The Dawn of Everything

The archeological rigor and discovery explained in this book do indeed shed new light on our arrogant and foreordained conceptions of prehistory and the development and status of what has become known as "civilization." I have always found the notion of near-instantaneous "revolutions," whether agriculture, industrial, or computer, to be inherently questionable (and most often preceded by a blizzard of trial and error and half-steps and experimentation over centuries). I find it much easier to believe in an ebb, neap, and rip tide of different intellectual and cultural phenomena and traditions (moving into and back from the cultural shore that it changes) to be a more likely scenario. The new archeology would appear to support such a story.

If I have a misgiving about this book, it is the authors' sharp tongue for what amounts to enlightenment political philosophers who, while they may have had their views of the nature of man, were neither archeologists nor social scientists, and lacked the wealth of modern discoveries and tools available to these authors. So too, the work of prehistory scholars (such as Gordon Childe, Robert Redfield, Henri Frankfort, and many others) is dismissed readily, some sub silentio, for want of the more modern discoveries, when many of these older scholars took pains to point out the anomalies in what record they did have, which they could not resolve. Finally, this is a book about prehistory, not history. It spends scant time discussing the impact of writing on cultural development, and concedes in its silence on the point that it is mostly making informed judgements from a physical record, rather than reading how prior cultures and periods conceived of themselves. Notwithstanding these minor matters, this is a book not to be missed (as many others have concluded).

This book suffers from two things in terms of its writing and structure. First, there's Graeber's desire to compress as much information into one space as humanly possible, even to the detriment of his own argument and the discussion he wants to push people to have. The second is that it seems, if I'm reading into both authors' writing styles correctly, Wengrow's desire to flesh out those concepts with more detail to further support them. (I say that because I've checked a few of his articles, and he has a tendency to develop even more focused detail than Graeber.)

I could be wrong about who was doing what, but regardless? The end result is a book that is a slog to get through and frequently leaves me forgetting half of what I've read, going back to skim it and remind myself about what they were discussing, and then trying to figure out what most of it has to do with the point being made. Which, yeah, the topics discussed do relate. But it's such a winding detour through excruciating detail that it makes it hard to focus on the overall picture that they're trying to get us to see.

So much of this would've benefitted from focused case studies rather than intertwining and switching between each of them. It also would've dealt better with more clear (instead of verbose and annoyingly lengthy) section titles that could serve as functional reminders rather than quippy sayings.

Overwhelmingly, I wasn't amused with most of this. Despite the obvious amount of time this had to have taken in order to gather all the resources and research, the writing feels rushed and confused. It doesn't feel nearly as solid as it really could've been.

One of the earliest recollections I have about thinking about ancient peoples was while playing Age of Empires (@AgeOfEmpires): as an omniscient god, I commanded villagers to build and farm until buildings of the army and university created scientific breakthroughs I could use to make better dudes to kill other civilizations.

Graeber (@DavidGraeber) and Wengrow (@DavidWengrow) show that the myth of prehistory doesn't really stray far from the gameplay of Age of Empires in #TheDawnOfEverything: after humanity fell from the "eden" of egalitarian hunters and gathers, agriculture required individuals to give up autonomy to brutal rulers to avoid returning the Hobbesian horrors of an "eden" that is both paradise and hell. According to the myth, the continued progress of humanity requires the social contract because humans are incapable of organizing without the threat of violence.

In the Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow demolish the myths of prehistory with modern scholarship on the people of prehistory and their inclusion in recent works of anthropology like Harari's (@harari_yuval) Sapiens.

In the place of prehistoric myth, Graeber and Wengrow provide evidence of "bold social experiments representing a carnival parade of political forms" including seasonal monarchy and despots, ceremonial kings, civilizations taking up and abandoning agriculture, and the egalitarian and complex structures of Nebelivka and the Huron.

If you haven't visited "precivilizational", "prehistorial", or early human history since high school, Age of Empires, or Sapiens, Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything should help you demolish ideas now unsupported by archaeology and research so you can imagine and work toward a more liberated future.