blinkers removed,
we discover skeletal and archaeological traces of conflict throughout prehis-
tory (Guilaine and Zammit 2005; Keeley 1996; Martin and Frayer 1997;
Walker 2001). We rediscover the truth: we really are a bloody species.
But what do we make of violence? How do we make sense of it when we
uncover it in the past? Our first step here must be to distrust our instincts.
As Anton Blok (2000) has observed, in state societies, violence is normally
understood as instrumental, as a political prerogative used by the state for
specific tactical ends such as maintaining order or protecting its foreign inter-
ests. Within this logic, all other forms of violence are understood as irrational
social pathologies, as deviations to be abhorred, contained, punished or cured.
As academics, we have often constructed theories based upon this position.
Because we understand and justify violence by rationalising it with reference
to a pragmatic social function such as military force or judicial punishment,
we have trouble theorising acts of violence which lack such an evident social
function. Hence we are forced into either inventing a spurious rationality for
it (such as attempts to construe Yanomamo aggression in terms of genetic
fitness) or simply noting its existence descriptively without an attempt at inter-
pretation. Yet neither strategy actually lets us understand violence. With the
former, we simply impose an ethnocentric vision of social action upon the
past. With the latter, we prevent ourselves from putting prehistoric violence
in relation to its social and cultural context, reducing our work to, at best,
simple description and at worst, a decontextualised, voyeuristic sensationalism
of broken heads, mutilated limbs, and cannibalism.
This is tricky ground to negotiate. Fortunately, anthropologists have sup-
plied us with an almost bewildering diversity of paths to follow. Modern and
historical studies provide a means to determine whether or not there is con-
tinuity between the present and the past and to refute the notion that mod-
ern perspectives have little relevance for times and places in the past. To
review the range of approaches briefly, cross-cultural studies have shown that
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2 ARMIT, KNÜSEL, ROBB AND SCHULTING

violence is present in all societies, while warfare is present in most (Ember

and Ember 1997; Kelly 2000; Knauft 1987, 1991). There has been substan-
tial exploration of violence as symbolic action, both worldwide (Aijmer and
Abbink 2000; Riches 1986) and in specific areas of the tribal world, of which
New Guinea is the best explored (e.g., Knauft 1985, 1993). Such cultural
analyses reveal social environments where violent responses are enculturated
into people—in other words socialisation for aggression. They also show the
importance of gender and status ideologies (particularly the need for adult
males and potential leaders to prove themselves and to earn prestige through
fighting and raiding), of religious ideologies (as in Aztec warfare, Conrad and
Demarest 1984), and of the intersection of cultural patterns and historical
contingencies (as in Ilongot headhunting, Rosaldo 1980). Ethnohistorically, a
wave of rising warfare accompanied early colonial situations (Ferguson and
Whitehead 1992; Wolf 1982), while 19th and 20th century colonialism often
entailed the pacification of traditional fighting. Post-modernists have explored
the meaning of violence particularly in the context of state terror and geno-
cide (Hinton 2002). Nor can economic factors be ignored. Recent perspec-
tives on the increase in modern civil conflict (i.e. conflicts involving neighbouring
peoples who are familiar to one another) portend a point of departure for
the study of early warfare, whether historical or prehistoric: ‘. . . the poorest
one-sixth of humanity endures four-fifths of the world’s civil wars. The best
predictors of conflict are low average incomes, low growth, and a high depen-
dence on exports such as oil and diamonds. The World Bank found that
when income per person doubles, the risk of civil wars halves and that for
each percentage point by which the growth rate rises, the risk of conflict falls
by a point. An otherwise typical country whose exports of primary com-
modities account for 10% of GDP has an 11% chance of being at war. At
30% of GDP, the risk peaks at about one in three’ (Anon. 2003). Marxist
and materialist analyses thus blame conflict over scarce resources rather than
cultural patterns or innate human aggression.

