An important and stimulating book because it challenges so many of our assumptions about the development of human societies, and effectively at that. Food for thought and debate.

More than one “revisionist” history starts by setting up a straw man to knock down — a thesis that nobody believes in anyway. But here the authors take on a set of assumptions that anthropologists may question but laymen still tend to take for granted: That a people’s economy evolves linearly from a hunter-gatherer mode to agriculture and then to industrial societies; that political structures grow from small bands to tribes to states and then perhaps supranational entities; and that organisations evolve from simple and egalitarian to complex and hierarchical. And we commonly assume that all these trends are naturally and unavoidably linked.

Those assumptions, the authors argue, are not supported by the facts. They may once have been a reasonable attempt by early modern western philosophers to understand how human societies evolve, but they were simplistic and wrong. Instead of allowing themselves to be steamrolled into a fixed pattern by some inexorable force of history, our ancestors demonstrated agency and creativity, and consciously experimented with many different models of survival and organisation. And crucially, they demonstrated the ability to reject forms that didn’t work for them — to turn their back on agriculture, cities and kings. Teleological interpretations of history tend to see such actions as regressive and signs of failure, but Graeber and Wengrow demand more respect for the wisdom of our ancestors and their innovation in the pursuit of happiness. In particular they offer fascinating perspectives into Native American political thinking and the possibility that it strongly influenced Enlightenment ideas (which are so often imagined to be essentially European).

To support their thesis, they walk us through a long list of societies, spread all over the world, that chose different models. There is an obvious risk there, as this to a varying degree involves interpretation of limited evidence. But they at least make a good case that their interpretations are as defensible as the traditionalist ones — and that much evidence has been previously overlooked or misinterpreted because both scientific and philosophical analyses were too biased, seeing kings and empires without serious evidence. They emphasise the evidence that many societies managed complexity and developed effective solutions with a self-organising collaborative model. Which may seem counterintuitive, but actually I have rarely seen an supervising hierarchy solve a problem — at their best hierarchies adopt and promulgate solutions that are developed at a collaborative level, but they almost never invent them. So this makes sense to me.

In a study that set out to investigate the origins of “inequality” (itself a fluid concept) Graeber and Wengrow arrive at the conclusion that the very hierarchical, multilayered organisation of most modern societies is an avoidable evil. A “trap” that we could escape from, because some our ancestors already did. It is an encouraging idea, that the condition of modern is often the ravine we got stuck in, while on our way descending from the rocky mountain slope to the green, fertile valley. A ravine of which the steep walls may be hard, but not impossible to climb. Still, the authors don’t really explain how so many of us got trapped there, if more egalitarian, more collaborative models are so much more attractive. They imply that Western colonialism may have helped to spread the hierarchical model, but they don't press that argument very hard.

Those of us with experience of top-down bureaucratic organisations know that one of the Kafkaesque ways in which they sustain themselves is to declare that challenging the status quo is “not done” and unhelpful. Such organisations instead tend to reward those who share the Panglossian notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds and everything is for the best. Graeber and Wengrow tell us that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, and we should have the courage of our ancestors to rethink, experiment, and find better solutions. They do not offer a cookbook, no easy road into paradise, but they do bring a fundamentally positive message. ( )

What an extraordinary, mind-expanding book [b:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity|56269264|The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072525l/56269264._SX50_.jpg|87659801] is. I had high hopes for it and they were consistently exceeded. Over 526 pages plus extensive notes and bibliography, Davids Graeber and Wengrow systematically undermine conventional wisdom about prehistoric life and recount the diversity of ways humans have lived in communities over the millennia. I found the sense of perspective and possibility running through the whole book really powerful and mind-expanding.

This feeling took me back thirty or more years, to reading a big hardback world history book in the primary school library with absolute fascination. (This might have been it but I'm not sure.) I was enthralled to learn about how many hundreds of thousands of years humans have been living in societies, leaving archaeological evidence of the buildings and objects they created. I've never got over that sense of awe about the span of human history; thank you school library. [b:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity|56269264|The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072525l/56269264._SX50_.jpg|87659801] reignited that same awe and fascination by bringing a dramatically original perspective to prehistory. The two Davids deconstruct conventional understandings of how agriculture, slavery, cultural exchange, democracy, sexual inequality, city-building, and hierarchy worked in ancient and precolonial times. Their analysis is intellectually robust and evidence-based, yet accessible to the general reader - something Graeber was always incredibly good at. The text is rich with fascinating examples that cover a huge span of history and much of the world. There is some intersection with and considerable expansion upon [b:Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia|60784843|Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1654480633l/60784843._SY75_.jpg|95849575], Graeber's other posthumous book. I wish I'd read that after [b:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity|56269264|The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072525l/56269264._SX50_.jpg|87659801], in fact, as now I realise why it felt unusually insubstantial. The ideas in the two books are closely connected.

