What is left to be said about David Graeber and David Wengrow's book, The Dawn of Everything (hereafter, TDoE)? Reviews of it have appeared in a great many mass-media publications. Although many trend to the hyperbolic (e.g., “What If Everything You Learned about Human History Is Wrong?” New York Times, October 31, 2021), the amount of conversation the book has generated within and beyond the discipline is impressive. This review is written by an archaeologist and for archaeologists, and it is informed by a semester's worth of conversations among faculty members and graduate students in archaeology and history at the University of Georgia.
TDoE is a sweeping ideological and intellectual project that has both swagger and heft. With nearly 700 pages including notes and references, its goal is nothing less than a fundamental transformation of how we think about the human past. The book was written to be public facing. It will be best enjoyed by archaeologists who can avoid getting caught up in the dog-whistle critiques that inevitably emerge when the authors play fast and loose with archaeological data. TDoE will sit comfortably alongside other public-facing grand narratives: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997); Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens (2011); James Scott's Against the Grain (2017); and Graeber's own Debt (2011). However, it will also find company among more radical scholarship that seeks to deconstruct teleological narratives about social evolution and inequality.
The late David Graeber was an iconic activist, thought leader, and prolific intellectual, who moved seamlessly between public and academic realms. It is sad that Graeber did not live to see this book's reception. David Wengrow is an archaeologist with a strong background in African and Middle Eastern archaeology, and a publication catalog that reflects a history of grappling with concepts central to the project (i.e., origins, civilization). Wengrow's foreword explains that this book was the outcome of 10 years of dialogue between him and Graeber and was intended to be the first of multiple creative collaborations.
The first chapter introduces the central premise: narratives about human history that forefront inequality and a step-wise history of human evolution are dangerously wrong. They have made seem natural a modern global political system in which inequality is understood as the natural outcome of social evolution. Where did we go wrong? And how did we get stuck there?
The second chapter takes a deep dive into a core element of their thesis: the “Indigenous critique” of European society. The proponent of the Indigenous critique is Kandiaronk, a Huron-Wendat statesman whose purported views on religion, law, politics, personal freedom, and the refusal of arbitrary power formed the basis of Lahontan's Dialogues and in turn profoundly influenced Enlightenment thinking in France and beyond. Although Kandiaronk was certainly a real person, there is a question about whether the Dialogues represent his actual thoughts or whether he was crafted as an archetypical “noble savage”; Graeber and Wengrow come down firmly on the side of the former. For the Huron-Wendat Nation of Canada, the elevation of a Wendat philosopher and political leader in this way represents a much-desired recognition of one of their own (Louis Lesage, personal communication 2022).
Chapters 3–10 take the reader on a head-snapping journey through world prehistory, from the Ice Age through the origins of farming, cities, and premodern states. Graeber and Wengrow argue that the origins of inequality lie in the Paleolithic, and that as soon as such imbalances in power and/or wealth manifested themselves, humans developed flexible and self-conscious political strategies for subverting them. In exploring the heterarchical-to-hierarchical dynamics of human collectives among foragers, farmers, city dwellers, and states, they emphasize the fact that humans have consistently assembled and disassembled the sociopolitical worlds they inhabit—sometimes seasonally, and sometimes when things appear to have gone dangerously wrong.
Whether they are discussing forager complexity, play farming, decentralized cities, or why Cahokia was a failed experiment, each case study is deployed so as to highlight horizontal complexity in opposition to the prevailing logic that increasing inequality or vertical complexity should be considered “peaks” of evolutionary change. The decoupling of farming and sedentism and the city and the state is refreshing, well argued, and explained in terms that reference how concepts of modern science and social evolution developed in ways that mutually reinforced one another. In this way, their narrative succeeds in flipping the script on traditional “beats” in human history despite being organized in a familiar chrono-evolutionary schema.
A salient theory-building component of the book appears in Chapter 10, where Graeber and Wengrow lay out three principles that form the basis of social power: (1) control of violence (sovereignty), (2) control of information (administration), and (3) social charisma (heroic politics). When harnessed together, they can allow a group of people—any people, at any time—to establish positions of power and create hierarchy. But, more often than not in our collective past, that hierarchy could be (and was) disestablished.
For me, a real strength of this book lies in its deconstruction of the Enlightenment-and-later intellectual history that gave rise to the social sciences, including the neoevolutionary frameworks that have underpinned those disciplines and Western-derived myths about the inevitability and superiority of inequality. Where I imagine most archaeologists will find fault in the work is in the picking and choosing of case studies that support that argument and the dismissal of those that do not. Although the book's cross-cultural coverage seems exhaustive, I found myself scanning the references for additional cases that I thought necessary. Where was New Guinea and the work of Paul Roscoe and Polly Wiessner? John Ware and the sodalities of the Puebloan Southwest? The book fails to grapple with issues of demographic and spatial scale in a satisfying manner. The advent of market economies in the processes described is also a missing thread.
Thumbnail sketches of each archaeological case study can make contentious interpretations seem matter of fact. This is most apparent in their recounting of the archaeology of eastern North America (Chapter 11), which serves as a bookend to the Indigenous critique introduced in Chapter 2. Their retelling of eastern North American Indigenous history is clearly in service to the central aims of the volume, leveraging the Hopewell interaction sphere and the demise of Cahokia in service to their notion of a collective human spirit intent on subverting authority. Their linking of Huron-Wendat political philosophy to the rejection of Mississippian society is especially tenuous. I do not presuppose that if asked to write a popular history of Egypt—Wengrow's specialty—I would not make similar errors in my parsing of reliable versus unreliable sources or interpretations. However, it is an odd feeling indeed to witness scholars whose work one so respects walk into one's wheelhouse and start rearranging the furniture in such a high-profile manner.
There are some benign errors in their retelling of Indigenous eastern North American history, such as the claim that clans likely originated in the Middle Woodland as opposed to the Late Archaic period. However, while undoubtedly unintentional, there are sections of the book that might be considered somewhat more problematic. Statements that descendants of Cahokians thoroughly abandoned all ties to the American Bottom, locating the Wendat in Quebec but not Ontario—where their ancestral villages were and are present—and stating that the Calusa effectively disappeared, having been packed off onto slave ships bound for Caribbean plantations, have implications for the association and disassociation of descendant and traditionally associated communities and their ancestral sites and territories.
These quibbles with the leveraging of North American Indigenous history aside, the take-home message of the book is powerful. Social evolution is a myth. Political flexibility has been, and can be, our reality. We need only to embrace the potential of our shared history to achieve collective action in the present. I am not sure that the volume provides us a road map for how to do so, but it is an invitation to imagine, and to play with, what such a future might look like. As a manifesto that challenges us to think differently about possibilism in opposition to determinism in both archaeology and our contemporary world, TDoE is a resounding success.
