Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First off, let me say something about myself by way of establishing why anybody shopping on Amazon should care what I think about this book. I am an archaeologist and a published author on several of the issues that Graeber and Wengrow address. My work (with colleagues and collaborators) is cited in this book’s extensive (and comprehensive) bibliography. So: allowing that this is the reviews section of Amazon and not American Antiquity where reviews come with their own bibliography, I can speak to how well this book holds up to being read by a subject matter expert. And it’s thrilling. It’s empirically rigorous despite the breezy (often funny, sometimes scorching) tone. And I hope it shatters the existing view of prehistory in the popular imagination, because Graeber and Wengrow are categorically right that said view is factually wrong, politically disastrous, and astonishingly boring. The way I see it, this book is tackling two necessarily interrelated projects at the same time. First, it marshals mountains of evidence from all over the world and all periods of time to make the argument that from the very beginning—ca. 300,000 years ago—human beings have lived together in an astonishing variety of arrangements and that none of those arrangements has any single point of origin, or single scalar or economic correlate: tiny hunter-gatherer bands can be fastidiously democratic or violently authoritarian; industrial cities have existed at the heart of empires and in the total absence of sovereign government altogether. These societies have been peaceful and violent; patriarchal and matriarchal; slaveholding and abolitionist. Many societies have deliberately and self-consciously moved between different forms of social and political organization at different times of year, or deliberately reoriented themselves toward another way of living in the space of a generation or two. In other words, the human career has been marked by an extraordinary variety of political and social possibilities that most modern people not only don’t KNOW about, but do not IMAGINE to be possible. And so the second project Graeber and Wengrow take on with this book is to reconstruct how we came to be so intellectually shackled as to think that many of the ways people have organized themselves are not only unusual or hard to achieve or whatever—but actually not even possible at all (they implicitly invoke Ostrom’s Law: “what’s possible in practice must be possible in theory,” and illustrate how prevailing theories of human’s history run afoul of it). They trace the history of thought that elevated a completely unscientific set of Enlightenment origin myths (Hobbes’s bit about life before the state being “nasty, brutish, and short,” and Rousseau’s about the idyllic pre-agricultural “state of nature”) to the scientific canon. And they counter by saying, in essence, that both of these ideas are testable scientific hypotheses, and they are both demonstrably and catastrophically wrong. What that should make clear is that any claim that this book is romantic—or, as an earlier Amazon reviewer said, “woke revisionism” (that person went on to invoke Ye Olde “days of kings and serfs,” and the “way our ancestors actually lived,” which is an interesting way of establishing authority by demonstrating total lack of subject knowledge. But I digress—has not actually read the book. This book abounds with examples of all sorts of human unpleasantness, along with all sorts of social wonders. That is, in fact, the point: Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate that ancient and non-western societies obey no evolutionary taxonomy, no linear moral or organizational trajectory. Rather they demonstrate that people have always made choices about how to live together, that some of those choices have had better or more durable consequences than others, and that by telling ourselves a simplistic and teleological myth about the relationship between political organization and economic organization or social scale, we have dramatically limited our ability to imagine better ways of doing things. To my enormous frustration, reviews of this book in major outlets (notably the NYT) have rhetorically asked "how can we know whether all of the facts presented in this book are true?” but never actually bothered to ask anyone qualified to answer that question. (They have instead played up a silly and minor flap about a single claim early in the book, which is easily resolved if you understand the difference between reading an entire document and reading its abstract. It isn’t my turf, but Wengrow’s comments on the matter thoroughly convinced me. Emily Kern has a whole section on this in her excellent review of TDoE for Boston Review.) So let me do so: In all the areas directly touched by my expertise, this book gets it right. So much so that most of the material they survey is in no way “revolutionary”: these are things that have been fixtures of archaeology courses for decades, and they are not controversial. That Poverty Point was a vast, monumental building project carried out by hunter-gatherers who did not permanently live on-site is not something new: it is the reason Poverty Point is a world heritage site (and if you don’t have much patience, the world expert on Poverty Point, T.R. Kidder, has a great YouTube video where the whole argument is laid out with cartoons). That Tlaxcallan in 16th Century Mexico was a republic is not new, or revisionist, or “woke”: Cortez literally calls it a republic in his letter to the king of Spain, and more recent archaeological and ethnohistoric research published in major journals has borne this observation out. What is novel and revolutionary about this book is not the evidence it presents, but rather the coherent argument it makes about the diversity of social and political life across the sweep of the human story. Synthesis is a process of simplification, and so any synthetic work necessarily simplifies and condenses the source material in the service of a larger argument. Graeber and Wengrow of course do that here, and there is no reason to fault them for it. Where they address the things I have published on, they demonstrate far better respect for and command of the published literature than other big syntheses published by non-anthropologists (which makes sense; they actually know this literature because they’ve spent decades immersed in it). They cite everything I would have hoped for a big synthetic treatment to cite, and then some. Their reading of the literature in fast-moving subfields is extremely current. Glancing through the acknowledgements, it is clear that they enlisted the very experts I would have pointed them to as guides to some of the case studies that emerge as particularly important in their book, like Teotihuacan in Central Mexico. So while they may simplify and sometimes offer interpretations that are a little bit out of the mainstream, they do not misrepresent and their interpretations are still well-constrained by the evidence. Which brings me to another important point: “Speculative.” When archaeology challenges a particular cherished origin story (like this one, my favorite: “women like to shop because they instinctively want to gather berries, since back in cave man days…”), the inevitable rejoinder is that archaeology is speculative, so people can go on believing whatever they want about the past. Again, a lot of major media reviews have lobbed The S Word, without referring to a single archaeologist for comment. This is crap. Archaeology is not speculative. Archaeological interpretations are constrained by evidence, and the more evidence one has the fewer and fewer viable interpretations of that evidence there are. That multiple hypothesis can remain viable despite evidence at hand does not render a science speculative: it makes it a science, one whose precision at describing reality improves with time. And so anybody who comes out and says “this is all really speculative, so I’m going to stick with Hobbes” has no concept of how science works, or of just how much archaeologists know about the ancient world. This book is imaginative—a high compliment—but not speculative. There is a difference. In sum: This is a really, really good book. You should read it.