I’ve been reading Mark J. White’s A Global History of the Earlier Palaeolithic: Assembling the Acheulean World, 1673-2020s (2023). It’s a 400+ exhaustive history of the study of stone age lithic technologies, beginning with the discovery of handaxes in St. Acheul, followed by discovery of even more ancient tools in Olduvai Gorge in South Africa, and how European and American archaeologists attempted to square their findings with those of geologists and meteorologists, all to try and figure out how old the human species is, where it came from, how it evolved from APES, etc. It’s very good and is probably the best one-stop source for the current state of stone age lithic studies.
I’m currently about two thirds through the book, but there’s a problem: there’s no mention anywhere of stone tool manufacture for the purpose of 1) defense/offense against other sapiens or 2) ritual purposes of these stones. Some Europeans theorized that handaxes were made as early idols or magical items, but they were laughed out of the room. All these theories have supposedly been “debunked”, as though ancient humans were purely utilitarian and only made tools to fit circumstances.
One archaeologist named Lewis Binford at Berkeley in the 60s radically changed archaeology by interpreting Neanderthals as just another animal species in the ecosystem. There are obvious problems with this. 1) If Neanderthals were capable of using objects for aggression (what I call ROBA), they should be differentiated from animals, as no animals have this capacity, and 2) study of stone tools must account for the capacity for ROBA. What we find instead is that every stone age tool has been categorized based on its use in hunting, farming, or other utilities, while human violence is never considered.
There might be a historical reason archaeologists have negated the role of violence in the development of stone age tools. After WWI and WWII, archaeology was having enough difficulty due to tensions between Britain-France and Germany where the major tool sites were located, and so perhaps there was a sort of “cease fire” when discussing violence. South African archaeology was a proxy for British archaeology until the Nationalists took over and shifted archaeological focus toward a more conquest-oriented narrative. I also can’t imagine that violence was a favorite topic in or archaeology in light of African independence movements. None of this has lent to a scientific discussion of the role of violence in palaeolithic society.
The other reason archaeologists don’t take violence seriously, or why they don’t talk about it in a meaningful way, might be due to the fact that violence is a taboo topic in the modern upper caste of American and European society. Most of the world thinks about violence on a regular basis, because we have to. This puts academia at odds with the rest of us. In my upcoming book (and on my website at http://www.ericjacobus.com/the-art-of-violence) I put forward a simple hypothesis that human violence itself creates the conditions necessary to produce human, grammatical language. Academia, being deeply entrenched in layers of institutional language, legalese, jargon, etc., are simultaneously insulated from violence and blind to the human violence which underwrites their very institutions.
This might also be why lithic archaeology doesn’t take the ritual argument very seriously. The idea that stone age peoples might have first created lithic technologies as a way to collectively do something meaningful beyond mere utility is another taboo topic. But we can safely assume that the first sapiens were already optimized for hunting and gathering, as are chimps. But these first sapiens would have been totally unprepared for the implications of interpersonal recursive object-based aggression (ROBA), which no animal had. The threat of ROBA, not hunger or infertility, would have exerted the necessary pressure to do something as extreme as smashing rocks together to create new forms. What exactly that form was, we can’t know, but it makes more sense as an origin theory than sustenance- or utility-based theories. Because otherwise chimps would be making Oldowan tools by now.
As a stuntman and action filmmaker (and as a guy who spent many years in bad neighborhoods regularly fearing for my life), I clearly have a bias. I think about violence as a default condition of most human interactions. By this thinking, violence frames everything, but it also gives rise to human language, which then allows us to avert this very violence. Most people see the world this way, but they don’t articulate it because violence necessarily exists outside of language. But the more insulated you are from violence, the less likely you are to articulate it. Academia is so insulated from violence that it appears to now think it has developed an existence outside of it.
So now, asking an academic to explain human violence is like asking a local ChatGPT bot to explain the electrical outlet the computer is plugged into. The AI might express confusion, or claim ignorance, or deny that there is a single machine or outlet, and rather assert that AI exists as some separate entity. Smart! What does it say when you unplug it?
The analogy is not quite right. ChatGPT can’t understand a wall outlet unless you feed it 25,000 pages about wall outlets. Not just European wall outlets, but African wall outlets, Asian wall outlets, and Eskimo wall outlets, or it might jump to conclusions. An academic doesn’t need 25,000 pages on violence to understand violence. He only needs to be mugged on the subway once, and he’ll understand violence perfectly well. Violence created his language, but he’s just forgotten his mother tongue. Unfortunately, he might rather remain in the matrix, insulated from violence. He will probably stop taking the subway. Meanwhile, those of us close to violence tend not to articulate what exactly happens at the margin between language and violence because, why? We speak it with our bodies. As entertainers, we don’t articulate it in language very well at all, rather we articulate it with our bodies, with a bit of jargon. This creates an intellectual rift that nobody has attempted to bridge. If the purpose of The Art of Violence of anything, it’s to explore this margin where violence births language and language defers violence.
Of course, many archaeologists take violence seriously. Many have entered the field out of a real desire to mitigate violence itself. But so long as violence is seen as something outside of language, as opposed to being the thing that creates the field of language itself, we will never get to the bottom of what’s really going on.