A new story about the history of mankind (Graeber and Wengrow) Martin Esch / 7347297

University of Cologne, Institute of Prehistory

International Seminar of Paleolithic Studies, Winter 2022/3, Jürgen Richter

A new story about the history of mankind by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Thesis by Martin Esch – 21/02/2023

Contents
1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1
2. About the authors.......................................................................................................................... 2
3. Main areas of the book ................................................................................................................ 4
4. Plot of the book ............................................................................................................................. 5
4.1 Farewell to Humanity‘s Childhood – or, why this is not a book about the origins of
inequality ............................................................................................................................................. 6
4.2 Wicked Liberty – the indigenous critique and the myth of progress ................................... 6
4.3 Unfreezing the Ice Age – In and out of chains: the protean possibilities of human politics
.............................................................................................................................................................. 7
4.4 Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private property (Not necessarily
in that order) ....................................................................................................................................... 8
4.5 Many Seasons Ago – Why Canadian foragers kept slaves and their Californian
neighbours didn‘t; or, the problem with ‘modes of production‘ ................................................... 9
4.6 Gardens of Adonis – The revolution that never happened: how Neolithic peoples avoided
agriculture ......................................................................................................................................... 10
4.7 The Ecology of Freedom – How farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed its way
around the world .............................................................................................................................. 10
4.8 Imaginary Cities– Eurasia‘s first urbanities - in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Ukraine
and China – and how they built cities without kings .................................................................. 11
4.9 Hiding in Plain Sight – The indigenous origins of social housing and democracy in the
Americas ........................................................................................................................................... 13
4.10 Why the State Has No Origin – The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy
and politics........................................................................................................................................ 13
4.11 Full Circle – On the historical foundations of the indigenous critique ............................ 15
4.12 Conclusion – The dawn of everything ................................................................................. 16
5. Testing Graeber/Wengrow: Luxury graves in the Upper Palaeolithic ................................ 18
6. Personal conclusions ................................................................................................................. 21
7. Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 22
8. Illustrations ................................................................................................................................... 23
9. Appendix....................................................................................................................................... 24
A new story about the history of mankind (Graeber and Wengrow) Martin Esch / 7347297

1. Introduction
When David Graeber, a world-renowned anarchist, together with David Wengrow, gave the
subheading 'Or, why this is not a book about the origins of inequality' to the first chapter of their book,
it seemed rather surprising. But rest assured. This is definitely a very critical book about social
inequality. But it is also a book that avoids traditional questions such as ‘Where does inequality come
from?’ and asks new questions such as ‘When did humanity and each individual lose their freedom
of choice?’.
This book, with its not very ‘modest’ title, was published in 2021, not long after David Graeber's
death. It received a huge response. A Google search of ‘dawn of everything review’ returns at least
80 entries with varying reviews. They come from both the scientific community and the general
public.
Why is that? I think it is because the book is not just another repetition of the same stories about
human history, stuck in the same old dilemma of whether human beings are good or evil. This book
really asks new questions and gives new answers, not only about prehistory and history. No, Graeber
and Wengrow succeed in linking their wealth of theories and examples to one of the central political
questions of our time, "There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A
very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are
doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion.“ (Graeber et al., 76).
The purpose of this paper is to restate the central arguments of that book. After presenting some
information about the authors, I will give a brief summary of the main areas of the book. Then I will
explain the plot of the book, its internal structure, chapter by chapter, finishing with Graeber's and
Wengrow's conclusions. Afterwards, I will try to dig a little deeper and test the reliability of one of the
authors' main hypotheses on the basis of a historical example: the interpretation of finds from luxury
graves in the Upper Palaeolithic. I will then finish with my personal conclusions.

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2. About the authors

Fig.1: YBJ (Yezidi Women’s Forces) fighter with David Graeber in Shengal

David Rolfe Graeber (1961 - 2020) grew up in a family where at least his father must have
influenced him with anti-capitalist ideas, as he fought on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish
Civil War. As Graeber said in his autobiography, “I’ve been an anarchist since I was 16, (…)“
(Graeber 2020).

Graeber was graduated with a BA in Anthropology in 1984. His academic career, which began at
the University of Chicago, was rather difficult during his time in the U.S. He then went to London
and eventually got a job as a full professor at the London School of Economics.

Seeing himself as an anarchist, he did not become active in any meaningful way until early 2000,
“(…) when I threw myself into the Alter-Globalization movement and it might be said that all my
work since has been exploring the relation between anthropology as an intellectual pursuit, and
practical attempts to create a free society, free, at least, of capitalism, patriarchy, and coercive
state bureaucracies.“ (Graeber 2020).

