War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage

Купить бумажную книгу и читать

Название: War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage

Автор: Lawrence H. Keeley

Издательство: Oxford University Press

Год: 1996

Страниц: 246

Формат: PDF

Размер: 7 Mb

Язык: Английский

The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past").