Once, in a coastal settlement in the North American northeast, people came together from near and far in an act of protest against what they perceived as a domineering and unfair distribution of goods and power. At first small in number, the gathering steadily grew: those present organized themselves into a small political community, with new forms of collective deliberation designed consciously to avoid the pitfalls of the society around them. Together, they planned for another, better world. At times, the gathering was carnivalesque, filled with performances and art. And yet, before long, the rulers who at first tolerated them had decided enough was enough: people were cleared from a public square with no small amount of force, and most returned to where they had come from. Often they traveled quite far, carrying stories and ideas back to their own communities.
Although little remains in the geological record, we know of this event because of the relics its participants left behind: documentation and artwork of many kinds. We also know because many continued to speak about it, such as the anthropologist David Graeber, who became one of the gathering’s most iconic voices. This event was known as Occupy Wall Street; it offers a contemporary example of the basic path of human history described in The Dawn of Everything (FSG, 2021) by Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow. They argue that those who came before us, even more than ten thousand years ago, were inventive and deliberative people who debated, and often fought, to construct the worlds they wanted to live in. They were complicated, like we are, but they were people whose aims and ideas we could understand. In a moment where social forms appear deadlocked, despite massive challenges (global warming not least among them), Graeber and Wengrow offer an account of how these innumerable experiments in collective living brought us, eventually, to where we are now: “stuck,” as they like to put it.
In one sense, then, The Dawn of Everything is a very long book about how the key question of human history is not the emergence of permanent or sustained inequalities but the gradual loss of our freedom to imagine and make things otherwise. It draws on extensive anthropological evidence to refuse the myth that agriculture’s transition into state-based domination was inevitable. On the basis of this evidence, they show how early modes of human creativity and social experimentation were subverted by three “elementary forms” of domination: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma.
That focus on how social creativity becomes sedimented by domination, we would suggest, is the core of The Dawn of Everything. However, it is not what many readers, focused on the book’s early discussion of the indigenous critique, have taken the core to be. To us, generously reading the book for its widest scope is important. Thus, in the spirit of Graeber and Wengrow, the two of us, an archaeologist and a historian, go beyond summary or critique to try to push forward the project begun by the two Davids.
The Role of “Evidence” in The Dawn of Everything and What Some Reviewers Have So Far Missed
Even before its publication, Graeber and Wengrow’s opus was heralded as a “brilliant” account that “upends bedrock assumptions” about human history. Equally jubilant responses followed, with the book charting on the New York Times Best Seller list before release—a rarity for thick anthropology monographs. Yet despite the hype about its revolutionary intervention, The Dawn of Everything positions itself as a straightforward, albeit overdue, update to the discourse around our prehistory. Graeber and Wengrow write, of the reasons for embarking on their decade-long project, “Mainly we were just curious about how the new archaeological evidence that had been building up for the last thirty years might change our notions of early human history, especially the parts bound up with debates on the origins of social inequality” (521). This motivation, framed playfully, appears throughout the text in a repeated authorial dance between, on the one hand, caution that the paucity of available data for X, Y, or Z site makes definite conclusions difficult, and, on the other, pointing out where various Western scholars have been “mostly wrong.”
To take an example: one central assumption in many narratives about human social development is that the emergence of large-scale agriculture represented a monolithic “revolution,” one which increased social complexity and permanently reshaped societies. Once humans begin farming, so the story goes, domination follows, locking groups into ever-larger social forms capable of producing magnificent cities but requiring ever-grander apparatuses of control. That story, our authors tell us, is a myth. Graeber and Wengrow note that planned cities and megalithic monuments—feats that would have taken extensive, coordinated labor to accomplish—existed in many pre-agricultural societies. They carefully walk through recent archaeological findings from a number of such sites, which Graeber and Wengrow argue refute long-standing assumptions that hunting, gathering, fishing, and foraging economies are incompatible with large social projects. [1]
The oscillation between caution and confidence struck us as an appropriate tactic to account for the inherent uncertainties of the archaeological record, but perhaps because of this, critics have been quick to search for and point out errors in the book—places where Graeber and Wengrow might be, to use their own framing, “mostly wrong.” Prominent critical reviews have focused on the second chapter, where the authors explore the “indigenous critique” of European civilization. The “indigenous critique” is a dispersed set of views by Indigenous North Americans, arising in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, that sees arriving Europeans as fundamentally unfree and uncivilized—in thrall to goods and currency. This critique was not only not ignored by arriving Europeans, Graeber and Wengrow argue, but it actually encouraged many, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to ask profound questions about the structure of their societies. In this way, the indigenous critique was an overlooked inspiration for the European Enlightenment. This point frames the book, because Graeber and Wengrow want to start by turning attention away from the “origins of inequality” and toward the disappearance of freedom to imagine ourselves otherwise.