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Fig.2: David Wengrow teaching as a guest at the University of Kiel, 30/06/2022

David Wengrow's (* 25/07/1972) career seems to have been much more conventional. Trained in
archaeology and anthropology at Oxford University, he is currently Professor of Comparative
Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
Wengrow has carried out fieldwork in Africa and the Middle East. His three books cover a wide
range of topics, from Early Egypt (10,000 - 2650 BCE) and the Ancient Near East to an interesting
look at monster imagery in the Bronze Age (see Wengrow 2023).

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3. Main areas of the book

The guiding theme of this book is a fundamental critique of evolutionism. Although almost no current
archaeologist, according to Graeber and Wengrow, would dare to call her- or himself an evolutionist,
when it comes to generalised assumptions about the development of human societies, no one seems
to be able to avoid evolutionism (see Graeber et al., 95-6).
Fortunately, they do not stop at criticism. Instead, they respond to the old ideas with new narratives.
The following brief overview shows some of the traditional evolutionary assumptions on the left and
some of the new theories of Graeber and Wengrow on the right. These ideas are elaborated as we
progress through the book in Chapter 4.

Evolutionism Graeber and Wengrow

The more people, the more complexity. There are many examples of large settlements
And complexity always means hierarchy. including cities, organised in an egalitarian way.
Hunter-gatherers up to the Mesolithic lived in Homo sapiens always thought politically,
small mobile groups, their behaviour was still acted in large networks and undertook major
close to apes. projects.
The ‘invention’ of agriculture was a Agriculture was developed either out of
revolutionary step towards a higher poverty or incidentally. It was just one of many
organisation of society. different ways of life.
Hierarchy, elites and so on came into being Hierarchy can be found very early in history,
at a certain point in history after a period of but for a long time there was a political choice
small egalitarian groups. between hierarchy and other political systems.

Why do the authors prefer the new narratives to the old? Not only because they believe in them
and provide a great deal of evidence to support them, but also because they think that these new
narratives are much more in line with the values of democratic societies and international
institutions.

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4. Plot of the book

Looking at the table of contents (see figure 3), we find a rather conventional structure of
introduction and conclusion. Within this framework, the authors open a second framework between
chapters two and eleven, which deal mainly with the confrontation between indigenous intellectuals
and Europeans in North America in the 16th and 17th century.
Chapters 3 to 10 follow a kind of chronological path through history, starting with the Upper
Palaeolithic. They often deviate from chronology, jumping through time and space to develop a
new kind of evolutionism. The picture in the middle of figure 3 demonstrates the meandering flow
of this part of the book.

Fig 3: Structure of the book, symbolised by the Okavango-Delta, Africa

What's new about their view of the path of evolution?
First of all, there is no ‘high’ or ‘highest’ culture. Very often so-called ‘Dark Ages’ or ‘Intermediate
Periods’ were much better for the lives of ordinary people than the times with elaborate hierarchies
(see Graeber et al. 2021, 381-2 on Egypt).
Nor is there any historical law for a given society to move along the path of progress to the next
stage of evolution, be it agriculture or city or nation. There have always been conscious decisions
by informed people to live in a certain way.
And there were always new choices that led people to change their way of life, e. g. from
agricultural and sedentary to mobile and pastoral - or from hierarchical to egalitarian.
It is with this in mind that we enter the first chapter. I will use the headings of the book as the
headings of the following sub-chapters.

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4.1 Farewell to Humanity‘s Childhood – or, why this is not a book about the
origins of inequality
The first chapter starts with a brief summary of an important philosophical debate in Europe during
the Enlightenment: On the one side, we find philosophers and politicians, based on Thomas
Hobbes (1588 - 1679), who spoke of humanity in terms of "bellum omnium contra omnes" (war of
all against all). Only a strong state is capable of civilising life in a society.
On the other hand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) became famous for the core of his
theory of humanity: human beings are inherently good. In the early days of humanity, people lived
together peacefully, and it was only when civilisation and states emerged that humanity deviated
from its course.
For Graeber and Wengrow, this controversy, which is still alive in the social sciences, leaves only a
choice between two alternatives, both of which:
"1. simply aren't true;
2. have dire political implications;
3. make the past needlessly dull." (Graeber et al. 2021, 3).
They want to tell a different story.