[b:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity|56269264|The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072525l/56269264._SX50_.jpg|87659801] begins not at the start of history (if there is any such thing), but at the point when Europeans encountered a genuinely new and different society to their own in the Americas:

This is one area in which early missionary or travellers' accounts of the Americas pose a genuine conceptual challenge to most readers today. Most of us simply take it for granted that that 'Western' observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perhaps even unknowable Other. But in fact, in many ways, the authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignity - or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology - indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones.

The differing views on individual liberty are especially striking.

Successive chapters consider broad topics (agriculture, political organisation, cities, etc) and move through the millennia. I found the whole extremely thought-provoking, but will pick out a few points that proved particularly striking. The authors are at pains to counter linear narratives that societies move inexorably from simplicity to 'complexity', often underpinned by technological determinism and presumed irreversibility. One significant point is the number of societies that move between very different forms of social and political organisation depending on what time of year it is:

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either 'simple' or 'complex' types, since what have been identified as the diagnostic features of 'complexity' - territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display - apppear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population. Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognise that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgement has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn't really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history anymore. Nobody has proposed an alternative.
[...]
The same individual could experience life in what looks to us something like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states. With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to both make and unmake the political worlds we live in.

This book both seeks to recognise the true diversity of social forms that existed before capitalism flattened them all and to ask how and why such a range of forms arose. There is no straightforward explanation, of course, but the questions are all fascinating to consider:

But how do we explain the differences between these two culture areas? Do we start from the institutional structure (the rank system and importance of potlatch in the Northwest Coast, the role of money and private property in California), then try to understand how the prevailing ethos of each society emerges from it? Or did the ethos come first - a certain conception of the nature of humanity and its role in the cosmos - and did the institutional structures emerge from that? Or are both simply effects of a different technological adaptation to the environment?

These are fundamental questions about the nature of society. Theorists have been batting them about for centuries and probably will for centuries to come. To put matters more technically, we might ask what ultimately determines the shape a society takes: economic factors, organisational imperatives, or cultural meanings and ideas? Following in the footsteps of Mauss, we might also suggest a fourth possibility. Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?

The two Davids are evidently very tired of anthropological ideas being dumbed down and misinterpreted in popular social science books (some of which they cite and demolish impressively in a few sentences). One trope I've definitely come across before, presented without evidence, is that farming leads inexorably to hierarchical systems of domination. Their refutation is systematic and convincing:

If peasants are people 'existentially involved in cultivation', the ecology of freedom ('play farming', in short) is precisely the opposite condition. The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without becoming farmers; to raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one's existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death. It is just this sort of ecological flexibility that tends to be excluded from conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as the point of no return.

Moving freely in and out of farming in this way, or hovering on its threshold, turns out to be something our species has done successfully for a large part of its past. Such fluid ecological arrangements - combining garden cultivation, flood-retreat farming on the margins of lakes or springs, small-scale landscape management (e.g. by burning, pruning, or terracing) and the corralling or keeping of animals in semi-wild states, combined with a spectrum of hunting, fishing, and collecting activities - were once typical of human societies in many parts of the world. Often these activities were sustained for thousands of years, and not infrequently supported large populations. As we'll see, they may also have been crucial to the survival of those first human populations to incorporate domesticated plants and animals. Biodiversity - not biopower - was the initial key to the growth of Neolithic food production.

Dunbar's number is a concept even more overused and abused in social science books, notably those about technology and the workplace. The popularised version is that prehistoric humans lived in small communities, so we are evolutionarily hardwired to only able to personally know and maintain bonds with about 150 people. This is sometimes extravagantly extrapolated to explain why direct democracy can't work, why people act mean on social media, etc, etc. I was delighted by the two Davids nuanced treatment of Dunbar and emphasis on how patronising it is to assume that prehistoric humans were stupider than we are:

It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents. This might seem odd, but from the perspective of cognitive science it makes perfect sense. It's precisely this capacity to shift between scales that most obviously separates human social cognition from other primates. [...] Humans tend to live simultaneously with the 150-odd people they know personally, and inside imaginary structures shared by perhaps millions or even billions of other humans. Sometimes, as in the case of modern nations, these are imagined as being based on kin ties; sometimes they are not.

