Abstract

This paper is a philosophical examination of the claim that human violence is essential to the process of civilization. Some post-processual archeological studies of the phenomenon of Neolithization suggest that violence is endemic to it. This is the case in work on Ҫatalhöyük, an important site of the Anatolian Neolithic. To establish that violence is tied to Neolithization, archaeologist Ian Hodder and others have drawn on ideas culled from archaeologist Jacques Cauvin and philosophical anthropologist René Girard. My task will be to bring out the philosophical underpinnings of Cauvin’s and Girard’s views. They lie in the narratives of social development found in two nineteenth-century philosophers, Georg Wilhelm Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. I will thus articulate the way some contemporary work in archaeology is implicitly shaped by ideas from Hegel and Nietzsche on violence and inequality and draw attention to their connection to nineteenth-century Indo-European studies.