4.2 Wicked Liberty – the indigenous critique and the myth of progress
When European settlers came to North America, they soon brought with them not only soldiers and
priests, but also scientists and others curious to learn. These people learned the indigenous
languages, talked to the people and tried to understand their ideas and ways of life.
On the other hand, there were also intelligent and curious people in the indigenous societies.
Leaders, intellectuals, religious people in their societies, also learned the foreign languages and
longed for contact to learn about the foreign people.
A prominent example was Kandiaronk (1649 - 1701). He was chief of the Tionontati Hurons and
one of the main architects of a major peace treaty between the Iroquois League of the Five Nations
and some 35 other Native American tribes in 1701. He also seems to have found time for many
conversations with Europeans.
His criticism of the European societies he came to know was deep and profound. “I have spent six
years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s
not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your
distinction of ‘mine‘ and ‘’thine‘. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; (…)“.
(quoted from the memoirs of one of Kandiaronk’s European interlocutors, Lahontan, in Graeber et
al. 2021, 54).
How this dialogue relates to Graeber and Wengrow's understanding of world history will be shown
in chapter 4.11.

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4.3 Unfreezing the Ice Age – In and out of chains: the protean possibilities of
human politics
We now enter the historical timeline with the Upper Palaeolithic, when Homo sapiens first left its
mark in Europe. Classical evolutionary archaeology would expect to find small groups of hunter-
gatherers in egalitarian communities with no signs of 'culture'. In two examples Graeber and
Wengrow demonstrate that the opposite is true.

Fig 4: “mammoth house“ (reconstruction)

Figure 4 shows a type of building, many of which were built in Eastern Europe (from Krakow to
Kiev) between 25,000 and 12,000 BCE. They are distinctly different from ordinary camp dwellings,
built of “mammoth tusks and bones, taken from many tens of these great animals“ (Graeber et al.
2021, 91).
Such monumental architecture shows two things: first, there must have been networks of people,
much larger than small groups, who came together to build such houses. And secondly, these
networks must have had some kind of common understanding of what they should be doing
together. Since there is no evidence of social inequality, these buildings seem to be the work of a
non-hierarchical network.
The second example of something more than small egalitarian groups are the luxury graves of the
Middle and Upper Palaeolithic (34,000 – 22,000 BCE). Figure 5 shows one of these.

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Fig 5: Children burial with precious objects (Sunghir)

As Graeber and Wengrow point out, there are two types of burials with valuables:
One type with bodies of people who can be seen as chiefs,
and another type of people whose skeletons show severe anomalies, people who were
most likely unable to feed and protect themselves without the help of others.
So, they conclude, there must have been both: hierarchy, privilege and its expression in burials on
one side, and on the other side tendencies to care for every member of a society and express this
in a different kind of burial and ritual. This could have happened in different societies in different
centuries, or in different societies that knew each other, or even within the same society.
The latter possibility they call ‘seasonality’, describing and explaining the following situation with
ethnological examples: During some periods of the year, societies accept chiefs, leaders, and give
them power over the group. This could be for the purpose of effective hunting, for example. And
during the rest of the year there is no chief, no orders, no privileges.
Chapter 5 discusses the luxury burials in more detail.

4.4 Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private property
(Not necessarily in that order)
In Europe, chronologically, we now arrive at the Mesolithic, at the beginning of the 10th millennium
BCE (in North America, for example, similar processes took place about around 2000 BCE). For
most archaeologists, this is the time when everyone is waiting for the Neolithic Revolution, which is
supposed to be THE big development, not only in the technology of food production.
Again, Graeber and Wengrow do not agree. They point out that long before agriculture, societies
invented many new technologies, such as "pottery”, “stone grinding tools”, “fermented beverages”,
new ways of “preserving meats, plant foods and fish" (Graeber et al. 2021, 123-4). These pre-
agricultural cultures needed neither sedentary life nor agriculture to develop new tools and other
ways of improving their lives.

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Some of them lived as ‘free societies’ (or ‘egalitarian’), meaning "able to live their lives and make
their own decisions" (Graeber et al. 2021; 130), others chose various forms of hierarchy as their
preferred organisation of society. Graeber and Wengrow refer to this process as ‘schismogenesis’
and explore this concept further in their next chapter.

4.5 Many Seasons Ago – Why Canadian foragers kept slaves and their
Californian neighbours didn‘t; or, the problem with ‘modes of production‘
Now they take us to North America, to its west coast from about 1850 BCE. At this time and in this
area, agriculture was already practised by some neighbouring societies. That means, the indigenous
peoples of California knew agriculture, but preferred to obtain their resources in other ways (see
Graeber et al. 2021, 165).
Within these non-agricultural societies there was a strong division: "From the Klamath River
northwards, there existed societies dominated by warrior aristocracies (...) and chattel slaves. (...)
But none of this was the case further south." (Graeber et al. 2021, 176/7 - see map in figure 6 with
the Klamath River).