Warfare in social archaeology

The study of warfare and violence in past societies has long been prob-
lematic. Controversies on this issue date from at least the Enlightenment.
Lawrence Keeley, for example, has contrasted the Hobbesian view of general
conflict as the normal human condition with the Rousseauean concept of
‘primitive’ humans existing in a peaceful state of nature. The debate has been
thrown into much sharper focus during the 1990s by a series of publications,
notably Keeley’s own War before Civilization (1996) in which he proposed that
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WARFARE AND VIOLENCE IN PREHISTORIC EUROPE 3

the past had been effectively pacified by modern anthropologists for broadly
ideological reasons. Modern state societies may have an unparalleled ability
to organise destructive mass violence; yet both ethnographic studies of groups,
such as the Gebusi (Knauft 1987) and the Yanomamo (Chagnon 1968), and
archaeological studies, like recent Anasazi reinterpretations, have shown that
non-state societies are equally capable of using deadly force, sometimes with
rates of homicide and war casualties exceeding any known in the modern West.
But what of archaeology? Too often archaeology is a bit player in these
debates. Yet the study of how warfare works and how it has evolved requires
great time depth; we must get beneath the surface of recent history. We must
study different kinds of societies, from foragers to developed states. Moreover,
historically known societies are all either states or tribal societies impacted by
states (for instance, many ethnographies describe groups which have been
pacified colonially, often after a period of armed aggression); a long prehis-
toric sequence is the best way, and perhaps the only way of acquiring the
long comparative perspective necessary to understand the changing nature of
warfare.
One important consideration is ethics, the need to consider the relation-
ship of present politics and the interpretation of the past. It may be true, as
Guilaine and Zammit (2005) suggest, that European prehistorians have pacified
the past in the last sixty years out of a reaction to the horrors of the Second
World War, just as the recent increasing focus on warfare in prehistoric Europe
coincides with the Balkans conflicts, the first open warfare within Europe since
that war. This leads to a basic question: are those who interpret a past that
includes the massed violence that is warfare invoking an anachronism to
explain changes that derive from other actions? Do such interpretive scenar-
ios encourage in some way violent actions—even by discussion of them?
Moreover, who or what is responsible for these events? Are they group or
even individual-centred events, or can they be seen as a result of more regional
or even global events to which humans and human populations can only
respond and which create the necessary requisites for mass violence (see, for
example, Teschler-Nicola et al. 1999).
To the question of academic responsibility, we suggest a robust answer:
while academics should always be aware of the political context of their
research and of how their work may be integrated into nationalist or ethni-
cally driven views of the past, researchers nonetheless have a responsibility to
grapple with issues of past violence. A willfully pacified view of the past is
no less a political statement, and we can hope that our work, by tracing the
causes and history of conflict, may help counter dangerous myths of the past
and understand how we have got to the present.
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4 ARMIT, KNÜSEL, ROBB AND SCHULTING

Faced with the embarrassment of riches described above, archaeologists and

osteologists have made a meager feast. Basically, two responses characterise
the field (and see Walker (2001). The first is simply to remain at the level of
descriptive empiricism, to “rediscover” violence but leave it socially untheo-
rised (Guilaine and Zammit 2005). In Martin and Frayer’s (1997) outstand-
ing volume, for example, most attention is given simply to documenting the
skeletal presence of violence. A second trend is to relate it to simple, gener-
ally functional themes such as ecological competition for territory (Keeley
1997). For example, the protracted debate over Anasazi cannibalism has con-
centrated on either simply establishing whether or not it occurred, or upon
relating it to simplistic monocausal determinants such as ecological crisis
(though see Darling (1998)). To a certain extent, some more theoretically
minded sectors of archaeology (for example, British Neolithic studies) have
remained with a pacific vision of the past, or at most focused upon social
and economic conflict rather than physical harm.
In the last two decades, there has been an increasing emphasis on the social
role that violence and warfare have had on the distribution, continuities and
discontinuities that one sees in the material cultural record. Evidence for the
impact of this extended role is nowhere better demonstrated than in recent
interpretations putting warfare in the spotlight with regard to both the rise
of social stratification and what has previously been termed the Bronze Age
‘World System’ (Gilman 1981, Frank 1993) and the origin and spread of the
Indo-European languages: ‘With the introduction of the chariot, the composite
bow, the long sword, and the lance, warfare took on a new social, economic,
and ideological significance from the beginning of the second millennium B.C.’
(Kristiansen 2005a: 683). Colin Renfrew’s (2005) riposte to Kristiansen’s view-
point is both compelling and illustrative of the influence of the 20th-century
political climate on such sentiments. Where Kristiansen (2005b: 695) sees ‘his-
torical reasoning’, Renfrew (2005: 692) finds a perspective that led to the
‘detriment of many groups and nations’. It seems apposite that the renewed
interest in warfare and violence comes at a time when ‘ethnic tension’ has
led to the deaths and displacements of large populations in many parts of the
world from East Timor to the Balkans to Darfur, at the same time that
anthropologists begin to grasp the effects of Western societies on the ‘peoples
without history’ (Wolf 1982), and in a world dominated by the spread and
increase in acts leading to mass mortality.
In sum, osteologists, and to some extent archaeologists, have been suffering
from a double division of labour. The first involves concentrating narrowly
on accumulating empirical data and leaving social interpretation to the archae-
ologists who furnish skeletal samples. The second involves generating archae-
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WARFARE AND VIOLENCE IN PREHISTORIC EUROPE 5

