Against Method

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Previous articleNext article FreeOnline Review ArticleAgainst Method The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021. Pp. 704. $35. ISBN 9780374157357 (paper).Ian MorrisIan MorrisStanford University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore“Alas, a classic,” said the Greek archaeologist James Whitley in reviewing my colleague Michael Shanks’ book Classical Archaeology of Greece—a work for which, Whitley felt, “both … admiration and exasperation are merited.”1 David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is, alas, even more of a classic.The reasons for admiration are obvious. For archaeologists, Dawn has been the biggest publishing event of the decade. It has attracted attention on television and radio, been dissected in podcasts, racked up reviews in major newspapers and magazines, and quickly become a bestseller. In all these ways and more, it is the most significant book on the history of antiquity since Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens or even Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.2 Yet it is very different from either of these books. Where Harari and Diamond offered evolutionist accounts of history,3 Graeber and Wengrow are explicitly anti-evolutionist. Dawn deserves admiration for being the most extended and detailed rebuttal to evolutionism this century—and it provokes exasperation for precisely the same reason.Dawn is original and ambitious, making antiquity speak to the larger human condition. Because its arguments span multiple millennia and girdle the globe, it is a work of synthesis; Graeber and Wengrow’s originality lies not in grubbing new facts from the dirt but in combining old facts into a new picture. The authors also deliver their thesis with verve, stuffing the story with vivid images and fine turns of phrase. They make the ancient world exciting. I have been reviewing books for the AJA for 30 years, but this is the first one I can honestly say was fun to read. Even more remarkably, it combines its lively retelling of prehistory with a massive, wissenschaftlich, and impressively up-to-date scholarly apparatus. Dawn is effectively two books in one: the 526 pages of the main text, which are likely to shake up almost everyone’s assumptions about prehistory, and the 165 pages of end matter, which give specialists at least some of what they need to push back against that main text.Graeber and Wengrow tell us that since the 18th century, almost everyone has gotten almost everything wrong about early history (504). Back then, they suggest, some Western intellectuals reacted to Native American critiques of European hierarchy and violence by inventing a story telling how humanity had evolved through a series of stages, from prehistoric hunter-gatherers through ancient herders and farmers to modern commercial folk (i.e., Western Europeans themselves). In this view of history, people started off with a lot of liberty but not much prosperity and ended up with a lot of prosperity but not much liberty. To many authors, this was a good thing; to others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau being the best known, it was bad. That said, almost all agreed that it had been inevitable, because scale automatically generated both wealth and hierarchy; and although 21st-century archaeologists are much better informed than 18th-century Europe’s self-styled “philosophical historians,” Graeber and Wengrow allege that they continue to think the same way (27–77)—that “the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces” (8).But “What if,” the authors ask, “instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?” (9). Doing this, they say, leads to replacing the evolutionary narrative with “another, more hopeful and more interesting story,” which shows that “we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labour never had to happen…. It also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think” (3, 524, emphasis in original). We should reject current theories that envisage a decline from egalitarian hunter-gatherers through unequal ancient city-states and empires to modern global capitalism, Graeber and Wengrow say, because these stories:1. simply aren’t true;2. have dire political implications;3. make the past needlessly dull (3).My own sense of exasperation with Dawn began right here, just three pages into the text. Personally, I think that evolutionist accounts often make the past extremely interesting; and in 40 years of hanging around evolutionists, I’ve found that they rarely agree on what their work’s political implications are, let alone whether they’re dire. But rather than go down those rabbit holes, I will concentrate in this review on Graeber and Wengrow’s initial claim, that evolutionist accounts aren’t true.As I see it, there are three main ways to evaluate this. First, there are the facts themselves. Do the authors get them right? Anyone writing such a wide-ranging book is bound to make mistakes, so the question here is not whether every datum in Dawn is exactly accurate. No book has ever cleared that bar. Rather, it is whether Graeber and Wengrow commit so many howlers that their central thesis is invalidated. Area experts will doubtless find errors that I did not, but it seems to me that the authors pass this test with flying colors.4 This is a well-researched book.The second criterion is their selection of facts. Given how much we now know about antiquity, combined with the huge gaps that still remain, authors of global syntheses can easily cherry-pick details and arrange them to tell almost any story imaginable. I do have some qualms on this issue, to which I will return; and Graeber and Wengrow—like most of us—sometimes slide from offering