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.
The overall focus of this doctoral research concerns the causes of war in simple societies, using as a case study the initial farming groups on the Colorado Plateau of the North American Southwest known as Basketmakers. How the Basketmaker evidence fits into a regional pattern is also considered. A principal goal is to assess a materialistic account for war in the Basketmaker case. The potential for being killed is the 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. Research is directed at establishing the temporal relationship between direct evidence for conflict (massacre assemblages) and three indicators off resource stress: (1) droughts and arroyo cutting, which strongly impacted food production, (2) skeletal indicators of nutritional stress, and (3) population levels. The logic of material gain, however, may not drive band and tribal fights. Even when resources are abundant, within-group competition for status and dominance persists because relative position within society impacts fitness. Whereas resource shortages are episodic, social position requires endless assertion. War among Basketmaker II groups may have served as a status arena for such striving, perhaps even a requisite for recognition of manhood and attaining a mate. This research also evaluates the role of status competition as a motive for violent conflict using rock art, burial associations, and other material remains, in particular 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 effort, and the one that NSF funding was used for, involved the detailed study and direct AMS radiocarbon dating of the purported fending sticks (descriptively called "grooved curved sticks") with the interpretation of function informed through use-wear analysis based on experimental research with replicated artifacts and ethnographic specimens of known function. A fending function would be consistent with the notion that war served as a status arena with fending sticks linked to this behavior. As such, the temporal and spatial distribution of this artifact class might allow the appearance and spread of ritualistic fighting in the southwest to be juxtaposed against environmental, ecological, and social factors on a regional scale. Recovered from widely scattered locations throughout the greater Southwest, grooved curved sticks are variously referred to as throwing sticks, rabbit sticks, grooved clubs, or fending sticks. These artifacts commonly have an S-shape on the Colorado Plateau (Figure 1) whereas in southern deserts a simple curved stick is more common (Figure 2). They usually have 3 or 4 parallel grooves incised longitudinally on both faces. Two early archaeologists working in NE Arizona during the early 1900s recovered examples of these sticks along with atlatls and darts in the graves of male Basketmakers. They maintained that the artifacts were not for throwing at rabbits like those used ethnographically by the Puebloans, but instead could have been used to deflect atlatl darts. Natives on one of the Solomon Islands used an odd-shaped club for fending spears and the Kamayurá of South America knock aside atlatl darts using a bundle of spears. . NSF funding has allowed the co-PI to conduct collections research at various institutions around the country. Almost 500 prehistoric grooved curved sticks have now been were analyzed along with 25 historic (ethnographic) rabbit sticks for comparative purposes. Information about each analyzed stick was recorded on a form to ensure a standardized set of observations, with special attention paid to use-wear traces and residues. This is the first time that one individual has examined most of these artifacts, few of which have been adequately described before, especially as concerns traces of use. Funding has also allowed radiocarbon dating of many individual artifacts since the age of the grooved curved sticks has remained speculative until this study. Direct dating was a critical in order to document the chronological placement of the grooved curved sticks across the entire study region. This allows the tool to be compared in time and against the temporal pattern for other relevant variables. Dating was performed at the NSF-Arizona AMS Facility at the University of Arizona using mainly minute wood splinters removed with no visible damage to the artifacts. Sticks were judgmentally selected for dating to adequately cover the spatial distribution of sites that have yielded these artifacts, while simultaneously taking into account provenience information, important associations, and stick condition. Highest priority was given to those artifacts with secure recovery context and those that provide wide geographic coverage. The results reveal a temporal span for the sampled artifacts of about 6500 years and considerably older than expected, back to about 8000 radiocarbon years ago. Work continues and a final report on this research should be available within a few years.
