Consider, for example, the Yurok requirement for victors in battle to pay compensation for each life taken, at the same rate one would pay if one were guilty of murder. This seems a highly efficient way of making inter-group raiding both fiscally pointless and morally bankrupt. In monetary terms, military advantage became a liability to the winning side. As Kroeber put it, ‘The vae victis of civilization might well have been replaced among the Yurok, in a monetary sense at least, by the dictum: “Woe to the victors.”’