ological interpretations without benefit of the rich and thoughtful social the-
ories of violence and embodiment developed in cognate disciplines. It is not
a complete caricature to say that, to anthropologists, the study of violence
and warfare is a study of tensions, confrontations, and deadly encounters with
meaning; to osteologists it is the tabulation of skulls with traumatic injuries.
The latter is certainly an important, necessary and laborious task. It is equally
necessary, though, to progress beyond this if we are to actually understand
the data we so painstakingly generate.

Research questions and methodologies for warfare and violence

As osteologists and archaeologists, we can make two substantial contribu-
tions to the study of violence and the body. First, once we get beyond a
veneer of history, which is surprisingly thin in many parts of the world, skele-
tal evidence is one of the most important primary sources on actual violence.
For example, even an anthropological treatment drawing principally upon
ethnographic sources such as Kelly’s (2000) relies upon skeletal data for direct
evidence of earlier periods. Secondly, one of the major questions of the body
in social theory concerns the status of the non-modern body. Most sociolog-
ical work on the topic attempts to situate the body as part of the uniqueness
of modern Western societies (Shilling 2003). This seems true as well for his-
torical anthropology. Elias (1994), for instance, has identified the centrality of
bodily civility in the transition from medieval to early modern Europe. Similarly,
Foucault (1977) contrasts early modern spectacular punishment with hidden
and regimented post-Enlightenment regimes of industrial and educational dis-
cipline. This habitual rhetorical contrast is difficult to overcome (as recent
archaeological attempts to use Strathern’s [1988] concepts as a model for gen-
eralised pre-modern societies demonstrate). It can certainly be useful for under-
standing ourselves, but it does not always do justice to the non-modern,
non-Western Other. In Elias’ scheme, for instance, aside from the question
of whether medieval societies, or any human societies, were ever regulated
simply by the capacity for brute violence, we are left with the impression of
a single, undifferentiated category of uncivilised bodies. This criticism certainly
applies to much of the sociological literature exploring modernity, which clearly
does not do justice to the case. One possible role for archaeology, as for his-
tory and ethnography, is to explore the world of difference among other kinds
of bodies, and other programmes of violence, than our own.
In tackling these questions archaeologically and osteologically—and we would
reiterate the importance of an integrated approach rather than allowing our
work to be fragmented along traditional disciplinary borders—there is a wide
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6 ARMIT, KNÜSEL, ROBB AND SCHULTING

range of specific questions that need to be addressed, ranging from simple

documenting of the level and nature of violence and warfare throughout pre-
history to integrating warfare and violence into the relevant political, eco-
nomic, and cultural contexts. Among others, we might cite:
– how does the nature and pattern of injuries change with the advent of new
weaponry?
– how closely does warfare as a cultural expression relate to the actual occur-
rence of bodily harm?
– what is the relation between warfare and “unsponsored” violence such as
domestic violence, homicide and transgression killings and feuding within
a society?
– are there patterns in the ways in which violence and warfare impact upon
different age, sex, gender or socio-economic groups?
– how does the political organization and scale of violence change? Is it
related to the formation of sedentary societies, stratified societies, states, or
economic classes?
– do levels of warfare and violence change through prehistory in tandem with
important social developments? For example, do we see an increase in vio-
lence with the adoption of agriculture and territoriality, or is there an
increase, earlier, among Mesolithic affluent hunter-gatherers with respect to
concentrated resources?
– what effects do the rise of early Mediterranean polities have on the fre-
quency of violence among central and northern European peoples, initially
on the periphery of such developments? Are these effects comparable to
the effects of European colonialism in historic times, which both stimulated
and repressed conflict in different cultural settings?
– is increased warfare associated with resource scarcity, particular cultural
structures, colonial expansions, or other identifiable factors?
So how do we go about addressing these questions? There are five major
data strands that we might draw upon to address some of these questions:
(1) Skeletal, comprising human skeletal remains from a range of funerary, rit-
ual and settlement sites; these can contribute both demographic data on
mortality and palaeopathological data on trauma and violence, as well as
records of health, growth and development, and stress which provide a
context for studying the causes underlying warfare.
(2) Iconographic, including indigenous and classical statuary, art-works in var-
ious media, and extending to the representation of warrior status in funer-
ary and ritual contexts. Iconography, while rarely a literal record of events,
provides essential insight into the cultural status, role and elaboration of
violence.
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WARFARE AND VIOLENCE IN PREHISTORIC EUROPE 7