Critics have glommed on to this chapter (we wonder, idly, whether this has anything to do with its early placement in a 500+ page book). Princeton historian David A. Bell, for instance, noted errors in Graeber and Wengrow’s treatment of Rousseau which bring them, he writes, “perilously close to scholarly malpractice.” (Wengrow, who engages nearly all critiques of Dawn online, was speedy in response on Twitter). NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah also took aim at the book’s reading of Rousseau, adding that Graeber and Wengrow are wrong in suggesting that the teleological, stages-of-history story has mostly been promulgated by conservatives to disarm Indigenous critics. One could answer these notes point-by-point (Wengrow tries his best to, including recently in The New York Review [2]), but an exclusive focus on The Dawn of Everything’s provocations concerning the Enlightenment risks distracting us from much of what makes the book so important: notably, its attempt to make accessible a vast array of recent anthropological and archaeological evidence; to read it against the grain; and to synthesize those findings into a novel story about what exactly happened in our long past. It’s worth briefly laying out, then, what exactly this “new” evidence is.
While archaeologists in the mid-twentieth century, such as V. Gordon Childe, wrote broad global histories, over the last seventy years, such histories have often been written from perspectives outside of the discipline. Mainstream archaeology turned away from ideas about linear, universal stages of development or civilizational progress, and turned toward site- and region-specific questions about the complicated historical, cultural, and environmental factors of the past and how people navigated them. The specificity of these questions has meant that many global-scale narratives of the human past come instead from historians, biologists, geographers, philosophers, journalists, and science writers. They are important voices, but archaeologists’ avoidance of writing in this more expansive vein (with recent exceptions, such as Where Are We Heading? by Ian Hodder [Yale University Press, 2018]), pulling disparate threads together into a broader tapestry of human life, has meant that many of the discipline’s stunning discoveries are either hidden away behind paywalls and intricate jargon or explored with limited context by journalists or less credible media sources. (Think, for instance, of just how much Ancient Aliens content there is out there—more on this soon).
Indeed, the last seventy years have been a dynamic time for archaeology: radiocarbon dating has allowed researchers, since the 1950s, to elucidate chronologies previously interpreted through stratigraphy alone; digital computers have enabled novel data collection and analysis, including geospatial studies and digital artifact models; and more recently still, biomolecular approaches, including isotopic and ancient DNA research, have let scientists draw new connections between people, places, and environments. On top of these changes, new sites and human-modified landscapes have been recently surveyed, excavated, and studied. All of this has allowed archaeologists a deeper glimpse into daily life in the past, enabling departures from an earlier focus on elite societies and ruling classes. Accordingly, Graeber and Wengrow try to take us beyond fixation on political leaders, military campaigns, and ancient elites to cast light instead on the past’s everyday.
In Which We Enter Something of an Academic No-Go Zone and Speculate on Why We Think Big Histories of Everything and Ancient Aliens Episodes Are So Popular
When one of us tells cab drivers or new friends that he studies history, their most common response is to share that they have heard about or read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens or its sequel, Homo Deus. Those who’ve finished one or the other tend to wonder: Is Harari right? The historian typically tends to equivocate: “Somewhat.”
Graeber and Wengrow remind us that quite a few of our stories about the past emerged from attempts to explain the present. Contemporary grand narratives such as Harari’s, which try to retell human history in a single book, often do the same. The popularity of such books emphasizes that many want to know more about who they are, where they came from, and even get a glimpse of where this big human project is going. Heady questions about human origins matter to the general public, contrary to the belief of some commentators: an American Historical Association survey in 2020 revealed significant public fascination with history and a widespread sense of where “trustworthy” history could be found, but a tendency to avoid academic historical writing. [3] Many turn not to university press publications, but to the Hararis or even the History Channels of the world.
