Bioarchaeological Approaches to Southwestern Violence

Abstract

Studies of violence in the Southwest need to include multiple lines of evidence in order to understand the social role of that violence. Focusing solely on ethnographic or archaeological reconstructions can lead to an incomplete picture of lived experience in the past. The articles in this special issue provide contextualized bioarchaeological analyses of how violence is used within different groups in the Southwest prior to European contact. This introduction highlights the role that bioarchaeology can play within greater reconstructions of lived experience in the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Bioarchaeology
• Southwest
• Precontact
• Violence
• Trauma
• Social control
• Raiding
• Captivity

Interest in Southwestern violence has a long history. Beginning with Bandelier (1890) and Parsons (1924), there is a focus on ethnographic understandings of violence during historic periods with possible extensions into precontact times. Both of these scholars point out that intergroup feuds were not uncommon and were likely responsible for defensive architecture. Haas and Creamer (1997) associate this raiding activity with Athapaskan, and they note that ethnographic accounts discuss historic conflict with Apaches, Navajos, Comanches, Utes, and Paiutes. Relationships between the Athapaskan groups and Puebloans have been heavily influenced and changed by European contact, particularly trading and economic relationships between the groups. Altering the economic interconnectedness between Athapaskan and Puebloan groups may have led to increased intergroup conflict after colonial contact (Haas and Creamer 1997), potentially making the ethnographic comparisons inappropriate for precontact analyses of violence and raiding activity. While we do see evidence of raiding activity in both material culture and bioarchaeological studies of the precontact Southwest (see Fleming and Watson 2018; Waller et al. 2018; and Harrod 2018), we should be careful not to attribute historic reasoning and causes for these activities.

Archaeologically, violence in the southwest is often given the label of warfare (e.g., Haas and Creamer 1997; LeBlanc 1999; Rice and LeBlanc 2001). This designation suggests larger-scale conflict between groups, something reinforced by the identification of warfare in defense-oriented settlement patterns, defensive architecture, evidence of destructive episodes, material culture related to martial activities, and symbolic representations of warfare (LeBlanc 1999). LeBlanc incorporates human remains into his interpretation of warfare, but the primary data set remains material culture. Archaeological explorations of violence tend to focus on providing an understanding of the causes of violence, whether that be climatic in origin (e.g., Cordell and McBrinn 2012) or due to increasing complexity and sedentism that goes along with the introduction of agriculture (e.g., LeBlanc 1999).

The purpose of this issue is not to provide overarching proximate or ultimate causes for violent activity in the Southwest prior to European contact. Instead, the authors of the articles in this issue examine osteological evidence for violence from more contextualized perspectives. The articles in this special issue all approach violence from different perspectives and with different research questions. The tie that binds them all is that they are heavily theorized throughout the analysis and interpretation. Theoretical and heuristic frameworks are important not only for developing research questions but also for interpretation of data. Bioarchaeology has become increasingly theorized in the past several years, adding an additional line of data to archaeological interpretations once based solely on material culture. Bioarchaeology, as the analysis of the makers of material culture, adds an additional perspective and therefore helps to produce more robust interpretations of past lived experience.

Numerous similarities exist in methodology as well. This is particularly true in the analysis of antemortem trauma (see Baustian, 2018 and Harrod, 2018, in particular). The analysis of perimortem trauma has a long history, but the analysis of small healed cranial depression fractures gives a real picture of lived experience and violence recidivism. Violence recidivism, or exposure to multiple traumas throughout life, may indicate subaltern status (see Harrod, 2018), warrior status, or symbolic battles resulting in injury while avoiding death (along the lines of Papua New Guinnean violence; see Wiessner 2009 for an ethnographic example). The articles within this issue also make use of forensic techniques in the interpretation of traumas as either interpersonal or accidental in origin (e.g., the use of the “hat brim” line on the skull as described in Guyomarc’h et al. [2010]). The use of forensic literature in the interpretation of bioarchaeological materials is not new, these case studies provide excellent examples about how these data can be applied in a rigorous manner to reconstruct human behavior in the past.

The study of violence has become more heavily theorized in bioarchaeology. No longer are we interested in the presence or absence of violence, but in how violent interactions vary through time and how violence is used socially. How is violence used to persuade? To reinforce social structure? How do we interpret violent assemblages? How do we identify attempted and/or successful raiding activity? How do we interpret a relative dearth of violence in bioarchaeological assemblages? Altogether, the articles in this issue show that violence does not take a single form, have a single expression, or perform a single social role. It is only in the context of material culture (the architecture, site locations, artifacts, indications of external cultural contact) that bony correlates of violence can be interpreted to understand lived experience in the past. In this way, and using primarily biocultural models, the authors show that skeletal analysis takes on additional meaning when properly contextualized. It is a feedback loop between the analysis of material culture and the analysis of the makers of that material culture: one cannot fully understand lived experience in the past without understanding both the skeletal remains and material culture.

The case studies in this issue also show the time depth that bioarchaeological analysis can provide. Understanding the changing role of violence (e.g., Fleming and Watson 2018) versus the stabilizing role of violence (e.g., Osterholtz 2018) requires a long view of human interaction. By examining time depths of hundreds of years, we can see the way that violent interaction changes within communities and between communities.

Altogether, the case studies in this issue show the breadth and depth of heavily contextualized bioarchaeology. Through an examination of both human remains and material culture, we can better understand the nature of violence in the past, how it ebbs and flows and changes in meaning. It is not a presence/absence of violence or an increase/decrease that is important but how those changes are brought about by social changes and how those changes in how we use violence ripple through the rest of our understanding of the past.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Debra L. Martin as editor of Kiva for her support and patience through the process of putting this issue together. I also wish to thank the individual article authors for their hard work and attention to detail. The anonymous reviewers were also instrumental to this process, and I thank them for helping to make the entire issue stronger.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Anna J. Osterholtz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8437-9147