(3) Artefacts, principally weaponry and defensive armour. Artefacts provide

both valuable concrete information about the technology of violence and
a body of material culture which can be studied to understand issues such
as sex and gender associations and symbolic investment in conflict.
(4) Architecture, including hillforts, earthworks and defended vs. open settle-
ment patterns. As noted above, while such structures may not necessarily
conform to our notions of effective functionality, they can give evidence
about the social organisation of conflict, the level of perceived threat, and
similar issues.
(5) Documentary sources, almost exclusively in the form of commentaries from
literate societies on late prehistoric European societies.
Each of these sources requires appropriate methods. To take one example,
skeletal evidence, if we are to make our interpretations meaningful we need
to be able to access data that has been analysed and presented in a directly
comparable fashion across period and geographical boundaries. For example,
how can we draw meaningful inferences from the occurrence of, say, 2%
unhealed cranial trauma in a given cemetery population? Does that represent
a high or a low prevalence of lethal violence? There are of course many con-
textual variables; what was the nature of the weaponry in use at the time
(clubs will leave a very different ‘signature’ (e.g. blunt force trauma) on a
cemetery population from that left by arrows (projectile or penetrating trauma)?
And how representative of the wider society is the cemetery population? These
are important variables. Yet at a very basic level we need to know what the
comparable rates of such trauma are for neighbouring regions, for other
chronological periods, and for potentially analogous contexts elsewhere. More-
over, at present any attempts to gauge the general patterns are bedeviled by
under-reporting of trauma, particularly in early osteoarchaeological reports, a
lack of standardisation in analysis, and inconsistency of reporting, to mention
just some of the more obvious problems. In the resulting vacuum, interpre-
tations have been local and grounded in supposition rather than statistics. For
example, in an Iron Age British context the same limited cemetery data has
been used to argue both for a very high and a negligible prevalence of vio-
lence in Iron Age society (Sharples 1991, 81; Craig et al. 2005).

Conflict in European prehistory: the papers in this issue

Is there potential to study these issues in prehistoric Europe? The confer-
ence from which these papers come derives from the recognition of problems
in the way that violence and warfare have been handled in European archae-
ology. Is history the conflict-ridden surface covering a deep, peaceful prehis-
toric continent? Or have warfare and violence always been with us in some
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8 ARMIT, KNÜSEL, ROBB AND SCHULTING

form? If so, how have they changed as European societies have evolved from
Palaeolithic foragers to the states at the dawn of history?
The rich and varied archaeological record of prehistoric Europe has, arguably,
been more densely studied than any comparable area across the globe. Yet
there is very little agreement on either the nature or the prevalence of war-
fare in the region (cf. Guilaine and Zammit 2005, Parker Pearson and Thorpe
2005). A good deal of important archaeological data is either unpublished or
else lies unread in unsynthesised case studies. Added to this, investigators have
sometimes taken the preserved record at face value with simplistic interpre-
tations, failing to consider fortifications, weaponry, and iconography as per-
haps rhetorical representations of violence rather than as direct evidence of
it. Sometimes, too, though, they have tended to see such structures as being
of ritual significance due to perceived ‘design flaws’ that in some cases have
been shown to be quite satisfactory defensive works on the basis of ethno-
graphic and historical analogies (Arkush and Stanish 2005). And the lack of
a synthesis of these indicators has made it difficult to compare the presence
and level of warfare at different times and places throughout European pre-
history and to evaluate the various arguments that have been suggested for
the causes of war. As a result, much of the most dynamic recent discussion
of prehistoric warfare has tended to focus elsewhere; especially in United
States, where there has been a good deal of active recent debate.
The European sequence sees the development of major social changes: the
advent of farming, the rise of elites and craft specialists, the manufacture and
social use of metals, the rise of weapons as a gender and prestige symbolism,
and the environmental effects of these processes. By placing prehistoric war-
fare in relation to such changes within a nuanced deep prehistory, we can
begin to evaluate alternative ideas about the relations between conflict, vio-
lence and social setting, and to generate new theoretical understandings of
warfare and society.
The papers in this volume will help to focus the debate on the role of war-
fare and violence in European prehistory. The conference, and this issue,
brings together archaeologists from different parts of Europe to discuss different
aspects of warfare and violence. The topic of warfare and violence in the past
is a large one—indeed, it certainly justifies not merely an issue but a dedi-
cated journal such as this one. These six papers serve both as important case
studies in themselves and as indicators of the highly varied directions and tra-
ditions through which archaeologists have approached the question.
Orschiedt and Haidle provide an insightful example of the value of work-
ing at a very small scale, here the analysis of a single site. At Herxheim, they
show that apparently similar situations of violence and ritual destruction of
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WARFARE AND VIOLENCE IN PREHISTORIC EUROPE 9

