Warfare is a constant in human history. Contributors to this book contend that agency and culture, inherited values and dispositions (such as religion and other cultural practices), beliefs, and institutions are always woven into the conduct of war. Using archaeological and ethnohistorical data from various parts of the world, the contributors explore the multiple avenues for the cultural study of warfare that these ideas make possible. Contributions focus on cultural aspects of warfare in Mesoamerica, South America, North America, and Southeast Asia.

This volume provides an overview of the whole range of long-term analyses in international relations. It evaluates and draws on theoretical approaches in both the humanities and social sciences - in subjects such as sociology, history, anthropology and archaeology - and recent progress in evolutionary theory and the mathematical study of complexity. The resulting analysis reinterprets processes of global political change in the past and present, and opens fresh areas of enquiry for international relations.

This sweeping, richly evocative study examines the origins and legacies of a flourishing captive exchange economy within and among native American and Euramerican communities throughout the Southwest Borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century. Indigenous and colonial traditions of capture, servitude, and kinship met and meshed in the borderlands, forming a ''slave system'' in which victims symbolized social wealth, performed services for their masters, and produced material goods under the threat of violence. Slave and livestock raiding and trading among Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, and Spaniards provided labor resources, redistributed wealth, and fostered kin connections that integrated disparate and antagonistic groups even as these practices renewed cycles of violence and warfare. Always attentive to the corrosive effects of the ''slave trade'' on Indian and colonial societies, the book also explores slavery's centrality in intercultural trade, alliances, and ''communities of interest'' among groups often antagonistic to Spanish, Mexican, and American modernizing strategies. The extension of the moral and military campaigns of the American Civil War to the Southwest in a regional ''war against slavery'' brought differing forms of social stability but cost local communities much of their economic vitality and cultural flexibility.

This edited volume mainly focuses on the practice of taking and displaying various body parts as trophies in both North and South America. The editors and contributors (which include Native Peoples from both continents) examine the evidence and causes of Amerindian trophy taking. Additionally, they present objectively and discuss dispassionately the topic of human proclivity toward ritual violence. This book fills the gap in literature on this subject.