Native North American Armor, Shields, and Fortifications (review)

David Jones is one of those rare anthropologists interested in warfare. Taken aback by the lack of work describing the defensive technologies of Native Americans, he has set out to provide a wide-ranging survey of the titular items across all of North America.

Each chapter surveys a different cultural area of North America, listed here in order of treatment: the prairie, California, the high plains, the northeast, the plateau/great basin, the southwest, the subarctic, the Pacific northwest, the southeast, and finally, the north Pacific. This is an odd sequence that seems almost deliberately designed never to discuss two adjoining areas in a row. At any rate, within each chapter Jones provides a brief layout of the defining geographic characteristics of the region, the general nature of subsistence practices, and the basic forms of offensive weaponry in use. The bulk of each chapter is then dedicated to defensive technology, with each type getting its own section. On occasion there are some very helpful diagrams and drawings of armor and forts, although oddly, not a single shield (or a single map). This is rich material. Persons unfamiliar with Native American warfare will be surprised by the range and complexity of defensive technology, from the Chukchee's full-body telescoping armor, to the Tlingit use of cannon in 1804, to the ditched, palisaded, bastioned, and towered, forts of many peoples.

Jones's purpose is to fill the void in treatments of defensive technology, and to add the fortified, armored, and shielded warrior to our normal vision of an Indian way of war. Each chapter is essentially a narrative catalog of peoples and their defensive technology. To this listing, Jones has tried to add two or three conclusions relating warfare to larger social and political issues. The most important is his borrowing of John Keegan's categorization of fortifications into refuges, strongholds, and strategic defensive networks. Keegan argued that the use of a given type correlated to that society's political complexity. Jones feels that the North American evidence substantiates this idea, suggesting that all three categories were in use, the type in use corresponding to political complexity and subsistence strategy.

This is a very short book for a very large subject, and the length alone may explain whatever shortcomings the book has. Condensed here is a tremendous amount of valuable material for comparative background or as a foundation for more detailed studies. In this sense the book lives up to its purpose. There are some problems, however. Jones is not careful enough in his application of Keegan's definitions. There were clearly refuges and strongholds, but Jones only hints at the presence of strategic defenses for the southwest, and he does not show them at all in the southeast, although in his conclusion he claims both areas had them (p. 162). Furthermore, Jones ignores the way Keegan defined fortifications by their military function (a refuge is for surprise attacks; a stronghold is a fighting platform, etc.). In Jones's formulation, as long as a society was complex enough, they would aspire to the most complex fortification system, without regard to the nature of the threat. In fact, consideration of the threat is the real shortcoming here. Jones does not show how defensive technology developed in response to a style of offensive warfare. He worries a great deal about offensive technology (the penetrating power of the bow, etc.) but not as much about how it was used. Many of the answers are lurking in his material, but he does not stop long enough in his end-of-chapter summaries to develop them. Linked to this problem is an inattention to chronology. Jones only deals with change over time when it is nearly unavoidable—as in the arrival of the horse and gun into the high plains cultures. This is particularly true in his discussion of the offensive threat, but he also frequently refers to a fort or...