In this, at least, modern foragers are no different from modern city dwellers or ancient hunter-gatherers. We all have the capacity to feel bound to people we will probably never meet; to take part in a macro-society which exists most of the time in 'virtual reality', a world of possible relationships with its own rules, roles, and structures that are held in the mind and recalled through the cognitive work of image-making and ritual. Foragers may sometimes exist in small groups, but they do not - and probably have not ever - lived in small-scale societies.
Which is not to say that scale - in the sense of absolute population - makes no difference at all. What it means is that these things do not necessarily matter in the seemingly common-sense sort of way we tend to assume.

I also liked the point that throughout human history some people haven't got on with their family so have travelled a long way to live elsewhere! There is plenty of archaeological evidence for this phenomenon, it seems. A running theme throughout the book is that evidence for more nuanced and interesting interpretations of political organisation across history has been around for a long time (although some is more recent), but has often been dismissed. The academic emphasis has been on a narrative with European political forms as the logical endpoint, rather than exploring the variety of other forms tried elsewhere. I was particularly intrigued by the case study of democratic government in the Aztec city of Tlaxcala. The two Davids are unequivocal in stating that this dismissal is part of why nowadays we feel trapped in our current global political and economic system, despite it being obviously exploitative and destructive:

In fact, the evidence we have from Palaeolithic times onwards suggests that many - perhaps most - people did not merely imagine or enact different social orders at different times of year, but actually lived in them for extended periods of time. The contrast with our present situation could not be more stark. Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like. Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them.

If something did go terribly wrong in human history - and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did - then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel that this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of history.

The last two sentences pack an extraordinary punch:

We can see more clearly now what is going on when, for example, a study that is rigorous in every other respect begins from the unexamined assumption that there was some 'original' form of human society; that it's nature was fundamentally good or evil; that a time before inequality and political awareness existed; that something happened to change all this; that 'civilisation' and 'complexity' always come at the price of human freedoms; that participatory democracy is natural in small groups but cannot possibly scale up to anything like a city or a nation state.

We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths.

Yet I urge you not to stop reading there. In most nonfiction I only skim the notes, but they are always worth a thorough examination in any Graeber book. He invariably includes amusingly sardonic asides, such as:

As others point out, Yanomami tend to sleep together six to even ten people in the same bed. This requires a degree of good-natured mutual accommodation of which few contemporary social theorists would be capable. If they were really anything like the 'fierce savages' of undergraduate caricature, there would be no Yanomami as they'd all have long since killed each other for snoring.

[b:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity|56269264|The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072525l/56269264._SX50_.jpg|87659801] is an antidote to TINA. It reminds us that there have always been alternatives in the past, we just haven't been looking for or at them. Although rapacious capitalism seems inescapable just now, it has only existed for a tiny proportion of human history. Many other ways to live together have been tried and remained stable for thousands of years. While some were violent and exploitative, others were peaceful and liberatory. I really hope the three sequels mentioned in the foreword still come to pass, even though tragically David Graeber is no longer alive to collaborate with Wengrow. I'd love to read a lot more revelatory reinterpretation of prehistory. ( )

Though the approach didn't resonate with me, I did enjoy the information, I wish it were presented in a more engaging manner. ( )

This sprawling book is hard to describe because it is a sprawling book covering spans of time from pre-Ice Ages to the 20th century, and cultures found all over the world. I found it fascinating to read/listen to. But I also found it a little frustrating that, by the end of it, I could not easily summarize their conclusions. And I think the authors are okay with this because they knew they were tackling a big, big intellectual puzzle.
So if you have the time to invest, I would suggest you give it a go. ( )

Loved this book for completely changing my perspective on ancient civilization and human history. ( )

The title is no joke. The breadth and depth of this non-fiction work is stunning in its range and detail, about the origins, dietary decisions and political systems of societies as far back as 15,000 years. I never felt glad to put it down. I had read other books by David Graeber, which were gripping. This one exceeded my expectations, which had been high. It is one of those creations where I frequently wondered, "How did he learn this vast area and amount history, archeology & anthropology in one lifetime?" ( )

Fascinating; highly recommend; upends so much of what I learned in school
( )

A good book, in my view, is one that, once I have read it and taken its concepts on board; I think them to be so obvious that any other view would be ridiculous but, I also know that I would never have been able to reach this perspective without the author's input.

This is a good book.

