A large body of archaeological and anthropological research suggests that warfare is more common when societies are stratified. This is true for societies based on either sedentary foraging or agriculture. We argue that warfare in stratified societies does not require climatic or technological shocks, and results from competition among rival elites over land rent. In our model, elites recruit specialized warriors by offering booty in the event of victory, which may involve elevation to elite status. After each elite recruits an army, the rival elites must decide whether to attack, defend, or flee. We solve for the equilibrium at the combat stage as a function of army sizes, and use backward induction to solve for the equilibrium army sizes. If stratification is relatively low (the land rents are small relative to commoner food income), elites can sometimes win through intimidation without fighting an actual war. But if stratification is high, such equilibria disappear and the only outcome is a mixed-strategy equilbrium with a positive probability of open war. In either case, successful elites expand their territory. Fiscal constraints on the capacity of elites to recruit warriors can sometimes limit warfare, but do not prevent it entirely.

Before beginning a review of the cultural context for adolescent development, I will touch on “middle childhood” a newly emerging field of study that examines the period between childhood and adolescence. Physiological changes associated with the period between ages seven and twelve include the full maturation of the brain and the onset of adrenarche (increase in the adrenal production of the neurosteroid DHEAS) and a modest increase in growth referred to as the “mid-growth spurt” (Campbell 2011). The complementary cultural components of middle childhood will also be reviewed.

Adolescence is associated with more dramatic physiological change, notably puberty and a rapid growth spurt (Bogin 1994). First menses is often treated as an important milestone, sometimes triggering an elaborate series of rites to mark the change in a young woman’s status. Other physiological markers may be treated as culturally salient. “’Youth’ on Vanatinai begins at about age fourteen, or when the signs of puberty … are visible to onlookers.

The societies of medieval Northern Europe were slave-holding societies that revered military prowess and expressed wealth and power through symbols of warrior-hood. They were intensely hierarchical and patriarchal societies in which control, guardianship and naked power over people equated with status. Despite the growth of governmental and religious institutions, they remained societies obsessed with notions of honor and shame, with lineage and kinship, identity and belonging. This chapter explores some problematic historiographical assumptions around the diminishing significance of slavery in these cultural contexts, arguing that only when we acknowledge and recognize the slave-holding nature of these societies are we are better able to understand them. Close analysis of the lifestyle, attitudes, and cultural conceptions of the slave-holder and the enslaver are therefore essential. Indeed slave-holding behaviours are evident in a wide range of medieval sources including sagas, poetry, myths, chronicles, legal texts, manorial records, wills and manumissions as well as penitentials, sermons and hagiography. These sources reveal that enslaved people were regarded as the weakest, most dishonorable and degraded of all individuals. Paradoxically, they highlight that the marginalisation of enslaved human beings was extremely important for these communities - underpinning broader power relations and defining and reinforcing the boundaries of community identity and belonging.

The image of the Persian king is of a leader who rules the known world with justice and safe-keeping. The warrior aspect of the Persian king is the quality of the ruler to emerge victorious in battle with honor. A large part of a warrior-king’s duty was to subdue the presence of evil in the world. Persian kings and heroes of legend were tested through their conflict with the forces of chaos and savagery. In conquest, the hero demonstrated his courage and bravery by defeating monsters, devils, and ferocious beasts. Muslim intellectuals writing about the conquest of India embellished their histories with the ornamentation of Persianate heroic lore that civilized the untamed forces of nature and the demonic realm.

Weapons and armor are significant objects in the Homeric epics as well as in the archaeological record of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Greece. The relationship between these objects in these time periods and their archaeological contexts suggests as much about early Greek society as it does about warfare.