That search for answers has created a significant market. Sapiens took the readerly world by storm, selling more than twelve million copies and popping up in Costcos, airport bookstores, and other places that denote mass market success. Publishers, in turn, have been eager to cater to this audience, and that’s likely one reason that The Dawn of Everything came out with Farrar, Straus and Giroux rather than a conventional academic or indie publisher (such as Melville House, which released Graeber’s Debt). There are reasons to be skeptical of the attention given to Graeber and Wengrow’s text: can anything be all that radical if it’s embraced so widely? One response is to shrug one’s shoulders: as Malcolm Harris tweeted, “The mainstream press has been giving Graeber and Wengrow the same sort of boosterish reading they give to lazy pop history all the time and I’m for it.” [4]
If such books are so obviously poised to reach a large audience, why aren’t more historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists writing them? One answer might be that now they will. But there are institutional and professional roadblocks: tenured positions, those endangered sinecures of academic life, have long appeared to require publishing with a handful of prominent academic presses. Although evidence to the contrary exists, it’s whispered that publishing first with a trade press can be a career-killer. In parallel, much academic history has become highly specialized, drawing on a style and conceptual apparatus difficult for the uninitiated to follow, with lively prose even criticized as “unserious.” Academic reviews of The Dawn of Everything reveal the gap between specialists and the general readership: Stanford historian Walter Scheidel could not “properly gauge how novel” the book’s arguments about farming “will seem to the reading public.” Yet the public’s response seems to be: very. A grand history like Graeber and Wengrow’s simply isn’t the type of project young academic historians and anthropologists are trained to write, even if the book’s success might suggest they should be.
But this also is only one side of the story. When one of us introduces herself as an archaeologist, people often mention specific archaeological sites that they have visited or read about: Pompeii, Cahokia, or Machu Picchu. But not all interactions go this way, and recently she has started to brace herself for the increasingly common phrase, “Do you think they had help?” She has learned that this does not mean, “Did several neighboring villages join forces to create the Nazca Lines?” or “Do you think hired or coerced labor were used to build the Giza Pyramids?” Instead, they mean Atlantis. In the wake of television programs like Ancient Aliens and Atlantis Found, beliefs that ancient humans had “outside help”—extraterrestrial or supernatural beings—are on the rise. [5]
The demand for this content—Ancient Aliens is in its eighteenth season—speaks to the same underestimation of the ingenuity and potential of past people that Graeber and Wengrow lament. We would suggest the inaccessibility of specialist scholarship is partly to blame. As a result, people are caught in the philosophical predicament Graeber and Wengrow point out: how could residents of a Hobbesian prehistory where life is nasty, brutish, and short—or even an idyllic Rousseauian one predating the modern industrial workforce—have created wonders of the ancient world, such as Jätinkirkko, Poverty Point, or Tenochtitlan? The megalithic site of Göbekli Tepe, for instance, has become a popular favorite due to its visually stunning anthropomorphic pillars, built before the development of farming. The Joe Rogan Experience, arguably the most listened-to podcast in the world, has promoted pseudoscientific theories about the site on several episodes, each receiving millions of listens. The vacuum left by limited public engagement from experts has allowed an explosion of this kind of fanciful speculation.
The Dawn of Everything reveals, however, that people of the ancient past were almost constantly involved in projects of fascinating interest and complexity, whether they had agriculture or not. The disbelief that hunting and gathering societies—without authoritarian governments, modern armies, or complicated logistical apparatuses—could have coordinated the labor to build the megalithic structures of Göbekli Tepe has everything to do with our lack of imagination about the possibilities of social organization in the past. The idea of hunter-gatherer communities mobilizing to build such a large and labor-intensive site is only surprising within a framework that defines entire societies by the presence or absence of farming. When we reimagine the way in which people obtain their food as only one of many features characterizing a particular system of social organization, we can see large-scale labor mobilization as a possibility for non-agricultural communities as well. Violent, forced labor or regimes of salaried skilled workers become only two of many possible forms of social coordination, and Göbekli Tepe becomes less shocking, although no less stunning.
On a Post-Revolutionary History of Humanity and the Vital Centrality of Care
Part of what’s so valuable about The Dawn of Everything is in how different it is from its predecessors in the genre of bestselling “histories of everything”—in particular, its refusal of a revolution-centric account of history and its attention to the quotidian practices of care. Sapiens, which Graeber and Wengrow occasionally take to task, is a good example of what this preoccupation with revolutions often looks like. Harari cites Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (W. W. Norton, 1997) as a key inspiration for the Sapiens project, and it’s relatively easy to see why: Diamond’s book, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the subject of numerous documentaries, sought to explain European colonial conquests as predestined results of environmental factors. At times, the argument seems to boil down to the suggestion that any group with the biogeographic conditions of Europe would’ve colonized North America. Who could resist? Harari builds on this foundation, structuring his own account around four(ish) “Revolutions” that fueled domination.