I am intrigued by tomes, such as this, which take views which are universally accepted and question them. Life is rarely as simple as unquestionable propositions suggest it should be. Graeber and Wengrow ask the age old question, "When did our societies fall from grace into the mess that they now are?*

Under normal circumstances, one of two answers are possible; firstly, one may suggest a time and/or place in history when the fall occurred, or secondly, deny that such a fall took place. What our authors do, is to show that we would be asking the wrong question. Human society is not that linear.

We are taken on a tour of pre-history; i.e. that time before copious written records provide strong clues as to what is occurring. We see that civilisations, or societies have developed through many different routes: that not all, by any means, have developed from free spirited to authoritarian in some essential form of progression and that the way things are now is neither the inexorable result of history or, necessarily, the final destination. We have the ability to live a different lifestyle. ( )

There's potential in the material. The authors do a service in letting us know about archeological discoveries of complex societies run on non-State lines. But its presentation here is marred by a prolix and overexcited style, flights of speculation, and half-baked theorization. I would prefer a more focused and detailed explanation of just what is being found out (like what "1491" did for the sophistication of pre-Columbian America).

This book ripped my mind apart and my understanding of what it is to be a human and put it back together in a way that makes me excited to be part of the species.

Many of us think that civilization works like this:
You start in wandering tribes, you hunt and gather at the whim of the environment, and then one day you invent agriculture. You start planting, taming nature, grow cities, empires, science, etc. We assume this is the one and only way civilization grows. Sure, the primitive hunting-gathering sounds good, but to have that, you'd have to give up science and art and progress in general. Sort of the same way you may envy the carefree life of a child, but you can't really go back to childhood. Civilization works the same way, right?

What if all the above was absolute total bullshit? What if, instead, during the colonial era, we came up with the above theory specifically so we can 'look down' on the natives that were being colonized? That way, even if it seemed like they had a better lifestyle, Europeans could reason that they were just in a more primitive stage of human social evolution.

It's hundreds of years later, but we still have some strong lingering pieces of the above argument in our collective psyche. If we find some skeleton of a human from 50000 years ago, we imagine they were basically animals howling at the moon and worshiping their own toes because they didn't know any better. If it turns out they also knew something about the motion of the stars, we write it off as a fun, weird quirk but it doesn't really change our overall view of howling savages.

The book opens more-or-less suggesting that the European enlightenment was actually a result of contact with Native American philosophers, learning their views on civilization and sending that back to Europe. At the end of the book, they circle back to this idea and show that the specific Native American civilizations that may have inspired the enlightenment probably did so because they lived through monarchies and inequalities, they had actually evolved philosophies and practices to guard against it [I'm digressing a bit but the whole thing is just that interesting!!]

What is a city, really? Why would people choose to not farm? How did egalitarian societies avoid having dynasties? All of these questions have been answered by our species many times before, but there are some very heavy biased blinders we have on that keep us from seeing those answers.

The point is this: Human civilization isn't a linear, inevitable march to hierarchy, wealth inequality, and toil. We could choose from zillions of social configurations that have been tried out in the past, tried out by humans that were every bit as thoughtful, deliberate, and civilized as we are today. With some of those colonial prejudices removed from our brains, we can actually learn from the past... and this book very meticulously burns through such prejudices until you truly are able to see humans from the past as amazing, clever, complex equals (not just in theory but from the bottom of your heart and mind, scooping out the prejudices you didn't even know were prejudices around the past).

The downside is it's about a billion pages long, and kind of feels like it meanders a lot, but it does take that large length to start internalizing the views the authors present.

Note:
I've read lots of critiques of this book and I think it's important to point out how I read it vs. how many critics seem to read it.

Many of the passages follow a formula like this (this is my own made-up example):

"Archeologists found a skeleton of a woman in XYZ-land with a little statue by her. They assume it was for fertility, but who's to say she wasn't the secretary of agriculture for the regional district? After all, tribe W in land ABC had women who decided ..."

Now, reading the above, you can interpret it in 1 of 2 ways.

1. The author is explicitly claiming this particular woman was potentially secretary of agriculture in XYZ-land
2. The author is giving an example of our biases and pointing out the general feasibility of a skeleton found actually being a 'modern' person and why that shouldn't be a far-fetched thought, even if he doesn't believe this *particular* skeleton has the particular role he implied

If you read this book as (1), then you'll encounter a lot of problems. Pretty much every critique I've read interprets this book as (1). They'll do a detailed 'take-down' of that specific burial site, why XYZ-land didn't have secretaries, etc. Sure, but (in my opinion) that wasn't the point the authors were making.

