The scale of The Dawn of Everything is of a different order. The book offers a history of humanity that extends some 30,000 years in the past and across the inhabited world. This expansive scope provides the authors, the late anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, the means to demolish the “prejudices, dressed up as facts, or even as laws of history” (11) that have long guided scholarly and popular understanding of the human past.
In the eighteenth century, writers such as A.-R.-J. Turgot and Adam Smith took what had been invidious distinctions about proper land use and the rationality of dispossession found in the work of John Locke, among others, and transformed them into a theory about how societies developed over time. So-called savages hunted, barbarians tended flocks, the civilized farmed, and at the apex of this sociocultural progression—or evolution—came European commercial society. Each stage was defined by modes of obtaining food and transforming the environment, increasing size and complexity, and different ways of thinking and speaking. That it was women who farmed in eastern North America disqualified them from practicing true agriculture in the minds of interested categorizers. What began as a justification of colonization and philosophical conjecture became the basis of more scientific hypotheses as scholars sought empirical evidence through excavation or collection to confirm evolutionary theories. The discarding of older labels and substitution of other, still pejorative, terms such as “modern” and “developing” did little to change the story. The invention of agriculture in most versions of this conventional narrative was a trap, one that multiplied the number of calories human beings could produce and allowed for the growth of urban settlements and specialization of labor, but which yoked human beings to longer and harder work under new hierarchies of rulers.
Graeber and Wengrow, however, insist that human beings are not trapped. Inequality is not a necessary price of “civilization.” This insistence pits them against the long line of writers, including Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—whose very different arguments about human beings’ natural condition and the effects of society and government formed another layer on which theories of sociocultural evolution rested—to contemporary writers of sweeping histories such as Jared Diamond, Stephen Pinker, and Yuval Noah Harari. The Dawn of Everything argues that some of the most important archaeology of the last several decades reveals monuments and cities arising without agriculture or apparent hierarchy. Different forms of subsistence and exchange existed alongside one another for millennia. Zones of cultural influence based on ritual knowledge existed without states, as at Poverty Point in today’s Louisiana some 3,600 years ago or the more recent Hopewell sites of the Ohio Valley, and some societies established hierarchies confined to particular places or times. The archaeological record, in Graeber and Wengrow’s telling, shows that human beings have experimented with social-political-ritual orders throughout their history.