An excellent Mark Steyn column on one of my favorite subjects:
Nicholas Wade's "Before The Dawn" is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps.But the passage that really stopped me short was this:
"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."
One group of primitive people has had some pretty good script doctors give their history a rewrite. According to the Houghton Mifflin textbook company, American Indian tribes, when they weren't being utterly benign, always managed to imbue their warfare with spirituality and nobility:
Killing an enemy or torturing a captive to death was intended to repair the metaphysical imbalance caused by a death. Some Native American women literally "dried their tears" with the scalps of enemies killed in battle.
I bet! Scalps have outstanding lachrymal absorption properties. In fact, in pre-Columbian times some tribes went through them like Kleenex:
The scalping victims considered in this study came from the Southeast, the Midwest, and the Southwest. The Midwest is by far the region with the largest sample, estimated at between 400 and 500 scalped individuals. However, most of these victims came from Crow Creek Canyon, the site of a large-scale massacre involving a minimum of 486 individuals (Gregg et al 1981). The excavators report that not only were almost every person scalped, but they also were mutilated and dismembered, and many of their hands and feet appear to have been removed and taken as trophies. This custom has been documented historically for certain Native American culture groups in the United States (Friederici 1907). Thus, it appears that something quite different from small scale raiding activities was occurring at Crow Creek Canyon.
Whoever said history is dull never had a lesson on prehistoric man's adroit use of a sharp blade.
(Via Lucianne.)
Posted by floridacracker at July 18, 2006 08:39 AM"Scalps have outstanding lachrymal absorption properties."
Native American hair has indeed been noted for its absorbent properties.
See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jfuPang3RM
http://tinyurl.com/qcfks
That's hilarious, Russ. Thanks.
Posted by: Donnah at July 18, 2006 01:38 PMJust finished reading Wade's book last night. His observations about the true baseline-state of hunter-gatherer human society caught my eye as well: universally, and regardless of location on the planet, they are and always have been locked into an eternal state of low grade warfare, and the cumulative cause of death in 30% of the male population is injury sustained in battle or as the result of being murdered ; exactly the same mortality statistic that governs the male chimpanzee population.
Noble savages indeed. Why have the social scientists been hiding this ugly fact from the 'great unwashed'? Were Rousseau and the Romanticists that influential, or is this just another example of PC in academia? Or just plain fear of this truth about human nature?
Posted by: Carl in Atlanta at July 18, 2006 02:32 PMThe Houghton-Mifflin link is a MUST READ.
The Noble Savage's wars were better than the ignorant White Man's, for they were for redistribution of wealth:
"...when Cherokee warriors returned from a successful war they gave the booty they had collected to their female relatives for redistribution among those women who had no close male relatives who could participate in raids."
Noble Savage war was less like real war, and more like boxing at the Police Athletic League:
"...Aboriginal North American warfare was also seen as an outlet for youthful male aggression."
And the Noble Savage had none of the White Man's hangups over property rights. Land was shared among warring tribes, and "colonizing" was utterly gauche:
"Most tribes viewed the possession of land in a unique way. Tribes had well-defined, sacred territorial boundaries that literally defined who they were; but these areas were relatively small and did not necessarily abut other areas. Local spirits and deities existed within these central areas, and the tribes' traditions reinforced the connection between identity and place. Territories surrounding these particular lands were shared hunting grounds or ranges, claimed by numerous groups. In effect, they were no man's lands, owned by no one but used by all. Tribal warriors might meet in pitched battles or intercept another tribe's raiding party in these neutral lands; but colonizing them, even for the sake of defense, would have been an unwarranted disruption of the natural order, necessitating a redefinition of the tribe's identity."
CJ- I was grinning the whole time I was reading the HM text. Never has killing your enemies been made to sound so noble and pure. Unfortunately, the link is to a cache of a pay site, so who knows how long it'll stay. It's from "The Encyclopedia of North American Indians Warriors and Warfare." A free pair of wading boots comes with it.
The scalping link is interesting. Braves got bonus points for scalping women and children because that meant they had gotten into a village.
Carl, one of the best little bits of information I read about where the whitewashing came from was some study that said that the public's attitudes towards Indians changed in direct correlation to their having had a family member killed by one. As the murders became fewer, so did the public's attitude shift. I was LMAO at the big freak out a few years back over the cannibalism in the caves of the Southwest.
As to why we come up now with silliness in archeological digs in foreign countries, I can only call it PC. When they open a grave that is filled with weapons and give some innocuous reason for their being there, I can't say it's anything else. You know, 'cause we're the *real* dangerous ones.