Warfare in the Prehistoric Southwest

An Interview with Steven LeBlanc

ALTHOUGH MUCH OF THE GENERAL PUBLIC and many anthropologists view the ancient Puebloans as peaceful and having lived in harmony with their environment, archaeologists recently have shown increasing interest in warfare and social conflict in the prehistoric Southwest. In the following interview, Stephen LeBlanc discusses the kinds of archaeological evidence for such violence and addresses the underlying causes for the warfare in both climatic conditions and genetic tendencies.

The evidence for warfare comes primarily in four forms: settlement data, skeletal evidence, weaponry, and iconography. Settlement information involves defensive site location, architecture, and settlement patterns. Inaccessible rock shelters and mesa tops are examples of defensive sites, while high walls, towers, palisades, and moats represent defensive architecture. Settlement patterns include consolidation of small communities into larger pueblos, the aggregation of buildings into larger, more compact units, clustering of villages for common defense, line-of-site communication with other settlements, and the creation of no-man's-lands. Burned sites can give particularly compelling evidence for war. Skeletal evidence may involve fracturing and burning of bones, projectile points embedded in skeletons, and so on. Weaponry provides important evidence for warfare. Changes in weapons technology, such as the introduction of the recurved bow, often coincided with periods of increased warfare. Finally, iconography includes images of warfare on rock art, pottery, and kiva murals.

LeBlanc focuses on three prehistoric southwestern cultures: the Anasazis, who lived in the northern Rio Grande and Colorado Plateau regions and are believed to be the main ancestors of the modern Pueblo Indians; the Mogollons, who lived in a region in west-central New Mexico and in east-central Arizona below the Mogollon Rim that had been abandoned by the time of Spanish contact; and the Hohokams, who dwelled in the Salt River drainage of Arizona and are believed to be ancestral to the Pimas (Akimel O'odhams). While considerable evidence for warfare has been found in all three regions, the clearest evidence comes from the Anasazi area, especially after 1250 A.D.

Today Pueblo Indians are the cultural heirs of a tradition of farming villages dating back at least 1,500 years. LeBlanc identifies three distinct periods of the prehistoric Southwest and attempts to correlate warfare with climatic conditions. The Early Period, ranging from 200 to 900 A.D. (corresponding to the Basketmaker and Pueblo I period of the Anasazis), was a time of average climate. During this period, the Puebloans lived in small villages, practiced rudimentary agriculture, and engaged in extensive but small-scale warfare (raiding, ambush).

The Middle Period, from 900 to 1250 A.D. (the Pueblo II period), corresponded to the Medieval Warm Period when the worldwide climate was warmer and drier and hence more favorable for agriculture. Warfare in the Southwest decreased dramatically during this time. It was the era of the Chacoan Interaction Sphere, when Chaco Canyon was the center of an extensive system in which goods and information flowed between outlaying communities and the central canyon. In the various communities of the interaction sphere, large buildings (some known as "Great Houses") were surrounded by many smaller dwellings, indicating a social differentiation between an elite and commoners. The archaeology of this era gives evidence for cannibalism or at least for "extreme processing" of human corpses. LeBlanc does not believe that these were cases of starvation-induced cannibalism. Instead, he thinks that an elite group may have used terrorism to intimidate and control its populace. In any case, the existence of cannibalism does not provide evidence for intergroup warfare, which was minimal during the Middle Period.

The Chacoan system went into decline in the mid-1100s. During what LeBlanc calls the Late Period (1250 to 1500 A.D., the Pueblo III and IV periods), violence took place on a large scale. This occurred especially at the beginning of this age when a number of villages were burned and numerous small villages were aggregated into larger, defensible pueblos. According to LeBlanc, the underlying cause for the intense Late Period warfare was a marked deterioration of the climate, leading into the Little Ice Age, when the climate worldwide became colder and drier, causing loss of agricultural potential. The climatic change was so dramatic that farming was discontinued over much of the Southwest. The scarcity of resources encouraged warfare among the ancestral Puebloans as well as defensive site locations and architecture and the establishment of more inclusive core communities. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the consolidation of the many communities that had existed earlier into a much smaller number of large pueblos along the Rio Grande, as well as at Acoma, Zuni, and the Hopi mesas. The appearance and development of the kachina cult during the fourteenth century may have helped to cut across kin and ethnic divisions, fostering the cohesion of large communities.

LeBlanc argues that warfare was endemic to ancestral Puebloan society. Despite alternative explanations for any given piece of evidence, multiple lines of evidence all point toward the widespread existence of warfare in the early Southwest. He disputes that the violence was directed against ancestral Apaches or Utes, for the simple reason that the major warfare occurred before these groups arrived in the Southwest. Rather, the wars occurred between different Puebloan groups.

The major Late Period warfare occurred simultaneously at a number of sites throughout the region, at a time when the world climate was changing for the worse, which strengthens LeBlanc's case for what he calls a "scarce resources/carrying capacity model" for the origin of war. In his view, such other motives as revenge or warrior prestige are secondary, happening after earlier wars over resources. Influenced by Lawrence Keeley's War before Civilization (1996), he points out that people lived as hunter-gatherers during most of the million years of human history. During human evolution, war did not involve large, formal battles but raiding and ambush. This form of violence, with many small-scale attacks, over time led to...