brought over every day.â It created a wasteland: âAll the districts in AAna [Williamsâs spelling] are depopulated & in sailing along the beautiful coast for ten or twelve miles not a habitation is to be seen.â
Just in case Aâana did not convince Williams that the Samoans were tough men, their chiefs showed him the preserved heads of men killed by their ancestors and regaled him with stories of the wars and massacres of the past. One village put a rock in a basket for each battle it fought: Williams counted 197.
But there is one difficulty. Williams was the first European to write much about Samoa, but he was not the first European to go there. The Dutch explorer Jakob Roggeveen had arrived in 1722, and others had followed over the next hundred years. For all we know, every single head, rock, and story that Williams encountered had accumulated since 1722 and was the fruit of contagion by civilization.
Archaeology, however, suggests otherwise. The interior of Samoa is packed with prehistoric hillforts. Some must have been built since 1722, butcarbon 14 dating shows that others are between six hundred and a thousand years old. Samoans had been building forts, and probably waging war, long before Europeans showed up. Samoan traditions describe great wars against invaders from Tonga, apparently around eight hundred years ago, providing a plausible context for the fort-building, and the wooden clubs and war canoes still in use when Europeans arrived seem to have descended from Tongan prototypes of this era, suggesting a continuous tradition of using deadly force.
Even on Samoa, the Coming of Age theory seems not to work very well, but there are always multiple ways to interpret archaeological finds. Archaeology is a young field, and as recently as the 1950s there were still very few graduate programs training future professionals. The people who dug up the past tended to drift into it from other walks of life, and a remarkable number were former military men. Many of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, tended to see war and destruction almost everywhere they dug. But in the 1960s and â70s, a new generation of men and women colonized the field, educated in university departments of anthropology and archaeology, and often steeped in the Coming of Age view of prehistory. Theyâequally unsurprisinglyâtended to see war and destruction almost nowhere.
It can be painful for the middle-aged to look back on the follies of their youth. As a graduate student in the 1980s (probably the glory days of Coming of Age-ism), I dug for several summers at Koukounaries, an extraordinary prehistoric Greek site on the fairy-tale-beautiful island of Paros. On our first visit to the site, the director explained that it had been destroyed by violent attack around 1125 B.C. Its fortifications had been cast down and its buildings burned. The defenders had piled slingstones by the walls, and the skeletons of several donkeysâcaught in the final disasterâhad been excavated in the narrow alleys on the acropolis. But I (and, I hasten to add, my graduate student peers) flatly refused to believe that any of this was evidence of war, and once we had ruled out war as impossible, whatever explanations remainedâno matter how improbableâhad to be true.
It was this kind of thinking that led so many archaeologists to insist, in the face of equally overwhelming evidence, that the pre-Roman hillforts of western Europe mentioned earlier in this chapter were ceremonial centers, status symbols, and basically anything except military bases. But like the anthropologists, archaeologists began realizing in the 1990s that the evidence just could not be shoehorned into a Coming of Age pattern anymore.
New scientific methods played a part in this shift. When hikers foundthe celebrated Ice Man in the Italian Alps in 1991âa deep-frozen corpse dating around 3300 B.C. âarchaeologists initially assumed that he had died in
Just in case Aâana did not convince Williams that the Samoans were tough men, their chiefs showed him the preserved heads of men killed by their ancestors and regaled him with stories of the wars and massacres of the past. One village put a rock in a basket for each battle it fought: Williams counted 197.
But there is one difficulty. Williams was the first European to write much about Samoa, but he was not the first European to go there. The Dutch explorer Jakob Roggeveen had arrived in 1722, and others had followed over the next hundred years. For all we know, every single head, rock, and story that Williams encountered had accumulated since 1722 and was the fruit of contagion by civilization.
Archaeology, however, suggests otherwise. The interior of Samoa is packed with prehistoric hillforts. Some must have been built since 1722, butcarbon 14 dating shows that others are between six hundred and a thousand years old. Samoans had been building forts, and probably waging war, long before Europeans showed up. Samoan traditions describe great wars against invaders from Tonga, apparently around eight hundred years ago, providing a plausible context for the fort-building, and the wooden clubs and war canoes still in use when Europeans arrived seem to have descended from Tongan prototypes of this era, suggesting a continuous tradition of using deadly force.
Even on Samoa, the Coming of Age theory seems not to work very well, but there are always multiple ways to interpret archaeological finds. Archaeology is a young field, and as recently as the 1950s there were still very few graduate programs training future professionals. The people who dug up the past tended to drift into it from other walks of life, and a remarkable number were former military men. Many of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, tended to see war and destruction almost everywhere they dug. But in the 1960s and â70s, a new generation of men and women colonized the field, educated in university departments of anthropology and archaeology, and often steeped in the Coming of Age view of prehistory. Theyâequally unsurprisinglyâtended to see war and destruction almost nowhere.
It can be painful for the middle-aged to look back on the follies of their youth. As a graduate student in the 1980s (probably the glory days of Coming of Age-ism), I dug for several summers at Koukounaries, an extraordinary prehistoric Greek site on the fairy-tale-beautiful island of Paros. On our first visit to the site, the director explained that it had been destroyed by violent attack around 1125 B.C. Its fortifications had been cast down and its buildings burned. The defenders had piled slingstones by the walls, and the skeletons of several donkeysâcaught in the final disasterâhad been excavated in the narrow alleys on the acropolis. But I (and, I hasten to add, my graduate student peers) flatly refused to believe that any of this was evidence of war, and once we had ruled out war as impossible, whatever explanations remainedâno matter how improbableâhad to be true.
It was this kind of thinking that led so many archaeologists to insist, in the face of equally overwhelming evidence, that the pre-Roman hillforts of western Europe mentioned earlier in this chapter were ceremonial centers, status symbols, and basically anything except military bases. But like the anthropologists, archaeologists began realizing in the 1990s that the evidence just could not be shoehorned into a Coming of Age pattern anymore.
New scientific methods played a part in this shift. When hikers foundthe celebrated Ice Man in the Italian Alps in 1991âa deep-frozen corpse dating around 3300 B.C. âarchaeologists initially assumed that he had died in
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