Steven A. LeBlanc
Steven A. LeBlanc (born 1943) is an American archaeologist and former director of collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum. He is the author a number of books about Southwest archeology and prehistoric warfare. His books have run counter to the once widespread notion of peaceful preliterate cultures. However, he continues that tradition in asserting that all preliterate cultures were similar, with the same cultural responses to being stressed. Azar Gat expresses similar arguments in the first chapters of "War in Human Civilization" (Oxford UP, 2006). Criticism. Some scholars  have disputed the claim that all primitive peoples in the American Southwest were warlike. The archaeologists Paul and Suzanne Fish have concluded that there is minimal evidence of conflict in the Hohokam regions. Todd Bostwick has argued that the hilltop sites most likely had religious or astronomical rather than military purposes. Ann Hibner Koblitz, a historian and professor of gender studies, surveyed the work of LeBlanc and his followers, and wrote: In a section of Koblitz's article titled "Looking-Glass Logic," she criticizes two arguments that LeBlanc and others have advanced. First, she writes that "it is illogical to  assume, as LeBLanc and his followers do, that the existence of an unpopulated or sparsely populated area between two population centers necessarily proves that those two populations were ever at war." She points out that there is a depopulated region between Phoenix and Tucson today, yet the two cities "are not now nor have they ever been at war." Second, she writes that "just because trade disputes can sometimes be a cause of war, it does not follow that evidence of complicated trade patterns means that war must have been a common occurrence."