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Rating: 
Summary: compelling argument for the dark side of social life
Review: Anthropologists have carefully examined the lives of hunter/gatherers and farmers living in non-complex societies and determined that these people, both the few such groups that survived into the twentieth century and the many who lived in the long period of human history known only from archaeology, were unlike us in three important ways.
First, neither hunter/gatherers nor pre-state farmers engaged in warfare. War emerged with civilization, first introduced to the world by the early Mesopotamians who gave us writing, the wheel and so much more. Earlier peoples may have had feuding or battle-as-ritual, but not actual wars in which soldiers aim to kill a lot of the enemy. Second, these non-complex societies lived in harmony with nature. Unlike `civilized' peoples from Babylonia onward, who have deforested hills, silted up estuaries, and driven numerous species to extinction, people in simpler societies lived in harmony with nature, often taking great care not to upset the balance of species and resources. They were the original ecologists. Third, the people whose lifeways are the simplest and most natural of all: the world's hunter/gatherers, are the best able to achieve harmony with nature since they have developed ways to keep population growth within sustainable levels. This is achieved by nursing infants for three or four years, which leads to such a long natural spacing of births that zero growth is achieved.
Archaeologist Steven LeBlanc, curator of collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, has written Constant Battles to inform us that it ain't necessarily so.
Despite endorsement of the three principles outlined above by virtually every anthropology professor now publishing, the effort to produce a single example of a society that eschews war, lives in harmony with nature, and has achieved zero population growth has born little fruit. Of the cultures known to archaeology and ethnology - and there are well over 1,000 - only about a dozen have been described as actually achieving even one of the three hallmarks imputed to all pre-state societies.
LeBlanc examines this very brief list and finds that they all fall into one of a few categories. There are groups like the Hutterites, undoubtedly pacifist, but only able to be so because they live entirely within a nation state that takes care of defense. There are groups like the Siriono of Amazonia, studied by anthropologists in the 1940's when introduced diseases had so decimated their numbers that the handful of surviving Siriono could not possibly overexploit the resources of an environment that had once supported many times their number. And there are groups like the Warrau of Venezuela, studied when they had just been given steel axes and other metal tools that made it possible to easily fashion dugout fishing canoes and chop down palm trees to get at the nourishing pith. Steel made it possible for the Warrau to live in unprecedented plenty.
In other words, when people suddenly live in great plenty, either because they are able to exploit resources in new ways or because some catastrophe has left only a few survivors in a lush ecosystem, they may indeed live in peace and without degrading their environment.
As for a group that lives in peace and plenty because it has carefully preserved the local ecosystem and/or successfully kept population growth below zero so that the ecosystem would be able to sustain the group in comfort going forward, LeBlanc asserts that none exists.
I have recently spent an extended period in Tozzer Library researching a book intended to portray those human groups that have maintained zero population growth and achieved a sustainable balance with their environment. I did, of course, understand that I would have to mention some groups only in passing since space would obviously permit going into detail with regard to only a few of the more interesting ecologically sustainable cultures. In the end, I did not have to leave out a single instance of humans living in balance with nature because I could not find a single society that met the criteria. This was true even though I was not requiring that these societies be pacific, merely that their environmental adaptation be sustainable.
It is a fact that every human group tends over time to grow. According to LeBlanc's compellingly written account of the human story, this incessant growth has always meant that societies sooner or later outgrow their resource base. At this point they set out to expropriate someone else's resource base, whether with stone-tipped spears, bronze battle-axes, or Black Hawk helicopters.
LeBlanc's depictions of hunter/gatherers are especially chilling. He describes women digging up an entire patch of wild tubers, then selecting only the large ones as worth the trouble of carrying back to camp. The rejected tubers are left on the ground to wither, a digging method that precludes a future harvest from that patch. And when hunter/gatherers fight, they aim to kill. The purpose of warfare in a world of hunter/gatherers, after all, is to eliminate competition for resources.
LeBlanc carries the reader along by the force of his argument. He sets out to persuade us that "the warfare and ecological destruction we find today fit into patterns of human behavior that have gone on for millions of years." And he succeeds.
Rating: 
Summary: anecdotal-based conjecture facilitates author's conclusions
Review: Archaeologist Steven LeBlanc's work on many digs led him to two controversial conclusions: there always has been warfare among humans, and humans never have lived in harmony with nature. Describing how many traditional societies have abused their environments, he connects pre-modern warfare directly to population growth and resource scarcity. Warfare in the past, he writes, may have ultimately been driven by rational response to diminishing resources. Bringing his thesis forward into modern times, LeBlanc again challenges conventional wisdom. His optimistic conclusion: warfare has declined over time, suggesting that it is not an inherently human behavior. The proportion of the population involved in war has been declining; there has been a reduction in war deaths on a per capita basis. The Industrial Revolution, LeBlanc writes, increased the world's carrying capacity; technology and science enable us to understand the Earth's ecology and our impact on it, to control population growth, and to increase the carrying capacity in ways never before imagined. According to LeBlanc, we are on the right trajectory for world peace. Sweeping conclusions like these must rattle the liberal intellectual establishment that has kept us on a collective guilt trip for decades. Those conclusions would be more convincing if LeBlanc had provided us with systematic data instead of relying on anecdotes. Such a book might have been drier to read, but more powerful.
