Projectile point in human remains in California Remains found in Contra Costa County, California, included a projectile point embedded in the bone. The burial was dated to between 500 amd 1500 BCE. (Photo by Randy Wiberg)
Posted on 05/03/2014 9:37:13 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
From shooting their enemies with darts and arrows to crushing their skulls and even harvesting body parts as trophies, the ancient foragers of central California engaged in sporadic, and sometimes severe, violence, according to a new archaeological study spanning 5,000 years.
In an effort to understand life and death in one of the ancient West’s most populous regions, anthropologists conducted a landmark study of its dead, cataloging signs of violence found in burials between the Sierra Nevada and the San Francisco Bay, dating from historic times all the way back to 3000 BCE.
After 13 years of mining the data, the researchers identified what they say is a complex pattern of episodic violence, driven by forces as diverse as competition for territory, pressure from a changing climate, and the arrival of Europeans.
Chronicling 16,820 burials from 329 sites among 13 different ethnographic groups, the data reveal that the most common type of violence over the millennia was so-called sharp-force trauma, caused by projectiles like arrows or atlatl darts, which appeared in 7.2% of the burials studied.
Another 4.3% of the hunter-gatherers suffered apparent blunt-force trauma to the head, while just under 1% showed evidence of dismemberment, with limbs, scalps, or heads having been removed after death.
These grim findings illustrate the periodic conflicts that took place among California’s prehistoric groups in response to the historical, environmental, and social circumstances around them, said Dr. Terry Jones, an anthropologist at Cal Poly who co-authored the new study.
“Many people still seem to think that prehistoric California was a violence-free paradise, but the archaeological record shows clearly that that was not the case,” he said in an interview.
“People are people, and most of us believe that an inclination to resort to violence in certain situations is part of the human condition.”
(Excerpt) Read more at westerndigs.org ...
Projectile point in human remains in California Remains found in Contra Costa County, California, included a projectile point embedded in the bone. The burial was dated to between 500 amd 1500 BCE. (Photo by Randy Wiberg)
No,no. We have been repeated assured that the Cali Indians were peaceful.
Chumash be mistaken.
Inclination to violence is part of the human condition?
does this help explain the violence of the youth gangs? Since they tend to be uncivilized, easily angered, ready to get even for all slights, real and imagined, with violence? A culture in which being “dissed” is the worst thing that can happen to someone, and someone who is “dissed” responds with violence?
I knew they would blame climate change for the violence.
and the white men...
Sounds like a night in East LA.
The savagery in the pre-Colombian American Southwest would make Conan the Barbarian blink. Genocide plus cannibalism at several points.
This was California BEFORE pot!!! (Sarcasm)
IOW, over a 5000 year period 12.5% of the natives died from violence.
To give some comparison, about 2.5M Americans died last year. We had about 50,000 murders and suicides last year, deaths by violence.
IOW, a rate of violent death of around 2%.
This study, BTW, lines up with a most excellent book. War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence H. Keeley. Highly recommended.
http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
“I knew they would blame climate change for the violence.”
I take that as a good sign. They are talking climate change going on
prior to man having the technology to cause climate change.
Envirowhacks would have us believe that before human techno
progress the world climate was forever stable. And, I am
personally proud that it took anthropologists from my alma matre,
Cal Poly, to expose the myth that before Europeans showed up
the natives lived in total peace and harmony.
They were killing off each other to protect the earth. Everyone knows the original people of America were one with nature. This just shows how wise they were.
Nancy Pelosi’s first husband?
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There is somewhat disturbing precedent for these attitudes. Until the last 150 years or so, a man who wished to be accepted as “a gentleman” in western societies was obliged to “resent” any slur on his honor. IOW, if somebody “dissed” him, he was obliged to challenge him to a duel.
If he did not, he would often be excommunicated from polite society as being by definition “not a gentleman.”
This super-touchy attitude can be seen in full flower in Romeo and Juliet, where the groups of young upper-class men were ready to fight each other quite literally at the drop of a hat. Or the bite of a thumb.
These same attitudes, obviously greatly corrupted, have visible parallels in the ghetto of today.
We have good evidence of past droughts in CA lasting decades or even more than a century. There are very deep lakes in the Sierra that completely dried out and had dense forests growing in their beds before refilling. The trees are still down there.
In such a severe drought, it is inevitable that people will wind up fighting for the few remaining resources.
IOW, it was SHTF for real.
We need to stop DART VIOLENCE-
All dart games in California bars, pubs, restaurants, carnivals and church festivals in California are hereby banned -
In NY State bar patrons are limited to only 10 darts per game.
Only 3 feathered darts are legal-
any more than 3 feathers are classified defined as ASSAULT DARTS and must be registered with ATF&D {Alcoholol, Tobacco, Firearms and Darts]
Dart tip points must be of plastic with yellow stripes.
All potential users of DARTS must take a pre-requisite course on DART SAFETY 101 [$300 cost]
A C&CD license is required to buy darts at Walmart and other sporting good stores.
See Post 16. The climate *does* change, sometimes with disastrous consequences for living things. But it's natural. The big lie is that humans cause it.
Paleo-climate studies have shown many periods of extreme drought in the U.S. Southwest, lasting for hundreds of years. That's likely the reason the Anasazi and other SW cultures abandoned the region around the year 1300. And it can and will happen again.
Isn’t the idea that pre-civilizated humans were peaceful a Marxist myth? Archaeology doesn’t teach this (or hasn’t for 4 or 5 decades). If Karl was the source of this fantasy it means the idea will never be given up. Reality has no value to Marxists.
Yosemite comes from “yo-hem-it-tee”. It means “those people are killers”. (My daughter was into Native American California language when she was in elementary school and that was one of the pithy facts she picked up.)
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