![[Book Club | Discussion Part 3&4] Dawn of everything: A new history of humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/O8JxQ0po7e.jpg){kind=link}
David Graeber and David Wengrow – ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’. This new book from Graeber and Wengrow seeks to challenge assumptions about human social evolution and narratives of a linear development from primitive brutes to civilised people. Instead, the authors draw attention to the diversity of earlier human societies, arguing that humans had lived in large, complex, and decentralized societies for thousands of years. In doing so, Graeber and Wengrow fundamentally transform both our understanding of the past, and our vision for new ways of organising society in the future.
Schedule
- Thursday 23rd December - Foreword, Chapters 1 & 2
- Sunday 2nd January - Chapters 3 & 4
- Sunday 9th January - Chapters 5 & 6
- Sunday 16th January - Chapters 7 & 8
- Sunday 23rd January - Chapters 9 & 10
- Sunday 30th January - Chapter 11 & Conclusion
I would really disagree with this, Graeber and Wengrow do provide evidence to back up what they're saying in the part you refer to, although I think part of the problem is that this evidence isn't presented clearly and explicitly in the main body of the text and they rely on the reader paying attention to the notes.
At Stonehenge, for example, there have been a large amount of pig remains found. Most of these were "immature" (just less than a year old but not neonatal) and the bones showed evidence of them being butchered, cooked, and discarded in pits. Due to pigs generally being born in the springtime, and given the age of most of the pigs that have been found, its very likely that these were slaughtered and killed during the winter period. There is no evidence of large amounts of pigs being reared around the area of Stonehenge, and analyses of the bones of some of these pigs indicates that they were reared elsewhere in Britain - some as far away as Scotland - and brought to Stonehenge to be eaten (although admittedly I don't really understand exactly how this analysis of the bones is done, that part went a little over my head). That the remains of the pigs include many heads, hooves, etc. also suggests that the pigs were not butchered elsewhere and the meat brought to the site, but that they were likely transported along these long distances alive and then butchered at Stonehenge. There is also evidence that the stones that aligned with the midwinter sun had been adorned with decorations.
This all happened in a period of roughly 2,000 years in which people in Britain had moved away from agriculture and reverted to foraging and herding livestock. This was likely caused by a colder, wetter period that negatively impacted crop yields and caused most people to turn away from agriculture - even for hundreds of years after the wetter period had ended (with the exceptions of people on some Scottish islands and a small amount of people in mainland Scotland and Northern England who stuck with agriculture but changed to more resilient crops).
We also know that there were dozens, possibly even hundreds of people buried at Stonehenge, and that many of the bodies buried there pre-date the structures that were built. Because of this, some believe that the stones act as a monument to those buried there and, given that many of the people seem to have been buried with items, weapons, and decorations, some suggest it might be the case that these were important people, perhaps the leaders of a clan and/or their descendants. That this might be a place for ritually paying respects to either living or dead (or both) members of some kind of aristocracy could also explain why these people would be willing to spend thousands and thousands of hours transporting very heavy stones from places as far as 150 miles away to build such a monument. That they would go through the trouble of transporting live pigs that had not even reached maturity (when the most amount of meat could be gained from them) yet all the way across the country every year to be eaten at these feasts, I think, also lends weight to the idea that these may have been given as some kind of tribute.
When you put all of this together, I don't think it is at all unreasonable for Graeber and Wengrow to argue that people in Britain in this period lived in smaller, dispersed foraging and herding societies who would congregate in the winter for a feast, possibly in deference to some kind of aristocracy (whether living or dead). Of course we'll almost certainly never know for sure about any of these things, and there's obviously going to be other theories on all of this, but I think there is definitely evidence to back up Graeber and Wengrow's claims - they, at times, just do quite a poor job of making this evidence clear to the reader, probably in an attempt to make it more accessible to your average reader.
Thank you for clarifying this! (I now have also read your perusall annotations)
Looking at the text again their citations seem to be better than I remember. But there are still some points where I'm not sure the citations entirely support the way they frame things. Their general thesis seems to be that these societies were highly conscious about the political and hierarchical implications of their modes of production/ positions of authority ... you name it, and thus consciously decided to form their societies in a way that accommodated their preferred type of social relations.
And with this framing, I don't really see how this:
They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it. [...] All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. [...]The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way.
is supported by this
I don't think this is the main theses of the book, although they do infer this at times. I think their main goal is to simply dispel myths surrounding early man: that they were all innocent, or all violent, or all stupid; or that certain ways of organising societies were natural or inevitable, or that human societies all developed in the same linear way. By helping people to gain a new understanding of the past, I think they're trying to help people think differently about how things could be in the future. That, for example, a city doesn't necessarily have to be hierarchical and authoritarian in order for it to function. There's also the stuff about finding out how we got "stuck" but I'm not really sure where they're going with that since they've only touched on it briefly where I am in the book.
That said, I think that in the places where they do argue that some societies were arranged in a conscious way isn't necessarily incorrect per se. Like its possible that some societies had an aristocracy at some point but ended up overthrowing them and arranging things with the intention of stopping it from happening again - this wouldn't be too far-fetched if we're to believe earlier humans were as intelligent as we are, why wouldn't some of them seek to overthrow authoritarian systems just as we do, or punish those who seek to place themselves over others in the first place? Their thoughts are shaped by their conditions and experiences just as ours are, so I don't think its too unreasonable to say that some of these more egalitarian societies were responses to or attempts to prevent more hierarchical ones. Although, even if that was the case, I agree that the Davids would need to do a much better job in proving it, if something like that could even be proved at all.
Yeah I agree with this. From what I can tell, their source doesn't exactly back up what they say, and I don't like that they don't mention the climate factors at play. Its still possible that they're partly right - that more people could have kept farming using the more resilient crops but perhaps chose not to because the crops failures made them lose trust in the benefits of agriculture, so they turned back to foraging the plentiful supply of wild hazelnuts instead. This could also explain the several centuries without agriculture even with the favourable climate restored. But again, they need to be more explicit with their reasoning for thinking it was a conscious decision and they need to provide better evidence for this.
So, I'm not denying fluid hierarchies nor that the structure of a society can be changed. But I've heard (more from the direction of psychology, but anyways) that general trends exist, according to material circumstances. E.g. societies with complex irrigation systems tend to be more communitarian (to keep them from clogging up/overflowing/drying out) while it tends to be easier to be individualistic if you just have to wait for rain. Or that cattle-herding likely produces more warlike and male dominated societies (since cattle are highly mobile and easily stolen and thus societies are organized around cattle-raids and and protection against them).
This is the oversimplified way I remember it, but it just seems intuitively to be an important factor. And therefore I'm annoyed that they just gloss over it (as far as I've read). Maybe it's obsolete for state of the art anthropology, but then it ought to be addressed and criticized and not left to be the big elephant in the room.
I just finished chapter 5 and there's something similar mentioned there. But its with preserved fish instead of cattle. And the compare/contrast was between two regions where there was a bit of a difference in how the tribes in those areas did things and the authors were trying to use fish/acorns as a way to illustrate the idea that groups in contact with each other, living in a places with similar resources, knowing similar skills, and aware of each other's cultures were able to do things completely differently at the same time.
I see, I believe this is something they go over in chapter 5, which I've just started reading. We'll have to see where Graeber and Wengrow go with this.