tentative hypotheses into treating them as certainties.5 But that said, I rarely found myself asking “What about X?” and feeling that the authors had just ignored uncomfortable evidence.6 The whole point of Dawn, they explain, is to bring in more evidence, by asking “what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, rather than just the 5,000 in which it did?” (523).My most serious disagreements with Graeber and Wengrow concern a third criterion: logic. They left me feeling far from certain that the facts are either inconsistent with evolutionary accounts or more consistent with their own alternative. From the many cases the authors offer, I will take just half a dozen, each of which seems important for Graeber and Wengrow’s thesis, but each of which, I believe, is ultimately unconvincing.SeasonalityEvolutionary models typically tell how egalitarian foraging groups turned into ranked farming societies and then into stratified states. However, Graeber and Wengrow note, anthropologists have regularly found societies that have moved back and forth on this spectrum, sometimes very rapidly. Nineteenth-century Native American groups on the Great Plains are a famous case. The Crow, Cheyenne, and others spent much of the year in tiny, aggressively egalitarian foraging bands, with no chiefs at all, but for several weeks each autumn, they flocked together to slaughter the great herds of migrating bison. They appointed chiefs and provided them with what the anthropologist Robert Lowie called “a police force,” which “issued orders and restrained the disobedient. In most of the tribes,” Lowie continued, “they not only confiscated game clandestinely procured, but whipped the offender, destroyed his property, and, in case of resistance, killed him.”7Graeber and Wengrow call such chiefs “play kings,” their power largely a matter of “performance,” and suggest that “their reality was, in effect, sporadic. They appeared and then dissolved away” (117, 429). Recognizing this, they say, undermines evolutionism because “the nineteenth-century Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen [by evolutionists] as evolving from the ‘band’ to the ‘state’ level roughly every November, and then devolving back again come spring. Obviously, this is silly. No one would seriously suggest such a thing. Still, it’s worth pointing out because it exposes the much deeper silliness of the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with” (110–11).Yet evolutionists have had no real problem incorporating these flexible societies into their typologies. Take, for instance, Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle’s widely read book The Evolution of Human Societies, which uses the Great Basin Shoshone of a century ago as one of its key case studies. Like the Cheyenne, the Shoshone spent most of the year in unranked, family-sized groups, but some of them periodically granted “rabbit bosses” and “antelope shamans” far-reaching powers to coordinate large-scale hunting and trapping.8 Most of the time, the Great Basin’s aridity made family-level organization the most effective way to hunt and gather, but when opportunities arose for rabbit drives, the Shoshone put people in charge and did what it took to get the job done. The Shoshone did not thereby become subjects of a stratified state. Bosses and shamans had no coercive powers beyond people’s willingness to follow their lead in maximizing the slaughter, whether that meant clearing brush and stringing out hundreds of feet of nets or punishing free riders whose unruliness threatened the shared effort. The minute the jackrabbits or bison stopped running, Shoshone and Cheyenne, who now neither needed multifamily organizations nor possessed a food supply abundant enough to support them, scattered across the landscape in tiny groups—until the next hunting season.Graeber and Wengrow are right that prehistorians have neglected seasonality, but wrong that seasonality is inconsistent with evolutionism.Upper Palaeolithic BurialsGraeber and Wengrow also argue that seasonality lies behind the spectacular finds from Europe’s Upper Palaeolithic. Prehistorians often suggest that the magnificent cave paintings at Altamira, Chauvet, and dozens of other sites were produced when large groups gathered for seasonal reindeer hunts.9 But Graeber and Wengrow go further, extending the argument to explain a second phenomenon: a series of famously rich burials dating between roughly 32,000 and 13,000 BCE—which, they suggest, is inconsistent with evolutionists’ accounts.This is the second issue on which I think the authors’ logic is flawed. From Russia to Wales, excavators have found rich grave goods, sometimes including thousands of mammoth-ivory beads and what look suspiciously like scepters and other insignia of office.10 These finds seem to show that we cannot simply assume that all Ice Age foragers lived like the contemporary !Kung San in the Kalahari Desert; but what makes them even more interesting is that the skeletons in the graves had extraordinary numbers of pathologies. “It seems extremely unlikely,” Graeber and Wengrow very reasonably comment, “that Palaeolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs” (103). Here, too, they see “play kings,” making an analogy with the precolonial Nuer of South Sudan, who sometimes interpreted people “who in our own society would likely be classified as anything from highly eccentric or defiantly queer to neurodivergent or mentally ill” as “being touched by God.” In moments of crisis, they explain, “a person who might otherwise have spent his life as something analogous to the village idiot would suddenly be found to have remarkable powers of foresight and persuasion.” Such a one might even “propose entirely different visions of what Nuer society might be