Rating:
Summary: Ignoble savages
Review: Do not read this book if you are wedded to the idea that we humans once lived in harmony with our natural environment. LeBlanc argues that we were slaughtering each other over scarce resources long before the invention of agriculture or the advent of complex societies. Although not the first to pooh-pooh the idea of the peaceful, noble savage, he is one of the first to do so using prehistoric archaeological evidence. LeBlanc makes a strong case that virtually all ancient societies collapsed from an endless cycle of overpopulation, resource depletion, and warfare. My favorite example, among many, was Troy. Archaeologists had a hard time finding it because Homer's description placed it near a bay. The Greek islands were not always the barren, desolate rocks that you see today. They were turned into stone by human activities: the elimination of forests, non-sustainable farming, and overgrazing (which continues to this day.) The bay that once fronted Troy was filled in by silt from the denuded hillsides centuries ago leaving the ruins stranded many miles from the sea. The author argues that overpopulation, followed by resource depletion and warfare, was more than just common; it was inevitable. Given the option to do so, people eventually went after their neighbor's resources. LeBlanc points out that there is a strong tendency for researchers to whitewash their archaeological findings. I have to agree with him. Years ago, when I first read of the bronze age iceman mummy discovered in the Alps, the researchers had suggested that he was probably a peaceful sheepherder who had been caught in an unexpected blizzard. The polished bronze ax found in his possession was too soft to cut down trees. It must have had religious or ritual significance. That was all before they found the arrow in the iceman's back. In addition, his knife has the blood of four other individuals on it. He also has defensive wounds on his arms. LeBlanc sees the iceman's bronze artifact for what it really is-a deadly battle-ax. Considering how rare prehistoric human remains are, I am astounded that so many of them show signs of violent death at the hands of other humans. This is exactly the point LeBlanc is making. This book has a few technical problems that should have been resolved by its editors. For example, the word infanticide is used ten times in just three paragraphs on pages 48 and 49. We are told more than once that Nanook of the North starved to death. We are also told at least seven different times that, according to the fossil record, about 25 percent of all males died at the hands of other males. In the end, LeBlanc's findings beg the question: are we genetically locked into this cycle of overpopulation, environmental degradation, and violence? LeBlanc falls victim to his own whitewash when he tries to answer it. Believing that warfare is ultimately the result of conflict over scarce resources, he optimistically concludes that with modern technology and knowledge we will eventually free ourselves from resource scarcity and therefore warfare. This is where LeBlanc and I part ways. We may one day free ourselves from resource scarcity, but it would be a stretch to suggest that modern war is the result of it. Hundreds of thousands of years of warlike behavior can only mean one thing: our aggressive behavior has been selected for by evolutionary pressure. Like wasps, we have a strong natural predilection to respond in a specific manner when someone hits our nest with a stick. Just sixty-two years ago, our nation was hit with a stick and we responded by incinerating the men, women, and children of two cities with nuclear weapons. Our nest was hit by another stick on 9/11/2001. I rest my case. LeBlanc concludes, "For the first time in history, technology and science enable us to understand Earth's ecology and our impact on it, to control population growth, and to increase the carrying capacity in ways never before imagined. The opportunity for humans to live in long term balance with nature is within our grasp..." I agree with LeBlanc's tenet that technology and knowledge hold the key to the planet's future. However, time is running out, especially for the planet's biodiversity. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed Bag
Review: First the good news: LeBlanc's main message is right. People in almost all societies have fought, and very often it's all about resources. Traditional societies of all sorts, from hunter-gatherers to early states, often overused their environments badly, and then either tried to cope by taking resources from the neighbors, or weakened themselves to the point where the neighbors could scarf up on them. LeBlanc urges us contemporary humans to take heed, and clean up our ecological act so that we can reduce (hopefully eliminate) the danger of war.
