War: What is it good for? by Ian Morris Page A

a snowstorm. In 2001, scanning technology revealed an arrowhead embedded in his left armpit, but even then some archaeologists hypothesized an elaborate funeral involving his dead body being carried up into the mountains. But in 2008, new immunohistochemical methods showed that the Ice Man had been attacked at least twice. The first assault gave him a deep wound in his right hand; in the second, a couple of days later, he was hit in the back with a blunt object and shot with the arrow, which severed an artery. In 2012, a nanoscanning atomic force microscope found intact red blood cells that proved he had bled to death within hours of being hit by the arrow.
    We would not know any of this were the Ice Man not so spectacularly preserved, but systematic study of large samples of skeletons can produce equally nasty and brutish results. Sometime around A.D. 1325, for instance, at least 486 people were slaughtered and their bodies tossed into a ditch at Crow Creek in South Dakota. A good 90 percent—and possibly all—of the dead had been scalped. Eyes had been gouged out, tongues sliced off, teeth shattered, and throats cut. Some were beheaded. For a few, this was not even the first time they had been scalped or shot: their bones bore the telltale marks of older, partially healed wounds.
    Excavations began at Crow Creek in 1978, and since then evidence for Native American massacres has come thick and fast. The most recent example (as I write) is at Sacred Ridge in Colorado, where a village was burned down around A.D. 800 and at least thirty-five men, women, and children were tortured and killed. Their enemies used blunt weapons—clubs, or perhaps just rocks—to smash their feet and faces to pulp. The killers scalped everyone, cutting off ears and hacking some corpses into dozens of pieces. Like the Romans described by Polybius a thousand years earlier, they even killed the village dogs.
    In fact, not much about Crow Creek, Sacred Ridge, or Samoa would have surprised the Romans. Cicero and Tacitus, like Hobbes and Golding, knew perfectly well that the Beast was close, close, close, and that only an even more terrifying beast—Leviathan—could cage it.
    Getting to Rome
    In his book The Origins of Political Order, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama asks a penetrating question: How do we get to Denmark?
    Fukuyama asks this not because he doesn’t know how to buy a plane ticket but because for social scientists Denmark has come to stand in as (in Fukuyama’s words) “a mythical place that is known to have good political and economic institutions: it is stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and has extremely low levels of political corruption. Everyone would like to figure out how to transform Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Iraq, or Afghanistan into ‘Denmark.’”
    If there had been political scientists two thousand years ago, they would have asked instead how to get to Rome. The Roman Empire was not very democratic, but it certainly was peaceful and, by the standards of the day, stable, prosperous, and inclusive (corruption is a little harder to judge). The alternative to getting to Rome was to live in societies with more than a passing similarity to modern-day Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Iraq, or Afghanistan—but more dangerous.
    I have suggested in this chapter that the explanation of how the Romans got to Rome is very much a paradox. On the one hand, Leviathan was what suppressed violence, and suppressing violence was what being Roman (or now Danish) was all about; but on the other, violence was what made Leviathan possible in the first place. All in all, war seems to be good for something. And yet … not all roads led to Rome. In the Mediterranean Basin, war proved to be the path to peace and prosperity, but in many other places it did not. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of incessant fighting around the shores of the Baltic, in the deserts of Australia, and