If you read it as (2), you'll get more profound realizations out of it. ( )

Graeber and his late partner reevaluated our standard picture of ancient civilizations based on recent evidence, and found old certainties seriously lacking in support, and sometimes even logic.. What characteristics of a society, if any, are inevitable, and which just seem that way because of where we are now? Especially interesting are their views of hierarchy, the contributions of women, the variability of definitions of freedom, and the pursuit of material wealth. They are also really good at snark. A little repetitious, not surprising in such a long book, but the listening was easy. I learned a lot and might listen again next year. ( )

What if we ask ourselves how we come to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? This is my paraphrasing of the authors’ simple yet provocative question, the one that motivates David Graeber and David Wengrow’s synthesis of decades of accumulating knowledge in anthropology and archeology. The sheer efficiency of that question pleases me, as I labored in deep concentration over a richly documented synthesis of a body of work. Surely no one person could possibly be expert in the fullness of this material. The back matter - endnotes, index and bibliography - of this encyclopedic work are fully 30% of that of the text. And as I read, rapt and consumed by topics that have driven me for much of my life, I wrestled with doubt that I could convey the essence of a book of such scale in short form like this.

If there is one essential thing to glean from the authors’ ten year effort, it is this: without knowing it, we have all been subject to a basic story about the last some 30,000 years of human history. Roughly this is a story about original small bands of human beings; the advent of sedentism and agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution; the rise of cities and empires; and the growth and complexification that bring about the political structures and social control requisite for large scale human societies. It is Graeber and Wengrow’s project to demonstrate that this conventional account - to use their schema - is wrong, is boring and comes with dire political implications. It is a myth that dates largely to the Enlightenment. In abandoning it we can begin to consider other narratives of human history. Not only are alternative social arrangements abundant historically, but the accumulating evidence offered by new scientific tools and the research of recent decades allow us to see an ossified false narrative. Actual human societies are far more varied and quirky, and far less limited than we need or should believe. Given that unchained history, future human societies may achieve far more freedom and variety than we tend to assume.

Any attempt to convey the evidence and even the full arguments presented would occupy a substantial fraction of the 526 pages the authors took. So I will offer a few ideas and examples from the book. I highly recommend exploring the entire synthesis.

The only possibility in this account is to oversimplify. The authors see the Enlightenment narrative stemming from the work of Jean-Jaques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, whose nearly opposite accounts of history have been elaborated and reified over four centuries. In brief, for Rousseau, we began in freedom and only in settling into organized societies did we arrive at the current state of restriction and inequality, as humans “ran headlong to meet their chains”. For Hobbes, the original “state of nature” was notoriously “nasty, brutish and short”, and only by voluntarily surrendering to a central authority did people establish a “social contract” that protected them from the predations and misery of human life in its “uncivilized” state. Graeber and Wengrow argue that both narratives are wrong, and contributed to the emergence of views of human social arrangements that limit us intellectually, politically and socially.

For a practical illustration, consider the tendency toward explanations of human arrangements that suit our preexisting beliefs. For example, for centuries there have been people arguing for the existence of some kind of proto-economy or “primitive trade” very early in human history, based on the discovery of materials, precious stones, shells, etc. found hundreds or even thousands of miles from their original sources. However there are many other explanations for this distant dispersal. To share only one example, it is now understood that in many indigenous North American societies, women would play gambling games. Often they bet shells or other objects of personal adornment. One well known ethnographer estimates that many of the shells and other exotic materials found far across the continent arrived by the nonintuitive means of repeated wagering over a long period of time. This example not only indicates something of the explanatory limitations of motivated or biased conjecture, but shows the failure to account for the sheer wackiness - the authors use the word “quirky” - of human behavior, and how hard it is to anticipate its myriad forms.

One of the strengths of The Dawn of Everything is its ability to present familiar accounts of history whose faulty logic, upon exposure, can readily be seen. For example (and others have delved deeply into this area), they suggest that the role of foragers in the construct of the “Agricultural Revolution” is to stand for everything that farming is not, in order to help explain what farming and the agricultural life is. “If farmers are sedentary, foragers must be mobile; if farmers actively produce food, foragers must merely collect it; if farmers have private property, foragers must renounce it; and if farming societies are unequal, this is by contrast with the ‘innate’ egalitarianism of foragers. Finally, if any particular group of foragers should happen to possess any features in common with farmers, the dominant narrative demands that these can only be ‘incipient’, ‘emergent’ or deviant in nature, so that the destiny of foragers is either to ‘evolve’ into farmers, or eventual to wither and die.” We see how the prevailing concepts have defined our viewpoint, regardless of their reality.

