History: Culture of War in Prehistory-3

The culture of war has always been characterized by male domination. Where did this come from? My own studies of brain research and animal behavior have indicated that it does not come from men being more aggressive or from any particular difference in the brain of men and women, except insofar as the brain is involved in the determination that only women can bear young (Adams, 1992, Biology does not make men more aggressive than women).

The origin of the male monopolization of war is caused by a socio-cultural contradiction rather than biological determinism. This is shown in my 1983 study, Why There Are So Few Women Warriors by using statistical analysis of cross-cultural data and predicting the few cases where women warriors have existed.

A woman could not be trusted in war, because her husband would be fighting on one side of the war and her brothers and father on the other side. As mentioned above, secrecy is essential to effective warfare. The danger of women's treachery must have been very frequent in prehistory. This is suggested by the analysis of ethnographic data indicating that most wars were fought between neighboring tribes and communities, and most marriage was arranged so that the wife comes from a neighboring tribe and community and goes to live with the husband (patrilocal exogamy). There was, in effect, a contradiction between the ancient institutions of marriage and war. Under the conditions that were most commonly prevailing (patrilocal exogamy and local warfare) the married woman was caught in a contradiction when there was a war. As mentioned, her husband would be fighting on one side of the war and her brothers and father on the other side.

The simple solution to this contradiction was to exclude women from warfare altogether. In fact, the data support this conclusion, because the only ethnographic reports of women warriors in the sample came from situations when all warfare is against distant enemies with whom one could not inter-marry, or when marriages were arranged inside the community or tribe (endogamy). There were no reported cases of women warriors from tribes with patrilocal exogamy.

The exclusion of women from war had profound implications for all subsequent history as explained in "Why There Are So Few Women Warriors" (Adams 1983):

"Considering all of the foregoing data, it is possible to construct the following hypothesis about the prehistory of warfare. In the beginning, one may suppose, the invention of weapons not only transformed hunting into an especially effective means for getting high-protein food, but it also transformed the noisy, but seldom lethal, territorial displays and attacks against strangers that characterized non-human apes into deadly encounters that could be called true warfare. The distance traveled by hunting and war parties would have precluded the participation of pregnant women or women carrying suckling infants and led to a tendency (not a monopoly) of hunting and warfare by men. The tendency toward a sex role differentiation between male hunting and warfare and female nurturing and gathering of food near a home base may well have provided the material basis for the family unit and the beginnings of marriage. So long as warfare was infrequent, one would have expected such primitive marriage to be agamous and bilocal (i.e. without exclusive exogamy or endogamy and without exclusive patrilocality or matrilocality), like many of today's cultures that have low frequencies of warfare. At this early stage, it should be emphasized, there is no reason to suppose that either hunting or warfare was monopolized by men.

As population density increased and cultures became larger in size, we may suppose that the frequency of warfare increased and that internal warfare came to predominate [i.e. war was carried out mostly against neighboring groups].

This would have been associated with restrictions on marital residency so that it was patrilocal and, in many cases, exogamous. Patrilocality may have been necessitated in order to keep young warriors with their fathers and brothers so they could help with the prosecution of the warfare, a proposal made by Ember and Ember (1971). The causal relationship may have been bidirectional since patrilocality is associated with fraternal interest groups which may, themselves, tend to promote internal warfare (Otterbein, 1968). Exogamy may have been instituted in many cases to restrict the ambiguity concerning sexual partnerships. Assuming, as does Divale (1974) that most primitive feuds stem from fights over women, and keeping in mind that under conditions of internal war, men are armed and trained to kill, such ambiguity rises to the level of contradiction. By rigorously instituting marriage and restricting it to exogamy, taking all wives from other communities, the contradiction might be reduced. The relationship of men and women could be clearly specified from the very first time that a woman entered the community through the institution of marriage, each woman "belonged" only to her husband without any prior history or ambiguity to be reckoned with.

With the advent of internal war, patrilocality, and exogamy, there came a profound shift in male-female relations. The male monopolization of warfare was instituted and extended to hunting (in order to preclude the use of weapons by women) and to the initiation rites of the young (male) warriors. The inequality of power between men and women was institutionalized in a way from which we have never recovered. This situation characterizes 35 of the cultures in the present sample, including over half those with large populations."

Looking back at what I wrote in 1983, it is clear that the analysis corresponds fundamentally to the cultural approach pioneered by the anthropologist Leslie A. White (1959) in The Evolution of Culture. The evolution of culture is best understood at the socio-cultural level rather than through an approach of biological determinism. Just as White sought to understand the evolution of incest, exogamy and endogamy as socio-cultural solutions to the question of group size and solidarity, so, too, we can best understand the male monopolization of warfare in terms of the socio-cultural solution to the contradiction faced by married women during warfare.

What about the idea that there was widespread matriarchy during prehistoric times and that this was related to a culture of peace? This idea, dating back to Johann Jakob Bachofen (1861), Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World, is still repeated by many contemporary authors, e.g. Elise Boulding (1976) in her otherwise excellent book, The Underside of History - A View of Women through Time. I once had the great privilege of exploring with Elise the ancient stone structures in Malta which are often cited as evidence of such a matriarchal period. Indeed, in Malta as in many ancient temple structures, there were images of women which seem to have been worshipped. But Elise could not find a rebuttal to the argument that veneration of the Virgin Mary by contemporary Roman Catholics does not make modern society any less patriarchal. For a time, claims were made that the ancient city of Catal Huyuk, excavated in Turkey, showed signs of having been a matriarchy, since it contained feminine images which seem to have been venerated. However, a further analysis of the data suggested that its culture was a culture of male warriors since men were buried with their weapons and there were fortifications around the city to protect it from warfare.

In general, the consensus among academic specialists is that a strictly matriarchal society never existed. See, for example, the recent book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future by Cynthia Eller (2000).

Continued on next page

To take part in a discussion about this page, click below on the Culture of Peace Dialogues: