Pre-market societies could sometimes have a lot of violence
adrianaA study called “The Better Angels of Their Nature: Declining Violence through Time among Prehispanic Farmers of the Pueblo Southwest” discusses some periods when native American life was quite violent. Here are some excerpts:
![Tim Kohler](https://wpcdn.web.wsu.edu/wp-cas/uploads/sites/648/2016/04/tim-kohler2_88x106.jpg)
“Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms.
“If we’re identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death,” said Kohler. The study also offers new clues to the mysterious depopulation of the northern Southwest, from a population of about 40,000 people in the mid-1200s to 0 in 30 years.”
“It wasn’t just violent deaths that poke holes in the harmony with the land and each other myth. A paper in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the Southwest also had a baby boom between 500 and 1300 that likely exceeded any population spurt on earth today. The northern Rio Grande also experienced population booms but the central Mesa Verde got more violent while the northern Rio Grande was less so.
Kohler has conjectures on why. » More …