Graeber and Wengrow review the evidence refuting that agriculture was adopted once humans learned its methods. Rather, many groups were uninterested, seeing it as unnecessary, even while understanding both the techniques involved and the attendant labor costs. It was adopted and rejected many times in many places, and there was apparently nothing inevitable about groups choosing to farm. Many other societies found ways to cultivate with minimal human involvement. And there is Richard Lee’s famous account of his discussion with an anonymous Bushman, who when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”

Such is the flavor of the book. In miniature and abbreviation.

This is a provocative and important book. One of its brilliancies is that any particular claim or example can be questioned without altering the fundamental point. Some have objected to the characterization of Rousseau’s thinking. Others have challenged the notion of a Native American “Indigenous Critique” that influenced Enlightenment thinking. And so on. Such critiques, however regarded, alter little if at all the fundamental claim here. It is hard to imagine marshaling any evidence or material of this breadth and volume without eliciting objections among some. And even harder to reject the fundamental insight that, despite one’s doubts about certain particulars, humans have lived within an exceptional range of social choices and arrangements over a vast period of time. In this, the authors are incisive and persuasive. I find this point of view truthful and exhilarating!

So what if we ask ourselves how we come to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? Graeber and Wengrow have rendered a liberating service: the invitation to regard ourselves and our history more clearly, with less bias. We see more clearly who we have been and who we are. Optimistically, with such awareness we envision future human life with greater freedom. And who couldn’t use an extra dollop of optimism right now? ( )

in essence a response rather than a standalone work so it probably wasnt a good idea going in with barely any pre-existing knowledge of scholarly archaeological or anthropological writings. but after reading a bit more about the type of stuff they analyze (and criticize) everything came clearer into the picture. from the amount of evidence alone it compiles (200 pages of notes/citations!) this work is outstanding. but graeber/wengrow go further and use this evidence as a means of picking apart, one by one, the preconceived notions about "egalitarianism" and "freedom" - whether they stem from rousseau or hobbes or someone else - that remain unfortunately driving academic and cultural thought today. ( )

This is important and should be taught to everyone. ( )

A convincing argument that the current world of hierarchical nation states is not the only way humans have lived together. For me, a few highlights were that the native Americans and how they organized their societies like we contributed to the enlightenment; that many early, large, cities were likely not based on agriculture and may only have been occupied seasonally; The Minoans were likely ruled by woman unlike their contemporary Greeks; and the Olmecs possibly organized society around sports figures rather than kings. ( )

This book challenges the standard narrative of how human civilization developed, which means that it also challenges the standard view of where we are now, and where we may go. It does this by looking at evidence -- the mass of new archeological and anthropological discoveries over the past forty years . It also (and simultaneously) shifts points of view, from Euro-centrism to a worldwide view with emphasis on the Western Hemisphere. And it proposes alternative views of what happened. This is an awful lot for one book, and can seem too much in the "could have been, was probably, was" vein, or too harshly critical of other scholars. But even so it really changed my views of the past. In the language of my youth, I would describe it as "mind blowing". In the language of today, I'll use the tamer "mind opening". ( )

It is impossible to summarize an almost 700 page book in a sentence or two. The authors observe that many recent discussions of human history attempt to explain the origins of inequality. There is also a strong belief that original human societies, bands of foragers, did not display inequality. The growth of inequality is usually seen as the result of the development of agriculture which was believed necessary for the development of specialists, rise of armies and autocratic leaders, either political, religious or both. The authors postulate three basic freedoms: freedom to move (I.e. relocate), freedom to disobey, and freedom to create or transform social relationships. They describe recent archaeological evidence that suggests that peoples in the past have deliberately retreated from and rebelled against oppressive societies such as the slave owning tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and the urban center of Cahokia, among others. They emphasize the idea that humans are active participants in the formation of culture, not helpless pawns of technological change. I really recommend this book.

Another big book of information, ideas, and conjectures, well organized, with a readable first chapter that clearly tells what it is about, and a final chapter, "Conclusion," that a gives the gist of its thought.
We humans have developed multiple kinds of cultures and societies. Our history and pre-history is complex. There is no simple explanation as to how we got where we are today, but it is all fascinating. ( )

The authors challenge the conventional wisdom of the early history of humankind, how agriculture began, how cities were formed and organized, and the formation of states. It provides numerous examples from recent, within the last 30 years, archaeological finds as well as overlooked historical sources.