like” (98).To the authors (104), the rich burials speak of a playfulness and willingness to shift between equality and hierarchy that evolutionism cannot accommodate. Yet here, too, their logic is flawed. In multiple essays since the 1990s, Brian Hayden has identified some foraging societies as “transegalitarian,” lacking rigid class structures but nonetheless “having private property, surpluses, prestige objects, and significant socio-economic differences.”11 Anthropologists have long known that foragers lucky enough to find dense concentrations of predictable and reliable resources in otherwise difficult environments tend to become less mobile, settling down to monopolize the oasis of abundance.12 The rich Ice Age burials overwhelmingly come from sites that were superbly placed for ambushing mammoth or reindeer on Europe’s frozen and otherwise forbidding plains, and Hayden suggests that the need for top-down organization—as in the Cheyenne and Shoshone hunts—turned these into niches in which transegalitarian hunter-gatherer societies could evolve. In modern foraging societies, such “aggrandizing” chiefs (as Hayden calls them) often claim to have been touched by the gods. Possibly the pathological Palaeolithic skeletons belong to village idiots who made good; or perhaps the discovery at Sungir, Dolní Vestonice, and Arene Candide of skeletons of strapping young men with horrific wounds or stone weapons embedded in their bones represent more conventional aggrandizers who co-opted visionary hunchbacks, giants, and dwarfs to support their causes. Maybe the power these men wielded was as transitory as that of a rabbit boss; or maybe some Ice Age societies were unlike anything documented in the ethnographic record.13 Either possibility requires us to recognize that cultural evolution can work in multiple ways, but neither requires us to reject its central premises.FarmingSince the 2000s, archaeologists and paleobotanists have moved away from three older theories about the origins of agriculture—first, that population growth after the end of the Ice Age (around 9650 BCE) drove experiments with gardening and herding that led to the domestication of plants and animals in the Near East; second, that domestication happened in a few core regions of the Near East and then spread steadily outward; and third, that farming inexorably drove processes of sedentism, rising labor inputs, and increasing inequality. Instead, most experts now suggest that the relationship between population and domestication was complicated and variable; that experiments with cultivating plants went on in multiple locations, particularly wetlands; that domesticated plants caught on extremely slowly, needing 3,000 years (ca. 9500–6500 BCE) to go from under 20% of assemblages to over 80%; that the drift toward domesticated resources was regularly reversed; that rather than causing sedentism, domestication was often its consequence; that sedentism and experiments with plant cultivation began as early as 21,000 BCE, at the coldest point in the last Ice Age; and that there is little sign of institutionalized inequality in the Near East before about 5500 BCE.14From this, Graeber and Wengrow conclude that “people were effectively trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you will, switching between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth.” Rather than locking farmers into increasing inequality, they argue, “farming actually set humanity, or some small part of it, on a course away from violent domination” (248, emphasis in original).Once again, my argument with the authors is not over the facts, which seem increasingly clear, but over what the facts mean for evolutionism. Graeber and Wengrow are right that the ways some evolutionists have described the agricultural revolution now look old-fashioned; but that is generally because their accounts were written before the new evidence was available, not because the new evidence is inconsistent with evolutionism. Across the last 20 years, evolutionists have adopted more sophisticated frameworks (such as niche construction theory) to accommodate the new findings, and Stephen Shennan’s superb book First Farmers of Europe provides a thorough and convincing evolutionary account of the origins and expansion of agriculture.15 It would not take much work to rewrite the relevant sections of Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel to be consistent with the last 20 years of discoveries.Monuments Without AgricultureIt used to be a truism among archaeologists that farmers build monuments, mobilizing huge amounts of labor, but foragers do not. This, we now know, is overstated. The most famous exception is Göbekli Tepe, an extraordinary cluster of sunken chambers with massive, carved stone pillars near the Turko-Syrian border. Construction began here by 9500 BCE, just as experiments with domestication were beginning not far to the south, but all the evidence suggests that the builders were hunters and gatherers.16 Stonehenge, the most famous prehistoric monument of all, was built between roughly 3000 and 2600 BCE by herders rather than farmers,17 but as early as 8000 BCE, foragers had set up a series of monumental posts (perhaps totem poles) at the site. At Locqmariaquer in Brittany, fishermen dragged a 20-meter-tall, 350-ton stone stele for 5 kilometers around 4500 BCE and then erected it over a communal tomb. In coastal Peru, other fishermen started building mounds at Aspero, Caral, and Sechin Bajo before 3700 BCE. Foragers in Louisiana heaped up giant earthworks at Watson Brake around 3400 BCE and even bigger ones, using a standardized unit of measurement, at Poverty Point around 1600 BCE.18Graeber and Wengrow conclude, quite rightly, that the societies that built these monuments “look about as far from