Gruesome instances of mass killing have punctuated the 6000 year-long sequence of the prehistoric South American Andes, an area that encompasses modern-day Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northern Argentina and Chile. Accurately gauging the intensity and intent of violence—in particular mass extermination—among people who left no form of written language, requires a forensic skeletal approach that informs on both the cause and manner of death, as well as the nature of corpse disposal or burial, which itself reveals how bodies were treated after death.

Time and again, aggressors in the Andes marshalled common tactics, including the sacking of towns and sanctuaries, instituting systems of mass displacement, controlling reproduction among women, moving children from subservient groups, and orchestrating the maiming and murder of both formidable rivals and civilian noncombatants alike. These violent episodes of eradication may best be understood as outbreaks of local communal strife, limited in both place and time. These genocidal moments capture the collective murder of targeted sub-population groups. The physical and material record helps us identify catastrophic death assemblages, reconstruct the profiles of victim and perpetrators, discern the methods of murder, and even deduce underlying motivations for attack.

The academic literature on the two major phases of violence preceding the Armenian genocide (1915-1923), namely the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896) and the Adana Massacres of 1909, remains in its infancy. While most historians have embraced the continuity approach which claims that the Armenian genocide was the culmination of the two other periods of massacres, only a handful of historians have argued that these episodes of violence should be analyzed and assessed as separate historical events by positioning them in their respective historical contexts. Following the latter approach the following entry analyzes the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896) and the Adana Massacres of 1909 both of which had catastrophic impact on the Armenians of the Empire. While the former took place during the despotic period of Sultan Abdülhamid II and led to the massacring of more than 200,000 Armenians in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, the latter took place after Young Turks Revolution of 1908 in the provinces of Adana and Aleppo leading to the death of more than 20,000 Armenians. The Hamidian massacres demonstrates the premediated nature of the massacres and the role of the central government. The Adana massacres were organized locally with the participation of the both the provincial authorities as well as local agents and their cronies.

Did genocide exist in prehistory before the formation of states? With Europe as focus, this article seeks an answer to this seminal question by coupling three lines of archaeological evidence: warfare, abnormal graves and genetics. When warfare is waged against other groups, there is a risk of genocidal events of unconstrained violence. Warfare became more frequent when Neolithic farmers, and later pastoral herders, migrated into the land in several expansions that eventually absorbed or replaced original residents. In the Bronze Age, along with professional military units and higher population densities, abnormal graves increased significantly in frequency. Indeed, warfare is often in evidence in abnormal graves, which call to mind recent examples of genocidal massacres and mass graves. At times, however, there is no apparent reason for the deviant interment. The victims in these graves evidently shared some form of identity. Young women and adolescents are often in minority, probably because they were taken captives and incorporated in the captors’ society as wives and labourers. The conclusion is that genocidal moments took place. Genetic and archaeological evidence corroborates that exposed groups’ possibility to continue reproducing themselves economically, culturally and biologically became restricted. Epidemics is an unknown variable.

The massacres in Memphis in early May, 1866, and in New Orleans in late July highlight the failure of Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policy to provide for black civil rights. The massacres are prompted by black soldiers in Memphis, black suffrage in New Orleans, and black claims to equality on both. Racial violence in the two major cities at either end of the lower Mississippi valley symbolize the failure of Johnson’s policy and help bring about Radical Reconstruction. Having been integral to the military outcome of the war and the ending of slavery, the lower Mississippi valley will continue to play an essential role in national affairs – especially with regard to race – throughout Reconstruction and for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

This chapter explores the fate of obstinate enemy garrisons who chose to withstand British breach assaults in the Napoleonic era. Under customary laws of war, British soldiers had the right to put such garrisons to the sword. In the sieges of the Peninsular War, British soldiers generally gave mercy to their French counterparts, part of a consistent pattern of self-regulating restraint that characterised Anglo-French combat during the war. A shared Anglo-French martial culture of honour and civility prevailed. Amongst other national enemies, however, in other contemporary global theatres of war, a very different picture emerges. British soldiers put defending Spanish and Indian troops to the sword at the sieges of Montevideo, Seringapatam and Gawilghur, raising important questions about the complex ways in which military and cultural factors coalesced, in shaping patterns of restraint and excess. These comparative case studies reveal the paradoxical Janus-face of enlightened ‘civilized war’ in action, with moderation and protections accorded to those enemy soldiers who fell firmly within its self-defining and self-limiting boundaries, and a dramatic lowering of restraints towards those combatants deemed to be on its margins or beyond.

This chapter spans the history of European siege warfare across the long eighteenth century, from the age of Louis XIV to the Napoleonic Wars. It lays out the key thematic groundwork and siege case studies explored in later chapters. The first half outlines the nature of ‘the siege’ as the classic form of old-regime positional warfare – its operational forms, temporal and spatial dimensions, and rituals and customary laws of war – and charts the relative historic decline of breach assaults and siege related massacres of garrisons and civilians in the eighteenth century. The second half shifts to the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era. It identifies the continuing importance of siege operations beyond their earlier high point in European military affairs; the regional and chronological shifts in sieges across the Napoleonic Wars; the nature of British siege operations in Continental Europe and the colonial sphere (India and South America); and ends with an overview of British and French sieges in the Peninsular War – the epicentre of Napoleonic siege warfare and of the storming and sack of besieged towns.

From the moment Christopher Columbus used the tinkling of a hawk’s bell to excite the interest of the welcoming Taínos during the First Encounter, music became a weapon of both conquest and resistance in the struggle for America. Here we are introduced to the nightmare of the Spanish conquest as reflected in the recovered Aztec songs of the Cantares mexicanos describing the massacres at Tenochtitlan and Cholula in the 1520s. Following the Spanish mission to Christianize America through the imposition of church music against the holdouts of Indigenous song, the European scramble for the “New World” introduces British explorations of Canada and musical encounters with the Inuits – sometimes against a background of violence, and sometimes in a tenuous moment of peace.

This chapter analyses four intercultural emblems of violence constructed by indigenous and Spanish artists in New Spain and Peru in the sixteenth century, when the region was under imperial Spanish rule. These highly stereotyped and conventional images combined the conventions of indigenous and European visual arts to present summarised and eloquent images of their violence, and this in turn facilitated Spain’s victory over the Aztec and Inca rulers, and also the imposition of Christianity over pagan religion. The detailed analysis of the contents, style and many layers of meaning of these emblems allows us to understand the diverse, even contradictory, cultural meanings of violence in this colonial situation.