The idea of a pre-contact “peaceable kingdom” that lasted until 1492 does not survive contact with the archaeological record. Violence appears early in the Americas and, by the Mississippian centuries, had become a regular feature of complex agricultural life.
What follows is limited to North America. The scale of organized ritual violence and warfare documented in Mesoamerica and South America was, in many cases, substantially greater still. Evidence of interpersonal conflict reaches back at least to the Early Holocene. Kennewick Man, recovered from the Columbia River in Washington and dated to roughly 8,500–9,000 years ago, carried a Cascade-style stone projectile point embedded in his right ilium. The point entered from the front at a steep angle, consistent with an atlatl dart. Bone had grown around it, showing that the wound healed, though the injury was serious. He also bore healed cranial depression fractures and multiple rib fractures.
Other early skeletons display trauma consistent with violence, but well-preserved Paleo-Indian remains are rare, so the sample is small. No mass graves or fortifications are known from that period. Violence is ancient human behavior; its scale and intensity rise sharply later with denser populations and agriculture.
Scalping itself is not unique to the Americas. Clear osteological evidence of the practice appears in prehistoric Europe and elsewhere well before the peopling of the New World.
