Wars in the pre-modern past served many different individual and group agendas, encompassed a very wide range of forms, and could involve quite different relationships with enemies. To some extent this was true even for wars waged by a single social group. Some enemies were considered hardly human, while others were potential allies, affines, followers, or subjects. Some wars were zero-sum conflicts to exterminate foes or dispossess them of land, captives, livestock, or other goods; other wars engaged in political contestation over the labor and loyalties of both new and existing followers or factions, often appearing alongside other propagandistic acts and war-related spectacles. This talk draws on cross-cultural ethnography and builds on decades of insights from the archaeological literature, especially in the Americas, to formulate a simplified model of these modes of war and their connections with the vertical and horizontal politics of societies and groups.