The New Ideology of ‘Eternal War’ in Archaeology: Critical Reflections on Early History

Abstract

Nowadays the vocabulary of war dominates everyday language, just as violence and war dominate the media. This way of thinking, in which war predominates, sees peace as nothing more than the absence of war, and sees it as the result of rules of conflict – just as if peace and peace building did not follow their own rules. Even among scholars, the current fashion is to look everywhere for violence and war. This applies to both Indigenous societies and early epochs of human history, which until recently were considered peaceful. Instead of an appropriately meticulous analysis of ethnographic records and archaeological findings, articles of belief are formulated. The result is an extreme devaluation of peace.

The idea of ‘peaceable’ societies is just as imprecise as the notion of ‘warlike’ societies, and it is just as ideologically charged. One can directly experience how this involves emotions rather than knowledge by noticing how some contemporaries become downright aggressive whenever anyone speaks of earlier peaceable societies. The spiteful tone intensifies especially when one speaks of peaceable societies in connection with matriarchy. It is worth taking a closer look at this problem and to find clear definitions, which will be done in my paper.