The Archaeology of Regional Interaction: Religion, Warfare, and Exchange across the American Southwest and Beyond

3: Regional Interaction and Warfare int he Late Prehistoric Southwest

The impact of warfare on the sociopolitical landscape of the Southwest has been largely unrecognized. This oversight applies particularly to the late prehistoric period, a time when—as is becoming increasingly clear—we know warfare was playing a major role in community formation and interaction. Because the act or process of warfare itself has been underrecognized in the Southwest, the implications of its existence have been considered even less; as a consequence, much of what follows is relatively uncharted water. The goal here is to look at regional social interaction in the Southwest in a framework that includes warfare. At this point the result of this analysis is a distinctly different paradigm rather than a new and clear model of behavior. BACKGROUND Warfare in nonstate-level societies has been much misunderstood. Lawrence Keeley (1996) has gone a long way to clarify the actual situation (see also LeBlanc 1999). In short, nonstate warfare was common in the past and was rather deadly. Keeley convincingly demonstrates that the facts do not support the idea that such warfare was rarely fatal, ritual, and without purpose. In particular, the presumption that raids and ambushes are not real warfare and that only formal battles constitute true warfare is not valid. Nonstate societies use all of these means of fighting a part of overall campaigns. Not only do raids and ambushes result in 41 3 REGIONAL INTERACTION AND WARFARE IN THE LATE PREHISTORIC SOUTHWEST Steven A. LeBlanc 42 Archaeology of Regional Interaction considerable numbers of deaths over the course of decades, but such activities occasionally result in massacres of entire groups, with great loss of life. Formal battles are also often misunderstood. Whereas few deaths may result from one such engagement, many societies have frequently faced off in formal battles, again leading to high overall rates of death. In fact, Keeley shows that a death rate of 25 percent of all males as a result of warfare was not uncommon in the past. As a result of this new understanding, warfare is more usefully defined as armed, sanctioned conflict between politically autonomous groups regardless of the means employed (see Meggitt 1977). Previous interest in southwestern warfare focused primarily on documenting its existence. Early efforts to demonstrate the presence of warfare in the Southwest have been recently reviewed and added to by Haas and Creamer (1993, 1995, 1996), Wilcox and Haas (1994), and LeBlanc (1996, 1997, 1998) and need not be repeated here. Plog and Solometo (1997) examined the role of warfare in the evolution of late prehistoric ritual behavior, and Haas and Creamer (1993) made an important attempt to consider the sociopolitical consequences of such warfare, focusing on the Kayenta region in the Late Pueblo III period. They argued that the intensification of warfare led to the formation of tribal organization. Regardless of whether Haas and Creamer are correct, it can be shown that warfare at that time had a profound effect on social systems all over the Southwest. At a more general level, one important aspect of warfare is the role it played in forming and maintaining group boundaries, which is part and parcel of the evolution of cultural divisions or regions. Evidence indicates that warfare played a significant role in the Southwest long before the late 1200s, contrary to Haas and Creamer. So if an evolution to tribal-level organization took place in the late 1200s in the Kayenta region and presumably elsewhere in the Southwest as posited by Haas and Creamer, such a social organizational change cannot be explained by warfare alone. Putting aside this issue, we can still examine the formation of boundaries in the Southwest over time and the role warfare played in the process. There are several reasons why we might expect recognizable and definable group boundaries—regions—to come into existence and also several reasons why such boundaries should not exist or should decay over time. Competition or the absence of competition between groups is one of the key factors involved in the formation or nonformation of boundaries. We would also expect boundaries to form because of ecological factors. For example, we should not be surprised that a long-standing 43 Regional Interaction and Warfare in Late Prehistoric Southwest cultural division occurred between the higher mountain country and the low desert of the Southwest. The Mogollon-Hohokam boundary does match, to a large degree, very different adaptations. Especially during the late prehistoric period, however, we find formations...