Okay, I'm browsing Archaeology Magazine online and there's an article on a Peruvian site called Taraco near northern Lake Titicaca, titled "War Begets State," which tells how, evidently, somebody burned the town about 1900 years ago which allowed their closest neighbor, Pukara(1), to flourish economically and technologically. Thus the title. The article is written by Julian Smith, the excavation led by Charles Stannish, but the key quote comes from a guy named Steve LeBlanc. From Harvard. I googled up a lecture of his called "Prehistoric Warfare: Pervasive, Deadly, Rational and Relevant." Figures. His line goes, "The models of state formation that do not see warfare as a central key element do not have it right."
These old piles of stone rubble in the coastal Supe valley had been known by archaeology since the 40's (and by the locals forever) but were ignored as just another middle-horizon knock-off, nothing to fund an excavation over, until a stubborn Peruvian digger named Ruth Shady Solis took her trowel and camel's hair brush there on her own dime and found some rough cotton textile that looked old. She sent it to Chicago for a carbon-14 test and it came back confirmed: 4,600 years old. Twelve hundred years older than any urban settlement known in the Americas.
This takes the site all the way back to Ur. All of a sudden the New World is running with the big dogs. This is monumental construction, with pyramids, plazas, palaces, temples, and an amphitheater -- it's pre-ceramic, meaning they didn't even have pottery, but they were advanced enough to marshal a work force capable of major civil engineering projects. Of startling sophistication and grace.
But the trick is this. There is no sign of war. Organized or otherwise. No layers of ash, no mass graves of crushed skulls and shattered bones, no city walls, no hilltop forts, no weapons. Their influence spread rapidly over a wide area, several river valleys, but not by military conquest. This was a religious, cultural expansion. Other peoples just thought they had a good thing going and wanted in.
We call this, knowing nothing of their language or identity, the Norte Chico civilization. They were followed by a dozen or so others we also named at our whim -- the Chavin, Sechin Alto, the Nazca, the Lambayeque and Viru valley peoples -- and these shared the same disappointing peace-torn method of expansion. They had a better mousetrap so people bought it. They built it and the people came.
It went on this way for, check it out, LeBlanc, a couple thousand years. Eventually you see graphic depictions of pretty gory stuff on Mochica ceramics, decapitations and tortured prisoners, but there's still no sign of organized warfare. Not until the Mordor of the Andes pops up in the sixth century CE (the old AD), the Wari. Their imperial phase was contemporary with Islam, which is to say, way late in history.
And yeah, around 100 CE the Pukaras probably burned Tarapaca and had a growth spurt. Stuff like that happens. But we'd had two millenia plus of city-building peoples rising and fading before the Wari invented war. And even that's in question.
But you know who else pulled that off? California. Word, dude. When the white man found the left coast the people there had been at peace for at least fifteen hundred, and very probably for more than five thousand, years.(2)
California(3) is now the most diverse and populous region north of the Rio Grande. On the other hand, California before the white man was already that way, with the most languages and cultural roots, the most people per square mile. They had been living the same life style for time immemorial. Again, here, none of the artifactual stigmata of armed conflict.
Fifteen hundred years ago there was a change in burial techniques, which, anthropologically, tends to indicate invasive influence. But still no burned villages or mangled bodies, no war clubs, swords, weaponry. And, in fact, no confederations. Each village was its own people, they didn't form organized alliances.
Californians were technologically primitive compared to the eastern tribes; no pottery, textiles, or agriculture; their tools weren't as cool as the fighting/torturing confederations of the woodlands or prairies. They didn't have to be. They had everything they needed to live well -- mild weather, infinite game and all the acorns they could leach. But they knew how to get along with their neighbors, they had refined social methodologies. Territorial borders were maintained, mostly, for hundreds, probably thousands, of years. And they made great baskets.
They weren't hippies; you wouldn't want to live with them; they had no concept of the individual, or personal freedom. Everyone was an organ of the community. The ultimate punishment was banishment.
Maybe there were formalized, ritual wars; maybe each village would send out a team, to resolve some issue. But if somebody got hurt, that would be it. Shake on it and go home.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, there were some tribes who liked to fight down in the extreme southeast corner along the Colorado River, around Needles. These guys were influenced by the pueblo cultures of the southwest, who were in turn touched by contact with the Mexican city-builders, the Aztec types, who were bellicose as hell. But their shit didn't migrate across the Mojave to the rest of California.
Check it out. Look it up. We here in LAAATD aren't proposing that war doesn't stimulate creativity, that it doesn't make for good stories, that it's not more fun than anger management interventions or playing Scrabble; but the west coasts of these continental land masses are here to say that it doesn't have to be that way. You can live without war. It's been done, long and well.
The models of state formation that do not see warfare as a central key element have it right. Live with it. Peace out.
(1) Pukara means "fort" in Runasimi
"The models of state formation that do not see warfare as a central key element do not have it right. The models of state formation...."
I cite everybody involved so as not to trigger a war. Then they might found a civilization on my ass and I, like Huck Finn, have been sivilized before and I can't stand it.
