INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, INDIGENOUS VIOLENCE - PRECONTACT WARFARE ON THE NORTH-AMERICAN GREAT-PLAINS

Anthropologists have recently focused on the relation between high-casualty tribal warfare and Western contact, arguing that such contact greatly increases the scale and intensity of such warfare, and frequently citing ethnographic data from the North American Great Plains in support of this conclusion. However, archaeological data suggest that high casualty warfare was endemic in at least some parts of the Great Plains for hundreds of years prior to Western contact and indicate that this warfare developed in response to indigenous cultural-ecological processes rooted in unpredictable environmental fluctuations and a population/resource imbalance. This article summarizes the evidence supporting these conclusions and considers the implications of the Plains example for our general understanding of the conditions under which tribal warfare develops.