Thanks to Hollywood, every American knows that the Great Plains was a very violent place in the nineteenth century as Native Americans took up arms to resist European-American expansion. This fine volume demonstrates that armed conflict was very much a part of life on the Great Plains for much of its 14,000 years of human history, even though archaeological evidence of violence before A.D. 1 is relatively rare. In the introduction, coeditor Douglas Bamforth defines war broadly as community level violence sanctioned by whatever social or political units that exist in a particular time and place, and thus takes a wide variety of forms in non-state societies like those found on the Great Plains. He rejects the notion that all societies are equally warlike and that they engage in warfare in essentially the same way. While often detrimental, even catastrophic, warfare can also be beneficial. Winners can gain land, resources, and control of trade and labor.
In this study, sixteen scholars examine warfare on the Great Plains in the archaeological record. They report on research at a variety of sites from North Dakota to Texas. Archaeological evidence of warfare comes in several forms. There is abundant rock art that depicts weapons and battles. Oral histories tell of long past conflicts. Skeletal remains can show evidence of wounds obtained in battle, including crushed skulls and spear and arrow points embedded in the body. Defensive architecture is also a telltale sign of violent conflict, or at least the threat of battle, and sites with defensive structures and fortifications are fairly common on the Great Plains. Finally, destroyed and/or burned villages leave an archaeological imprint.
The authors not only report on the archaeological evidence of warfare, they also assess how war shaped the societies and the regional balances of various groups. The editors argue that neither war nor peace is inevitable, but rather the result of choices human societies make according to the circumstances.
Warfare is a very important part of the human experience and this volume is a thorough examination of conflict among small scale societies in a wide regional context. As such, it is an important contribution to the growing literature on warfare in prehistoric America.