In both cases, we’re left with stories about why we are the way we are that appear to suggest that nothing could have happened particularly differently. The grand human story is a slow march of revolutions that come and go, transforming virtually everything that came before them. It’s a way of thinking about history that many of us are used to. Many elementary history courses teach that the Scientific Revolution irreversibly altered everything about Europe—and therefore the world. [6] That sense of continuous progress with minimal alternative pathways might be comforting for a society like the contemporary US, where things don’t seem to ever really change at all. But it’s one that Graeber and Wengrow adamantly insist is misleading: people of the past didn’t just start farming and never look back; it was a slow, gradual, and nonlinear transition. Experiments like these, in the “in between” periods of history, might be just as important as the “Revolutions.” American schoolchildren learn about Tutankhamun and the pyramids of Giza, but rarely do lesson plans seriously analyze those long periods between dynasties and the people who inhabited them—farmers, bakers, merchants, miners, craftspeople, priestesses, parents, and children. “A truly radical account, perhaps, would retell human history from the perspective of the times and places in between,” they write (382).
For anthropologists Chris Knight, Nancy Lindisfarne, and Jonathan Neale, the attention to in-between times occasionally causes The Dawn of Everything to lose sight of class struggle—a reasonable concern—but the broader argument against revolutionary stories is hard to deny. Seeing history strictly in terms of revolutions misrepresents change as sudden and total: the people before agriculture were a different kind of people than the ones who came after; the hunter-gatherers a different sort than the stationary farmers. Graeber and Wengrow show that this is flawed: the archaeological record reveals no discrete revolutions, no clear demarcations. Instead, groups exhibited opposed social structures and productive practices, sometimes quite near to each other, while experimenting with alternatives. Frequently, social forms even changed with the seasons: what we’d call authoritarianism in the winter, hippie egalitarianism in the summer. Graeber and Wengrow are at pains to argue that people tried and then often just refused what, to modern eyes, seem like “better” systems. The Dawn of Everything might have begun, “There was no such thing as the Agricultural Revolution, and this is a book about it.”
That resistance to revolutionary stories such as Harari’s is tied to a second major theme of the book: an emphasis on the role of compassion and mutual aid in early history. These are usually downplayed in more bellicose accounts—a point Guns, Germs, and Steel makes with its very title. Graeber and Wengrow reply to Steven Pinker’s query—“What is it about the ancients that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?”—by noting that it depends “on which corpse you consider interesting in the first place” (14). The focus on interpersonal violence and warfare in sweeping narratives like Diamond’s, the authors suggest, emerges from a bias about what sort of interactions are considered noteworthy. Often, narratives appear shaped by a desire to naturalize current geopolitical power dynamics and the conflicts of modern nation-states.
Graeber and Wengrow, instead, point time and again to evidence of interpersonal care in the past. In this, they continue Graeber’s emphasis in Debt on “primitive communism” as a baseline of human social interaction. There were plenty of warrior kings telling people what to do, but the archaeological record is also filled with evidence of mutual aid and people providing for one another through sickness, injury, and disability. The Dawn of Everything introduces readers to a host of examples, including an individual, buried nearly 10,000 years ago in modern-day Calabria, known as “Romito 2,” whose remains showed signs of acromesomelic dysplasia, yet who survived to adulthood and was carefully interred after dying.
But care was not always straightforwardly positive; as the authors note, it frequently intertwined with domination. Some of the earliest royal courts made an explicit commitment to caring for widows, orphans, and the sick and injured. “Perhaps this is what a state actually is,” they write: “a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion” (408). Unpacking the connection between care and violence, argue Graeber and Wengrow, might be the key to understanding how exactly we got “stuck,” and why we see historical progression as an endless transfer to ever larger cages.
A Return to Critiques of The Dawn of Everything and Our Own Addition to the Project
The Dawn of Everything relies on a large, multifaceted evidentiary base. Often, the debates its authors participate in are allusive: “But had we tried to outline or refute every existing interpretation of the material we covered, this book … would have left the reader with a sense that the authors are engaged in a constant battle with demons who were in fact two inches tall.” That caveat has not stopped some, such as Scheidel or Knight, Lindisfarne, and Neale, from accusing Graeber and Wengrow of “idealism,” and watching David Wengrow engage multiple critiques online leaves one with the unmistakable impression that the battle has not been entirely avoided. But quibbles with the book’s interpretation of various pieces of archaeological evidence, or its lack of engagement with a variety of subdisciplines (comparative primatology, for instance), point to a thornier aspect of the book’s reception.