Particularly interesting were the views of European society expressed by early Native American thinkers who visited Europe soon after it was rediscovered. The authors make a very good case that these indigenous Americans had a profound effect on Enlightenment thinking.

The conventional wisdom is that the first efforts with agriculture kicked off an agricultural revolution and, from that point on, society was on an inevitable road to create cities and kingdoms. The authors refute this view with numerous examples from around the world of societies that did some agriculture but preferred to continue with their hunter-gatherer lifestyles since it was more efficient than agriculture.

The conventional wisdom is that large cities and major projects could only have been developed with the help of a hierarchical society with strong leaders. The authors provide several interesting examples of large cities that had no evidence of a strong central leadership.

The book is not a light read as a result of the number of references to early archeological sites. Nevertheless, the book is very readable and enjoyable. The book has extensive footnotes, often discursive, that are also important to read. ( )

New archeology indicates there were multiple types of societal organization in prehistory.
The authors of this long and heavily referenced book argue that the usual summary of prehistory as a progression from hunter-gatherer, to agriculture, to tyranny and statehood is wrong, and that Hobbes characterization of life in pre-civilized society as "poor, nasty, brutish and short" is also incorrect. The most interesting suggestion is early in the book, with evidence that the European Enlightenment ideas of individual freedom may have been derived from contact with the native peoples of eastern North America. The French Jesuits who made initial contact with the Hurons, Wendats, and the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee in the early 17th century were impressed by the natives rhetorical and verbal powers, practiced in constant counsels. Freedom among the natives was the freedom to obey or disobey any order, and leaders had to persuade them to do anything. Kandiaronk (the muskrat) lead a coalition of four Iroquoian speaking tribes, the Wendats, and tried to prevent a fight with the Haudenosaunee, and later to oppose the French. In these societies, no man or woman was subordinated to another. Kandiaronk's words against Christianity were reported in the writings of Lahontan. Kandiaronk was sceptical that God would become man, and if he did, he would do so with pomp, in full view of everyone, giving everyone in the world the same laws and religion, not creating warring sects.

Quotes:

-"Why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierachy, did homo sapiens - supposedly the wisest of apes - allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root" (119)
-"...animals produce only exactly what they need; humans invariably produce more" (128)
"As St Augustine put it, we rebelled against God, and God's judgement was to cause our own desires to rebel against our rational good sense; our punishment for original sin is the infinity of our new desires" (139)
-Poverty Point, Louisiana, earthworks built in 1600 BC by native Americas, covering 200 hectares, more area than early cities in Eurasia (141)
-Jomon - a monolithic cultural destination in Japan, built by foragers from 14,000 BC (144)
"... indigenous critics of European civilization were already arguing that hunter-gatherers were really better off than other people because they could obtain the things they wanted and needed so easily." (148)
-"In Roman law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus, the right of use; fructus, the right to use the products of the possession; and abusus, the right to damage or destroy" (161)
- Schismogenesis - how societies become deliberately different in many areas as they interact (180)
-"What makes a slave different from a serf, a peon, a captive or inmate is their lack of social ties. In legal terms, at least, a slave has no family, no kin, no community; they can make no promises and forge no ongoing connections with others" (187)
-On potlatch and art: "The result, among others, is that Northwest Coast artisitic traditions are still widely considered among the most dazzling the world has ever seen; immediately recognizable for their strong focus on the theme of exteriority - a world of masks, illusions and facades" (202)
-"The Gardens of Adonis ... were a sort of festive speed farming which produced no food ... In the dog days of summer, when nothing can grow, the worman of ancient Athens fashioned these little gardens in baskets and pots. Each held a mix of quick sprouting grain and herbs ... left to wilt in the sun: a botanical re-enactment of the premature death of Adonis, the fallen hunter ..."

-"Or consider one of Sigmund Freud's two favorite students: Otto Gross, an anarchist who in the years before the First World War developed a theory that the superego was in fact patriarchy, and needed to be destroyed so as to unleash the benevolent, matriarchal collective unconsciousness, which he saw as the hidden but still-living residue of the Neolithic" (215)

- The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one's existence to the logistical rigors of farming; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death." (260)

- "What if everyone who ever died were all in one place? ... These 'invisible crowds', [Elias] Canetti proposed, were in a sense the first human cities, even if they existed only in the imagination." (276)

- The upper limit of close relationships that humans can form with each other is 150 persons. (279)

- [Basque villages and pre-historic Nebelivka in Ukraine] "... they provide an excellent illustration of how such circular arrangements can form a part of self-conscious egalitarian projects, in which 'everyone has neighbors to the right and neighbors to the left. No one is first and no one is the last' " (295)