small, nomadic, egalitarian ‘bands’ as one can possibly imagine”; but they then claim, quite wrongly, that evolutionists have largely ignored them. “Scholars and professional researchers,” they announce, “have to actually make a considerable effort to remain so ignorant” (140, 147). Not so. Hayden’s account of transegalitarian elites monopolizing rich, stable resources in oases of abundance accommodates foragers’ and fishermen’s monuments perfectly well, and the evolutionary archaeologists Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus take the Peruvian case as a prime example in their book The Creation of Inequality.19 But that said, while we now know of foragers’ and fishermen’s monuments from many parts of the world, they remain extremely rare compared with those of early farmers. Mesolithic England produced a row of totem poles at Stonehenge, but Early Neolithic England was crowded with tens of thousands of long barrows and causewayed enclosures.20 Farmers were not the only people able to organize enough labor to move great quantities of earth and stone, but evolutionists are right that the scale on which farmers operated was orders of magnitude greater than that of foragers.Cities Without InequalityAll living things, from amoebas to elephants, increase their populations when conditions are favorable. When monkeys or other animals multiply, however, they continue to live in troops of roughly the same size. There are no simian cities. We humans are unique in our ability to scale up our permanent settlements. So far as we know, there were no year-round, sedentary communities with even 1,000 residents before Çatalhöyük, around 7000 BCE; none above 10,000 residents before Uruk, Susa, Tell Hamoukar, and Tell Brak in the Near East and Majdanetske, Taljanki, Dobrovodi, and Nebelivka in Ukraine, all roughly around 3500 BCE; none above 100,000 before Nineveh, around 700 BCE; none above one million before Rome, around 50 BCE; and none above 10 million before New York, London, and other early 20th-century supercities.21 Although we have continued to evolve biologically since 7000 BCE, we are still more or less the same animals as we were then. What has evolved out of all recognition is our institutions, giving us the organizational tools for cooperation on much larger scales; and evolutionary anthropologists have consistently concluded that, through most of history, top-down hierarchy has been what made this possible.22Yet as Graeber and Wengrow (276–327) note, the link between scale and hierarchy seems less obvious now than it did in 1950, when V. Gordon Childe published his famous essay “The Urban Revolution.”23 Excavations have uncovered palaces and royal or aristocratic tombs at most early cities,24 but not all. Signs of massive, institutionalized inequality are hard to find not only at Çatalhöyük but also in the Ukrainian megasites, Sumerian Uruk, the Indus Valley cities (occupied between 2500 and 1900 BCE), Teotihuacan (around 300 CE), and first-millennia BCE and CE West African settlements such as Dakhlet el Atrous and Jenné-jeno—not to mention most archaic and classical Greek city-states.25Specialists dispute how egalitarian some of these cities were, but Graeber and Wengrow’s observation that “the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization” (277–78) seems reasonable. However, the conclusions they draw from this are less so. These examples, they suggest, add up to “a surprisingly common pattern” in which “a dramatic increase in the scale of organized human settlement took place with no resulting concentration of wealth or power in the hands of ruling elites” (322). This pattern, they add, “is robust enough, not just to upend the conventional narrative but to open our eyes to possibilities we would otherwise never have considered” (284). The truth is that we just don’t know why a few urban systems (the Greek among them) got along perfectly well without palaces or elite cemeteries; but we do know that it really was only a few systems, and that the vast majority of ancient cities did have rich, powerful rulers. To be convincing, a general theory must explain both the overall trend toward hierarchy and the occasional egalitarian exceptions, rather than just declaring that one part of the pattern trumps the other. Fortunately, sociologists, historians, and archaeologists are already providing such accounts.26Collapse and ResilienceEvolution is, by definition, undirected. No one is in charge; there is no telos. Under some circumstances, selective pressures mean that greater scale and complexity will increase an organism’s fitness; under others, simplification will increase its odds of passing on its genes or memes. In principle, sociocultural evolutionists should therefore be just as interested in the scaling down of societies as in their scaling up. In practice, however, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter was quite right to say in 1988 that “the development of political complexity has attracted more scholarly attention than collapse, its antithesis.”27Since then, evolutionists have made collapse a key focus, with Jared Diamond writing a bestseller on the subject; but anti-evolutionists have pushed back, with Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee going so far as to suggest that “‘collapse’—in the sense of the end of a social order and its people—is a rare occurrence.”28 Tainter defined collapse as a decline of hierarchy, specialization, centralization, investment in elite culture, information flow, economic integration, and territorial unity, leading him to conclude that “it is small wonder that collapse is feared by so many people today. Even among those who decry the excesses of industrial civilization, the possible end of that society must surely be seen as catastrophic.”29 