Appiah, for his part, suggests that Graeber and Wengrow frequently “introduce a conjecture with the requisite qualifications, which then fall away, like scaffolding once a building has been erected.” In his example, the authors note first that anything said about the governance of Uruk, an ancient city said to reveal evidence of experiments in participatory governance, is speculation, but then later write that the city experienced “seven centuries of collective self-rule.” One could point out that this isn’t completely fair: “Much of this remains speculative,” they write of evidence of governance in Uruk, before arguing, on the basis of surviving inscriptions, that there “is no reason to think that monarchy—ceremonial or otherwise—played any significant role in the earliest cities of southern Mesopotamia” (306, 309). Later, on the other hand, in the period illustrated by the Epic of Gilgamesh, clear archaeological signs of monarchy appear: palaces and much more.
This is rhetorical sleight of hand for Appiah: in the book, “the absence of evidence routinely serves as evidence of absence.” Yet because none of us can yet return to ask the residents of Uruk what they were doing, arguments from the presence and absence of evidence remain somewhat unavoidable. Such argumentation remains one of the great difficulties of archaeological work: the absence of walls here or the presence of figurines there are essential pieces in how archaeologists reconstruct the past, but the interpretation is key. Rather than simply assuming Uruk’s history was kings all the way down, Graeber and Wengrow want us to seriously imagine the alternatives suggested by existing evidence.
One risk of this type of critique—locating places where archaeological findings depart mildly from the book’s conclusions—is that death by a thousand cuts may well deter others from writing future works of sweeping synthesis. Indeed, many of these critiques take the book as a static, finished, and definitive artifact: the evidence is out there, and Graeber and Wengrow either have or haven’t read it correctly. A more valuable approach would be to embrace multivocality, recognizing that interpretations of the past often cannot be proven right or wrong and that diverse voices and robust debate are vital for overcoming the inherent biases any observer brings with them. The Dawn of Everything is not the final word on a novel account of history but an early foray into a much longer project, a presentation of possible interpretations, and an invitation for others to expand or rebut them. Perhaps the insistence on isolating particular errors demonstrates as much about our own anxieties—our need for histories to be straightforwardly “right” or “wrong”—as it does anything fundamental about the book’s arguments. Appiah frets that The Dawn of Everything leaves us “without a single unambiguous example” of “large, dense, city-like settlements free of rulers or rules”—yet part of the challenge of engaging honestly with archaeological evidence from the past is that “unambiguous examples” are difficult to come by.
A more positive and productive way of engaging with the book, then, might be to do exactly what Graeber and Wengrow ask for: look at the most recent evidence and see what it tells us, newly, about that past. To take an example from the emerging field of ancient DNA, studies from 2018 and 2021 have identified two Viking-era individuals from Scandinavia who were intersex (they had three sex chromosomes, XXY), who had previously been assigned to binary sex categories based on the presence of funerary artifacts such as broaches, furs, and swords. [7] These new findings, coupled with other evidence of gender fluidity in the Viking era, challenge the prevailing misconception that sex and gender expression were binaristic in the past, as well as a tendency among conservatives to assume alternative gender presentations today somehow go against “tradition.” In doing so, the findings reveal a diversity of human experience missed by earlier research methodologies which expected to find in earlier eras only a reflection of our own views of sex and gender. Indeed, there are undoubtedly hundreds of other examples like this one, each complicating our received accounts of the human past. [8] This is what The Dawn of Everything urges us to see—a past that, rather than justifying the status quo, allows us to think critically about the ways society might have been and might yet be.
Which returns us to the indigenous critique: critics have objected to Graeber and Wengrow’s story about how a specific critique of European society, enunciated by a Huron-Wendat statesman named Kandiaronk, transformed European debates about freedom. Kandiaronk is the key protagonist of the authors’ concept of indigenous critique, but some point out that there is limited evidence that Kandiaronk really traveled to Europe, and reason to suspect that his arguments may have been reimagined or transformed by European writers. Perhaps Graeber and Wengrow give too much emphasis to a single individual, whose true influence may have been more limited. In part, this comes down to one of the book’s consistent narrative techniques: to associate complicated arguments with a single, vindicated individual. Thus, in one chapter the anthropological anarchist Pierre Clastres gets emphasis; in another, archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. We find critiques of the book’s failure to cite one or another thinker or study valid, but think they are best understood as results of using character as a narrative strategy rather than scholarly ignorance or dispute. This is a key example of what’s challenging about this genre: the pressure to balance popular storytelling tactics with responsible scholarly practices.