- Aristocracies and monarchies may have arisen in raiding societies on the edges of egalitarian Mesopotamian towns (313)

- "If the visual arts of Teotihuacan celebrated anything, Pasztory insisted, then it was the community as a whole, and its collective values ..." (332)

- "... early Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. That is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles; and why for much of European history, the truly democratic way of filling offices was assumed to be by lottery." (356)

- "We would like to suggest that these three principles - call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma - are also the three possible bases of social power." (365)

- "In his Configurations of Cultural Growth (1944) [Alfred] Kroeber examined the relation of the arts, philosophy, science and population across human history and found no evidence for any consistent pattern..." (379)

- [on divine kings] "The king's sovereignty extends about as far as the king himself can walk, reach, see, or be carried." (394)

- [Ayllu - Andean village associations that were self governing] [Inca bureaucrats] "By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides an language of equity - but simultaneously ensures there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves." (425) ( )

Where to begin reviewing a book weighing in at nearly 700 pages from title page to end of index?

We open and close with a lot about freedom. Our first section is totally arresting, as we delve into how the Americans who preceded Europeans on this continent viewed European culture: with disbelief and disdain at our lack of freedom. While we Eurocentric people have always tended to view ourselves as being quite free, our "formal" freedoms were as nothing compared to the "substantive" freedoms found in America.

More on that in a moment, but notice my avoidance of terms like "indigenous people" or "Native Americans". They were Americans. They lived here. I love the radical respect that the authors give to those people who lived in this place before us. And those Americans who engaged in thoughtful substantive debate with their European interlocuters, they rightfully refer to as philosophers, even "philosopher-statesmen".

So about those freedoms: we theoretically have the right to travel, but if we haven't got moolah, we effectively must stay put. Many of the earlier American societies had kinship networks far and wide, and people really could travel whenever and almost wherever they wanted, knowing they would have kin that would have their backs. We formally have the freedom to do whatever we like, but we have authorities we must obey. North Americans the Europeans first contacted often did not. Their chiefs had no real authority to make anyone do anything. In a great turn of phrase, the authors say "the Wendat [Huron tribe of native Quebec] had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms."

And so the book continue with more of its radical upendings of our typical outlook on things. Pre-historical societies experimented with vast, vastly different ways of self-organizing. We weren't just "bands" (they always put that word in quotes) of ape-like hunter-gatherers, living in one particular default way, until bam, finally agriculture changed everything. We weren't always all the same and agriculture didn't all of a sudden change everything everywhere.

One item I couldn't help but bookmark: "There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don't like their families very much." I'm sorry, why isn't this called out more often? Most of us, given the slimmest of chances, will get as far away from our families as the train tracks will take us. Not that I have an axe to grind on this particular topic.

I'm sorry I can't do justice to more of the book, because there is much, much more. But these were my takeaways. ( )

How do you wrap your mind around the different options presented by these two authors? They cover the world from Ukraine to the Americas, to China, to India, to the Middle East. Their premise sounds plausible but how do I develop questions to critically analyze it?

there r a handful of ideas here worth pursuing

the "3 freedoms" and "3 kinds of domination" r interesting (tho they r neither original nor r they analyzed at any depth)

there r some potent suggestions, e.g. sacrality as the origin of property, or abt the distinction/confusion bw care and violence as underpinning sovereign human kingship

theres several cases which u could pull out at a dinner table debate to amaze and surprise

the book pulls together and points towards a synthesis of a diverse number of different arguments and bodies of evidence, but stops short of doing any serious creative theorizing or drawing any concrete conclusions

its far longer than it needs to b, and plays w/manipulates facts far more than it needs to ( )

This book has some interesting new information from recent archeological research that helps build a more complex and interesting picture of prehistoric societies. Unfortunately it is not a history as titled, but a rather tedious and haranguing polemic. Their intriguing premises were badly argued mainly with demolished strawmen, shifting definitions to suit, frequently citing the absence of evidence as the evidence of absence, and a whole suite of logical fallacies.

If they had just presented the evidence and added their interpretations of what some it might mean, it would have been great. The constant attack on "silly ideas" supposedly espoused by "very serious people" undermined their own claim to seriousness. ( )

Abandoned 1/4 way in on audio. It's manipulative and I don't want to spend my audiobook time dealing with that. If you like authors who poke holes in obviously unsupported arguments that no one still maintains, and then fill those holes in with their own unsupported ideas, and expressed with self-confidant gusto, this is your book. ( )