McAnany and Yoffee disagree, responding that while “living through some kinds of change is difficult, painful, or even catastrophic, … resilience is a more accurate term [than collapse] to describe the human response to extreme problems.”30Graeber and Wengrow share this impatience with talk of collapse. They firmly lock the word inside scare quotes (379), adding darkly that “with hindsight, it’s easy to see just how much these chronological schemes reflect their authors’ political concerns” (381). As an alternative to evolutionist accounts of collapse, they offer an extended treatment of the North American Hopewell and Mississippian cultures (456–70). Between 1350 and 1400 CE, the great center of Cahokia, which had boasted 15,000 people just three centuries earlier, turned into “a haunted wilderness of overgrown pyramids and housing blocks crumbling back into swamp, occasionally traversed by hunters but devoid of permanent human settlement” (468). This, they speculate, was caused by “mass defection … as subjects sought freer lives elsewhere.” “People simply walked away” from violent rulers, the authors explain, in “a self-conscious rejection of everything the city of Cahokia stood for” (467, 469). “In the wake of Cahokia,” they conclude, there followed “a broad movement away from overlords of any sort and towards constitutional structures carefully worked out to distribute power in such a way that they would never return” (491).Graeber and Wengrow tell this story well, but I suspect that classicists reading this account of Cahokia will be strongly reminded of the eastern Mediterranean after 1200 BCE and western Europe after 400 CE—where, despite some fascinating similarities with Cahokia, overlords did return over the next few centuries. Like post-Mycenaean Greece and post-Roman Britannia, post-Mississippian North America saw chiefs governing shrunken polities (Etowah, Moundville, Coosa) and trying to revive something of the grandeur that had been lost. All three cases also saw new populations moving into the area—but unlike the coming of Dorians or Anglo-Saxons, the tidal wave of European colonialism and disease that engulfed North America cut off any possibility of regenerating an Indigenous state. Graeber and Wengrow dismiss counterfactual arguments as “at best an idle game” (449), but I cannot shake the suspicion that, left to themselves, North Americans would have regenerated their complex societies by the 19th or 20th century CE, just as people all over the world regularly did after collapses.31 Graeber and Wengrow insist that “the case of North America not only throws conventional evolutionary schemes into chaos; it also clearly demonstrates that it’s simply not true to say that if one falls into the trap of ‘state formation’ there’s no getting out” (481–82). But this flies in the face of comparative logic.In all of these six examples, Graeber and Wengrow’s analysis is original and stimulating, and had they contented themselves with drawing attention to evolutionists’ failure to come fully to grips with these cases, their book would have been a valuable contribution to the academic literature. However, it would not have been a classic. What raises Dawn to the level of a publishing event is Graeber and Wengrow’s idealist, voluntarist alternative to materialist, determinist evolutionism. History has not been a long-term decline from a Rousseauian state of egalitarian grace into an Orwellian one of face-stomping, they insist, because people have always possessed “three primordial freedoms”: “the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships” (426). We have always been conscious political actors, and we will always be able to move, disobey, and transform our relationships if we will it. Hence their conclusion, which I already mentioned, that the real issue is not “how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality” but “how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves” (9).The answer, the authors conclude, is that villains of various kinds managed to seize what they call “the three possible bases of social power,” defined as “control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma” (365).32 Much of the book is devoted to tracing how upstarts in different parts of the world got their hands on one, two, or even all three bases, producing a 21st century in which “something has gone terribly wrong” (76). Fortunately, Graeber and Wengrow say, understanding history properly will allow us to “rediscover the freedoms that make us human” (8)—and the truth that “even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think” (524).These sentiments are what Dawn will be remembered for, but they remain mere sloganeering unless Graeber and Wengrow are right that evolutionists’ alternative theories simply aren’t true. My great problem with Dawn is that I find it hard to say whether the book adds up to a falsification of evolutionism or not, because the authors never really try to show that it does. They tell us that evolutionism is boring, dangerous, and wrong, and provide fascinating details of multiple cases that look like awkward fits for evolutionary narratives; but at no point do they specify how we can tell if these details have passed the threshold at which any reasonable reader would have to agree that the principles of evolutionism have been falsified. This is because Graeber and Wengrow have no method.The anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend’s book Against Method (alas, also a classic) is most famous for its offhand comment that “anything goes,” but its larger argument could—perhaps did—provide a playbook for Dawn. Normal science, Feyerabend asserted, “assumes that ‘science’ is successful and that it is successful because it uses uniform procedures”—but this “is not true b