bodies can be distinguished through careful study. At this late Linearbandkeramic

site, what appears to be a random and disorderly deposition of fragmented
human remains is actually a highly structured assemblage created through sys-
tematic ritual practices, not through massacre. McCartney, similarly, focuses
upon the interpretation of conflict at the local level. She draws upon cross-
cultural research to argue that there is a close linkage between high levels of
violence and cultures of fear, and that the latter will be reflected in archi-
tecture. On this basis, she then interprets the delineation of domestic space
and restriction of access to it in late Iron Age Aix-en-Provence as evidence
for such an orientation towards violence and fear, an interpretation bolstered
by iconographic and other evidence for warfare and warriors.
Contextualising violence within regional traditions and histories is the
approach taken by Mercer and Ivanova. In an extremely thought-provoking
analysis, Mercer questions the oft-repeated dogma that violence was uniformly
present in British later prehistory, rising particularly with Beaker “warriors”.
He argues that the archaeological record actually reveals relatively little vio-
lence between 3000 cal B.C. and 1500 cal B.C.; weapons such as bi-facially
flaked arrowheads and spears were used for hunting, and “daggers” were used
for sacrifice. It was only in the later Bronze Age that violence became com-
mon, this time in the context of increasing focus on defining territorial bound-
aries. Ivanova similarly provides a socially contextualized prehistory of violence
in Bulgaria between 5000 and 4000 cal B.C. Principally using fortified vil-
lages as evidence of a preoccupation with defense, supplemented by the rise
of weaponry partway through this period, she shows clearly how, while vio-
lence was always present throughout this period, it was not a constant state
of warfare; rather, there were distinct waves of conflict that must have arisen
within specific historical contexts.
Finally, two papers approach warfare and violence on a much larger scale,
that of entire continents, and the way in which they do so exemplifies quite
distinct long-standing traditions of study. Using detailed climatic data from
ice cores and other sources, Gronenborn argues for a large-scale correlation
between global climatic events, principally cooling episodes, and increased lev-
els of violence. It is argued that worldwide cooling events during the Holocene
made economic life more unstable and unpredictable, and this led to increased
conflict. Three particular moments are noted: the period around 6000 B.C.
of the Ofnet massacre, the late LBK featuring mass burials such as Talheim
and Schletz, and the 37th century B.C. expansion of the Michelsberg culture.
Here violence is taken principally in terms of conflict over resources, and
hence can be correlated with situations in which such conflict is likely to arise.
In contrast, Mallory treats warfare and violence as particular not to environmental
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10 ARMIT, KNÜSEL, ROBB AND SCHULTING

or social contexts but to cultural traditions, in this case, that of people speak-
ing Indo-European languages. Through a wonderfully erudite review of the
vocabulary of weapons, aggression, defense, and customs of warfare in Indo-
European languages, accompanied by discussion of related archaeological finds,
Mallory outlines the social institutions of conflict in later prehistoric Europe.
What is common to all of these papers, regardless of the scale of vision
and the material analysed, is the determination to treat conflict as socially
and historically contextualized rather than as a “natural” universal. It is neither
facile nor pessimistic to conclude with the observation that a satisfactory pre-
history of warfare and violence in Europe will require research along the lines
of all six, from detailed taphonomic studies at particular sites to constructions
of regional histories and finally to the bold attempt to tackle the big ques-
tions of tradition, context and causation on the continental scale.

Acknowledgements

The conference which gave rise to these papers was funded by grants awarded by
the British Academy, the Environment and Heritage Service of Northern Ireland and
supported by the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s
University Belfast.

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