The European Neolithic was a period of enormous social and economic changes affecting lifeways and population size, as well as beliefs and world views. By its closing stages in around 2500 BCE central and western European communities had been transformed from mobile or semi-mobile hunter-fisher-gatherer groups to settled populations reliant on farming and herding. The extent and significance of violence within and between communities during this period has long been debated, although attempts to resolve this issue have tended to generate more heat than light. However recent years have seen a growing corpus of evidence for violent assaults recognised among human remains from throughout Neolithic Europe. Viewed in aggregate, this line of evidence casts considerable doubt over notions of the period as a time of relative peace and stability. This chapter draws together the skeletal evidence for violence-related injuries from across Neolithic Europe and discusses these in terms of both overall prevalence and regional variation as well as the extent to which variations in demographic distribution are discernible. These patterns are considered in regard to the changing social contexts in which they occurred, with particular attention given to the role of population expansion, resource competition and the rise of social inequality. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Neolithic in the development of organised violence among human societies.

This chapter provides an overview of sites of mass violence from Early Neolithic central Europe. It focuses on the Linearbandkeramik (LBK), for which several such sites are now known, more than on other Neolithic cultures. It seems that the victims of mass violence were buried, if at all, by inclusion in disorganised mass graves without any sign of post-mortem care. This indicates intentional non-conformity to the usual burial practices of the LBK and thereby wilful neglect of the funerary expression of victims’ individual cultural identities. So far, every newly discovered mass-violence site has revealed new facets of violent behaviour, including likely evidence for massacres, selected capture, torture, mutilation and systematic execution. The bioarchaeological complexity of these mass-violence sites necessitates highly comparative approaches for their interpretation that incorporate all sites where human remains have been deposited as well as their periodic reappraisal. Currently, warfare seems to be the most plausible reason for most of the group violence encountered in the LBK, especially the drastic massacres of settled communities. LBK massacre victims are characterised by perimortem cranial injuries, careless deposition in settlement contexts, lack of post-mortem attention, and the suppression of their cultural identity.

It is now widely acknowledged that warfare played an important role in cultural developments throughout Maya history, including from its earliest origins. There is still much disagreement, however, over a number of fundamental aspects of Maya warfare, such as who participated in it, how it was conducted, the scale of conflicts and what the motivations were. This chapter provides a brief synthesis of current knowledge and controversies in the archaeology of ancient Maya warfare. First, a brief overview is provided of who the Maya are, the geographic region they have inhabited for over 3,000 years, the periods under study, and general patterns in how they conducted warfare. New findings produced by a diverse array of methods and specialists are then placed side by side and situated within their chronological and regional context. The focus here is on areas that have seen recent advances, in particular new archaeological evidence on the Preclassic period roots of Maya warfare, epigraphic advances showing the complexity of geopolitics during the Classic period in particular involving the Kaanul Snake kingdom, Postclassic mass burials and contact period war among Maya and between Maya and Spanish.