The character of Kandiaronk is also, to some extent, a red herring. As historian Philip Deloria recently noted in an interview covering The Dawn of Everything, it is important to excavate the origins of the indigenous critique, but even more important to remember that “the” indigenous critique was never the property of a single individual. It was, instead, a collective and multifaceted response by many different native groups to European colonial expansion and settlement near and far. The indigenous critique was, in reality, many indigenous critiques. And such critique did not end, Deloria emphasizes, after the European colonization projects had reached full steam: indigenous critique of the colonial and settler project “stretches from the very beginnings, first contact, up to the present day.” [9]
This is what The Dawn of Everything wants readers to take away. It is an invitation to rethink our inherited stories about the past in order to open anew the question of our freedom to imagine otherwise. But it is just as importantly an invitation to engage more vividly with those intellectual traditions that never lost sight of the need for freedom from domination, rather than mere freedom from social obligation. Rather than the end of every debate, Graeber and Wengrow’s book should prompt new investigations into human possibilities—those lost, forgotten, or foreclosed, and the many yet to come.
Notes:
[1] Poverty Point, in Louisiana, for instance, was the site of a city built around 3,600 years ago that served as a hub of trade and interaction along the Mississippi River (141). With massive earthworks arranged in semicircular form, it’s thought to have been similar in population density to contemporaneous large cities elsewhere in the world, such the city-states of Mesopotamia and Shang China. Likewise, the Trypillian megacities of the Ukrainian steppe, which could house thousands of residents—although population estimates dating this far back are always tricky, the book cautions—were built by communities who obtained food through hunting, fishing, and gathering.
[2] David Wengrow, “The Roots of Inequality: An Exchange – David Wengrow, reply by Kwame Anthony Appiah,” The New York Review, January 13, 2022, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-inequality-an-exchange/.
[3] Pete Burkholder and Dana Schaffer, “A Snapshot of the Public’s Views on History,” Perspectives on History, American Historical Association, August 30, 2021, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2021/a-snapshot-of-the-publics-views-on-history-national-poll-offers-valuable-insights-for-historians-and-advocates/.
[4] This tweet appears to have been deleted or made private.
[5] A 2018 survey conducted by Chapman University found that 57 percent of Americans believe that a lost “advanced” civilization (meaning, with technology similar to today’s and/or with paranormal powers) existed, and that 41 percent believe that aliens visited Earth in the ancient past.
[6] One reason we’re so used to thinking in revolutionary terms is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). A veritable bestseller, the book did two important things with long-lasting ramifications for how we talk and think about historical change. The first was to offer a vision of history as a series of unfolding “revolutions”: in Kuhn’s picture, mundane “normal” science is punctuated every so often by “revolutions” and “paradigm shifts.” Second, the knowledge produced before a revolution (say, the Heliocentric one) was not better or worse than the knowledge produced after, but rather “incommensurable.” Yet that story of a sequence of absolute ruptures seemed too neat, and academic historians partially gave up on “revolutions” and “paradigm shifts.” Thus Steven Shapin began his well-known history of the Scientific Revolution by writing, “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.”
[7] S. Ebenesersdóttir et al., “Ancient genomes from Iceland reveal the making of a human population,” Science 360, no. 6392 (2018): 1028-32, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar2625; U. Moilanen et al., “A Woman with a Sword?–Weapon Grave at Suontaka Vesitorninmäki, Finland,” European Journal of Archaeology 25, no. 1 (2021): 42-60, https://doi.org/10.1017/eaa.2021.30.
[8] Take another example: a recent study argues that archaeological evidence from the Mexican city of Monte Albán supports an account very much like The Dawn of Everything’s about the importance of collective decision-making in early societies. Linda M. Nicholas and Gary M. Feinman, “The Foundation of Monte Albán, Intensification, and Growth: Coactive Processes and Joint Production,” Frontiers in Political Science 4 (2022), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.805047.
[9] “A New History of Humanity,” December 2, 2021, Open Source, produced by 90.9 WBUR, https://radioopensource.org/a-new-history-of-humanity/.