
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, May 31, 1994                   TAG: 9405310011
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PREHISTORIC VIOLENCE WORSE THAN TODAY'S

Death by violence was at least 50 times more common among ancient peoples than it has been in the modern world, according to a new study of ethnographic records and human remains found in ancient burials. Still older prehistoric societies had violent death rates thousands of times higher. Recurrent warfare appears to have been the chief reason.

"The price we pay in our modern civilization for being divided into nation-states is far lower than what we would be paying if the world were still tribalized," said Lawrence Keeley, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose findings are being published next year as a book by Oxford University Press.

Keeley calculated that if the world's current population were undergoing warfare at the rate attributed to prehistoric peoples, 22 million people would die violently every year. In fact, the highest estimate of violent deaths of all kinds during the entire 20th century is around 100 million.

Keeley's study focuses on societies that lived between 12,000 years ago and the present. Among the more recent tribal societies, the annual death rate from violence - averaged from estimates by various anthropologists who studied them - is close to 0.5 percent. In other words, this is the percentage of people who die by violent means each year. In the United States today, the comparable figure is around 0.01 percent - 50 times less. (This is usually expressed as 10 violent deaths per 100,000 population.)

In still older prehistoric societies, Keeley said, the violent death rates, probably largely from warfare, appear to range between 1 percent and 40 percent. He cited one village site dated at A.D. 1325 in what is now South Dakota. "There were 50 houses in this town, which meant that around 800 people lived there. Every house in the town had been burned to the ground."

Archaeologists found a mass grave containing skeletons of more than 500 people. Of the skulls that could be found, 94 percent bore scalping marks. Most of the bodies had been badly mutilated and left to rot.

Keeley said it is a myth that "pre-civilized" life was peaceful and happy, and that Western civilization is the root of all evil. "As societies evolve and become larger and more complex, less violent ways of resolving disputes are institutionalized," Keeley said. "What prevents war is politics."

by CNB