So far, so good. Thus, on balance, this is a good book and a very valuable one. LeBlanc notes that whatever innate aggressions humans have, their actual wars are typically over land and resources, and thus are preventable. We all need to hear this, in an age when politicians and writers love to naturalize war and aggression as inevitable. (Yes, I know, war isn't just about resources, but it usually involves much concern about them.) The problems come with LeBlanc's exaggeration and sometimes shaky scholarship (on which see exchange of letters in ARCHAEOLOGY for Sept.-Oct 2003). First, while the myth of the ecologically harmonious "savage" was once common and is still with us, the myth of the peaceful savage seems quite rare. LeBlanc cites only one source for it, and he's wrong about that one. He cites Rousseau (hardly an anthropologist). In fact Rousseau never used the term "noble savage" (it's from Dryden), and R's "savage" was the chimpanzee, of whose sometimes-violent behavior R was well aware. (He tells some stories of their attacks on Africans.) Anthropologists know traditional people are often warlike. H. H. Turney-High's foundational review PRIMITIVE WAR (oddly, not cited by LeBlanc) established a baseline on that, many decades ago. Lloyd Warner (whom LeBlanc does cite) noted that Australian Aboriginals waged war about as often as Europeans, with casualty rates (and rhetoric!) comparable to WWI. Raymond Kelly and Brian Ferguson claim no "warfare" for simpler societies (in recent books) but it's a definitional difference; they define warfare as formal, huge-scale, organized conflict, and don't count the small but bloody feuds and battles almost universal among traditional peoples. I really don't know of anyone who thinks simpler societies were peaceful, but my panel of popular-culture experts (a.k.a. my family) assure me that the New Age and Goddess-worshiping set does indeed so believe. (I assume that Diana Muir's comments on anthropologists, in another Amazon review, refer to textbook accounts of ecological harmony; they certainly don't apply to the anthro literature on war.)
On ecology, while LeBlanc is right that lots of people mess their environments up, he exaggerates it, and uses a ridiculously strict definition of "conservation" that makes it virtually synonymous with "preservation." This would rule out modern soil conservation, water conservation, duck conservation, game animal conservation, etc. Traditional people everywhere figure out how to manage their environments well enough to let them survive; they sometimes overuse resources, and even ruin whole ecosystems, but usually they do well enough--though not well enough to prevent occasional war.
All this would be trivial if it weren't for the very strong possibility that LeBlanc's book will be misunderstood, by superficial readers, as a claim that "savages" are the treacherous, destructive bloodthirsty, violent, cruel, endlessly-warring beasts that they were said to be in all the earlier literature--from Thomas Hobbes to Hollywood cowboys-and-Indians movies. (Hollywood's recent glorification of the Indian is small recompense for nearly 100 years of portraying Indians as mindless butchers of cowboys and settlers.) In my experience, for every person who believes in the peaceful, harmonious savage, there are hundreds who believe in the Hobbesian one. These people usually follow Hobbes in assuming that we civilized folk have nothing to learn from "savages" except that we need a powerful king or dictator to keep us in line. If I read LeBlanc aright, this is NOT what he is saying, and readers should be warned not to make too much of his lurid title and occasionally (though not usually) exaggerated claims.
Rating:
Summary: A very good book
Review: Steven LeBlanc of Harvard makes a great case against the popular mythology that pre-historical man somehow lived at peace with his environment while simultaneously using only what he needed to live and no more; that is, without overusing the resources of his surrounding environment. He cites his vast experience as an archeologist to show that man has always been at war with other men, and has always "trashed" the environment. The myth has heretofore been that man only became warlike with the rise of capitalism which is supposed to have made men exploitative toward other men while concommitantly making him a despoiler of the environment in pursuit of greater profits; profits being a dirty word. BTW, anyone reading "Genome" by Ridley would be disabused of these notion immediately. However......... If you're an anti-politically-correctness guy like myself, you'll howl with laughter at these ridiculous theories of those in archeology who are slaves to funding at the government trough where these theories of history predominate; to purposely push a political agenda advocating international one-world socialism. This book should be required as a grouping of books to be studied along with "Genome", "no bone unturned" by Benedict, "the skeptical environmentalist" by Lomborg, "Bias" by Bernard Goldberg, and countless others which handily refute the distortions fomented on unsuspecting students by teachers with a far-left neo-communist agenda. If you're interested in how man evolved from monkeys, and made it out of Africa, you'll also love this book. Read Jane Goodall's books on the chimps in Gombi, and anything by Franz DeWall. Utterly fascinating!
