Only an even more terrifying beast—Leviathan—could cage it.

From War! What Is It Good For? by Ian Morris. Page 62.

We would not know any of this were the Ice Man not so spectacularly preserved, but systematic study of large samples of skeletons can produce equally nasty and brutish results. Sometime around A.D. 1325, for instance, at least 486 people were slaughtered and their bodies tossed into a ditch at Crow Creek in South Dakota. A good 90 percent—and possibly all—of the dead had been scalped. Eyes had been gouged out, tongues sliced off, teeth shattered, and throats cut. Some were beheaded. For a few, this was not even the first time they had been scalped or shot: their bones bore the telltale marks of older, partially healed wounds.

Excavations began at Crow Creek in 1978, and since then evidence for Native American massacres has come thick and fast. The most recent example (as I write) is at Sacred Ridge in Colorado, where a village was burned down around A.D. 800 and at least thirty-five men, women, and children were tortured and killed. Their enemies used blunt weapons—clubs, or perhaps just rocks—to smash their feet and faces to pulp. The killers scalped everyone, cutting off ears and hacking some corpses into dozens of pieces. Like the Romans described by Polybius a thousand years earlier, they even killed the village dogs.

In fact, not much about Crow Creek, Sacred Ridge, or Samoa would have surprised the Romans. Cicero and Tacitus, like Hobbes and Golding, knew perfectly well that the Beast was close, close, close, and that only an even more terrifying beast—Leviathan—could cage it.