Patricia Lambert, associate professor and anthropology program director, spoke about her work in California, Colorado and Utah as part of the Museum of Anthropology’s Saturdays at the Museum. Lambert began her work in the late 1980s and has worked in the Santa Barbara channel area primarily. The lecture Lambert gave was titled “The Archaeology of War.”

The lecture, which took place in Old Main, dealt with using resources found at archaeological sites that give evidences of war. Some of the resources, Lambert said, that were useful were war weaponry, pictographs and skeletal remains.

“War weaponry can be useful evidence, but there’s some problems with that. Most societies use the same weaponry to hunt that they use to fight battles with. It may also have symbolic meaning,” Lambert said. “You want to see the different kinds of evidence in support of it to argue that this is war weaponry. So weaponry can be useful, they just have some issues in terms of interpretation.”

Lambert also looks at bioarchaeological evidence, such as healed and lethal fractures on skulls found at the sites, as well as projectile wounds on other parts of the skeletons.

“You can notice that this looks like a depression in the skull. This means that this person was hit was a club of some sort and that the wound healed. However, if you look at this skull you can see that there is just a hole. This was a fatal blow,” Lambert said.

There are many different reasons people go to war, Lambert said. During the climatic anomaly in the medieval times – 1,000 years or so ago – the world had a mini ice age. This affected the tribal societies all over the world. Lambert noted that in almost all of the societies she studied around the time of the anomaly there was a jump in violent activity. According to Lambert this is most likely due to scarcity of food and water.

“It’s interesting to note that a lot of the cliff dwelling people live in places that are not great places to set up your house,” Lambert said. “It’s not clear who they were defending themselves from. All of the villages were built in the cliffs around the same time.”

There were also homes built on edges of canyons with the only door facing the canyon. The people would risk their lives walking out of their homes every day in order to defend against intruders. Lambert explained that the doors would have been easily defensible since people could push enemies off the ledge and to their death.

Lambert showed the group a picture of a mass grave, which is part of the Crow Creek Massacre, and a picture of the Rwandan genocide and said, “Clearly Rwanda was a much larger massacre; however, they look strikingly similar, and I think that can convey the same sort of intent. This was a genocide meant to wipe a group of people off the face of the earth. We sometimes think that this is something that’s just happening today but the archaeological evidence suggest that humans have a greater capacity of this in the past as well. Which suggest that we really need to take a broader view of humans and their behavior and why people do the things they do.”

– mikayla.rich@aggiemail.usu.edu