Poor Steve LeBlanc. He must be hurting. He and his guys have had the floor all their lives and the lives of their fathers and their fathers before. "War stimulates invention." All the Ur nations, the first cities of man, were built to defend against bullies. Uruk, Memphis of Egypt, Erlitou in China, Çatalhöyük (pronounce THAT, teach), Mohenjo Daro...all knew the sword and the flame. This makes for good, manly theories, justifying plenty of "defense" spending.
But here comes Caral, Peru.
Poor Steve LeBlanc. He must be hurting. He and his guys have had the floor all their lives and the lives of their fathers and their fathers before. "War stimulates invention." All the Ur nations, the first cities of man, were built to defend against bullies. Uruk, Memphis of Egypt, Erlitou in China, Çatalhöyük (pronounce THAT, teach), Mohenjo Daro...all knew the sword and the flame. This makes for good, manly theories, justifying plenty of "defense" spending.
But here comes Caral, Peru.
These old piles of stone rubble in the coastal Supe valley had been known by archaeology since the 40's (and by the locals forever) but were ignored as just another middle-horizon knock-off, nothing to fund an excavation over, until a stubborn Peruvian digger named Ruth Shady Solis took her trowel and camel's hair brush there on her own dime and found some rough cotton textile that looked old. She sent it to Chicago for a carbon-14 test and it came back confirmed: 4,600 years old. Twelve hundred years older than any urban settlement known in the Americas.
This takes the site all the way back to Ur. All of a sudden the New World is running with the big dogs. This is monumental construction, with pyramids, plazas, palaces, temples, and an amphitheater -- it's pre-ceramic, meaning they didn't even have pottery, but they were advanced enough to marshal a work force capable of major civil engineering projects. Of startling sophistication and grace.
But the trick is this. There is no sign of war. Organized or otherwise. No layers of ash, no mass graves of crushed skulls and shattered bones, no city walls, no hilltop forts, no weapons. Their influence spread rapidly over a wide area, several river valleys, but not by military conquest. This was a religious, cultural expansion. Other peoples just thought they had a good thing going and wanted in.
We call this, knowing nothing of their language or identity, the Norte Chico civilization. They were followed by a dozen or so others we also named at our whim -- the Chavin, Sechin Alto, the Nazca, the Lambayeque and Viru valley peoples -- and these shared the same disappointing peace-torn method of expansion. They had a better mousetrap so people bought it. They built it and the people came.
It went on this way for, check it out, LeBlanc, a couple thousand years. Eventually you see graphic depictions of pretty gory stuff on Mochica ceramics, decapitations and tortured prisoners, but there's still no sign of organized warfare. Not until the Mordor of the Andes pops up in the sixth century CE (the old AD), the Wari. Their imperial phase was contemporary with Islam, which is to say, way late in history.
And yeah, around 100 CE the Pukaras probably burned Tarapaca and had a growth spurt. Stuff like that happens. But we'd had two millenia plus of city-building peoples rising and fading before the Wari invented war. And even that's in question.
But you know who else pulled that off? California. Word, dude. When the white man found the left coast the people there had been at peace for at least fifteen hundred, and very probably for more than five thousand, years.(2)
California(3) is now the most diverse and populous region north of the Rio Grande. On the other hand, California before the white man was already that way, with the most languages and cultural roots, the most people per square mile. They had been living the same life style for time immemorial. Again, here, none of the artifactual stigmata of armed conflict.
Fifteen hundred years ago there was a change in burial techniques, which, anthropologically, tends to indicate invasive influence. But still no burned villages or mangled bodies, no war clubs, swords, weaponry. And, in fact, no confederations. Each village was its own people, they didn't form organized alliances.
Californians were technologically primitive compared to the eastern tribes; no pottery, textiles, or agriculture; their tools weren't as cool as the fighting/torturing confederations of the woodlands or prairies. They didn't have to be. They had everything they needed to live well -- mild weather, infinite game and all the acorns they could leach. But they knew how to get along with their neighbors, they had refined social methodologies. Territorial borders were maintained, mostly, for hundreds, probably thousands, of years. And they made great baskets.
They weren't hippies; you wouldn't want to live with them; they had no concept of the individual, or personal freedom. Everyone was an organ of the community. The ultimate punishment was banishment.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, there were some tribes who liked to fight down in the extreme southeast corner along the Colorado River, around Needles. These guys were influenced by the pueblo cultures of the southwest, who were in turn touched by contact with the Mexican city-builders, the Aztec types, who were bellicose as hell. But their shit didn't migrate across the Mojave to the rest of California.
Check it out. Look it up. We here in LAAATD aren't proposing that war doesn't stimulate creativity, that it doesn't make for good stories, that it's not more fun than anger management interventions or playing Scrabble; but the west coasts of these continental land masses are here to say that it doesn't have to be that way. You can live without war. It's been done, long and well.
The models of state formation that do not see warfare as a central key element have it right. Live with it. Peace out.
(1) Pukara means "fort" in Runasimi
(2) Thanks to Malcolm Margolin, The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area
(3) California is named for an imaginary island inhabited entirely by black women, from the novel The Adventures of Esplandian by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, 1510