Rating:
Summary: anecdotal-based conjecture facilitates author's conclusions
Review: The title of my review was inspired not only by the content of the book, but by LeBlanc's own words in the prologue: "This formulation, which is hardly original and admittedly oversimplified, enables me to combine archaeological and ethnographic examples from around the world and provide some insights...." People who have given serious thought to the social sciences would not argue against the main premise of the book, that 'primitive' societies engaged in warfare. The author assumes too much about the reader: "I was hard pressed to present these theories in both a historical and sociological framework that the general reader could follow. (p xvii)"
(Who did he expect was going to read the book?) Throughout Constant Battles, we are reminded of the follies of anthropological academia; consequently, one should expect quality research and interpretation beyond the anecdotal evidence dominating the content, which is riddled with irony and error. To illustrate my frustration, on page 142, the author claims that "...no one uses anything like a stone weighted digging stick to plant or collect plants." On the contrary, I do when I harvest hopniss (Apios), as do Ethiopian farmers when they cultivate, as described by Jack Harlan in The Living Fields, pages 215-216. Jack Harlan is no neophyte, neither is he obscure; I expect the author to have researched such matters well when making such bold generalizations. Some reactions... The author repeatedly attempts to deconstruct the myth that all primitive peoples are inherent pacifists and/or conservationists; for several reasons, this effort confuses me. I am not aware of very many people who harbor such beliefs; indeed, I wonder if more people believe the opposite about primitive societies, that they are ignorant, violent, and unpredictable. Certainly various aspects of primitive cultures have been romanticized, but, for the most part, such romanticizations are obvious to the discerning reader. Conservation is a concept that may be utterly alien to some societies and is indeed a value associated with resource scarcity, not abundance. One is thus unable to render the conclusion that since Hadza or San women select only the best roots and neglect the rest, they lack an ingrained conservation ethic; such an ethic is impertinent to Hadza or San survival. Had resources been stressed and bellies empty, then it would have become necessary to eat lower grade or taboo food or conserve. Even if we were to compare resource consumption of an "conservationist" american with that of an average hunting/gathering Kalahari !Kung San, it would be obvious, regardless of ethics or attitude, who's lifestyle is more sustainable. The author needs to be reminded that "traditional" societies are/were tremendously diverse, and an assumption, no matter how careful or careless, made about one society cannot be simply applied to another, even adjacent, society (consider Southern California). I guess he would differ: "Looking at the entire continent [Australia], instead of a single social group, has its merits (page 119)." Not that Australia has any diversity of biotic and human communities...
It is difficult to make generalizations about ancient, or even not-so-ancient, hunter-gatherers based on 20th century ethnographic research; the fraction of hunter-gatherers remaining survived only in the environments agriculturalists would consider inhospitable to their economies (thus their territories were last to be conquered, e.g. consider locations of North American Indian Reservations, on lands least accommodating to farming and industry, and the history of relevant treaties, or consider recent developments between Botswana and the Kalahari San). The author asserts that most of the world's wars have occurred in the world's poorest, not richest, nations. He neglects the influence of the richest nations on the poorest, warring nations, e.g. Belgium and USA on the Congo; France, USA, and China on Indochina; USA et al on Burma, etc. Nanook died because of a severe storm, not because of his subsistence strategy. To declare that Nanook did not live in a land of plenty (thus implying his subsistence strategy was unreliable or harsh) because he died in a storm is like saying that the Midwestern US is not a land of plenty and agriculture is bad because tornados shredded several homes and killed many people throughout the Midwestern US during the summer of 2003. Population and resources constantly fluctuate, and these give and take fluctuations establish equilibrium. Conflicts over resources in all their manifestations, from bears fighting over choice salmon spots to infanticide to people fighting over oak groves, wheat fields, or oil wells, are measures of participating in ecological equilibrium. Industrial societies are every bit as capable of outstripping their resources as anyone else; they, however, have specialized armies and bureaucrats that can destroy or subjugate other people and use their resources, a measure that conceals the impacts of resource degradation because the degradation is out of the sight of the consumer. The comfortable elite among the industrialized nation-states often fail to fully recognize the impacts of nation-state resource consumption and erroneously attribute foreign resource crisis to foreign mismanagement.
Rating: 
Summary: Ignores the HRAF and the cultural ecology fully
Review: There is a reason why this is one book among not many of its kind. It is simple- it contradicts everything we have found in our cultural database. While it is true that warfare is present in horticultural societies, and large-scale hunter/gatherers, small scale hunter-gatherers simply have no need for it, and this is supported by the HRAF (Human Resource Area Files). It it time for LeBlanc to pick up some elementary knowledge of anthropological theory, before he writes garbage. Incomplete, and purposfully misleading. UPDATE: Considering 32 negative reviews in a relatively short time, I would like any one of these negative reviewers to submit an archeological peer reviewed article on incidence of war in small-scale hunter/gatherer societies, which is particularily what I am interested in. The article must be of a respectable journal. Alternatively, offer an example from HRAF. This, of course, excludes large-scale resource chomping hunter/gatherer societies which could much more easily be compared with horticulturalists and the like. If you cannot come up with an example, at least offer a good human ecological scenario.
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