ABSTRACT
The ethnographic record by itself cannot imply anything about the prevalence of events in the past. The reason is that few if any societies described in the ethnographic record, even those described shortly after first contact with the West, were pristine in the sense of being completely unaffected by that contact. Cross-national studies suggest that war is associated with other kinds of violence. Archer and Gartner compared changes in homicide rates of various nations before versus after major wars. The chapter recently conducted another study that is relevant to predicting internal war. With political scientist Bruce Russett, it cross-culturally tested the hypothesis that democracies rarely if ever fight each other. In the ethnographic record, statistics on crime are not usually available. So in this study of interpersonal violence, it opted to compare societies by rank-ordering them in terms of ethnographers qualitative statements about the frequencies of homicide and assault.