Fig 6: Between present-day San Francisco and Oregon

Notwithstanding the great differences between the two types of society in terms of organisation
and values, there was communication, perhaps even trade, between them. "Knowledge of foreign
customs, arts, and technologies was widespread, (…)” (Graeber et al. 2021, 174). But in their
internal structures they sharpened the differences. "Cultures were, effectively, structures of
refusal." (Graeber et al. 2021, 174).
Graeber and Wengrow believe that this phenomenon, which they call ‘schismogenesis’, is one of
the basic tendencies of human behaviour, both individually and as a society. Defining one's identity
as a society (and as an individual) involves a careful selection of values and practices that are
either the same as those of one's neighbours or may even be the complete opposite.

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4.6 Gardens of Adonis – The revolution that never happened: how Neolithic
peoples avoided agriculture
We return to the Eurasian continent, this time to the Fertile Crescent, the dawn of agriculture at
around 8,500 BCE.
Again, Graeber and Wengrow ask against all evolutionary laws, " Was farming from the very
beginning about the serious business of producing more food to supply growing populations?"
(Graeber et al. 2021, 211).
Or wasn't it more playful, and agriculture emerged as a side-effect of other concerns like
wanting to stay in certain kinds of places,
looking for "spices, medicines, pigments or poisons" (Graeber et al. 2021, 237),
needing raw material for fibre-based handicrafts (see figure 7)?
All in all, they are relegating agriculture from its central role to one of many ways of life.

Fig 7: Twined bag (approx. 800 BCE) made from unprocessed leaves

4.7 The Ecology of Freedom – How farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed
its way around the world
Now looking at the first period of fully agricultural societies in central Europe (5500 - 4000 BCE,
beginning with the Linear Pottery), the authors become very provocative: "Farming: (...) you only
invented it when there was nothing else to be done." (Graeber et al. 2021, 274).
As for the immigrating new farmers coming from Anatolia via the Balkans, there seems to have
been no discussion for them whether to choose agriculture or not. They simply looked for suitable

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soils and environments and then started with what they had learnt (see figure 8), while the semi- or
non-settled groups around them either joined them or not.

Fig 8: Linear Pottery household and fields (reconstruction)

But in the long run you can say: “These Early Neolithic groups arrived, they settled, and then in
many (…) areas their numbers dwindled into obscurity, (…)“ (Graeber et al. 2021, 261-2).
Beyond mainstream assumptions, the dominant role of agriculture in prehistory has to be
questioned. For thousands of years after its 'invention', there is, as far as I know, no empirical data
on a larger scale to show that agriculture was really the main subsistence strategy in the Neolithic
or Bronze Age. Even cities did not necessarily depend on the support of peasants through their
agricultural products (see Graeber et al. 2021, 283).
It is a fact that, by 500 BCE, agriculture had become almost the sole means of securing the food
supply of most societies around the world. But that doesn't mean that this was the only way history
could have happened (see Graeber et al. 2021, 273-5).

4.8 Imaginary Cities– Eurasia‘s first urbanities - in Mesopotamia, the Indus

Valley, Ukraine and China – and how they built cities without kings
In the classic evolutionary narrative, agriculture is followed by cities. And 'cities' means more
people, which means complexity and therefore hierarchy. Instead, Graeber and Wengrow look at
the earliest cities around the world (between 4000 and 2000 BCE) and find many different social
structures:
Ukraine (Cucuteni-Tripolye culture): egalitarian and individualistic
Mesopotamia (early): egalitarian and uniform
Mesopotamia (later): kings, dictators
Indus Valley: egalitarian and caste hierarchy in combination
China: hierarchies punctuated by revolutions

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Here again, it is clear that people have chosen very different ways of organising their collective
lives. This will not always have been by choice, as violence increasingly became a means of
dealing with people. But Graeber and Wengrow's central hypothesis holds: We still see great
egalitarian examples at the 'level' of cities.
A very prominent one is Nebelivka, a 'mega-site' in the Ukrainian forest steppe, c. 4100 - 3300
BCE, with no evidence of hierarchical structures (see figure 9 and Graeber et al. 2021, 291, 295).

Fig 9: Nebelivka: early city in the Ukraine

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4.9 Hiding in Plain Sight – The indigenous origins of social housing and
democracy in the Americas
From Eurasia, the book now moves on to early cities in Mesoamerica between 300 and 550 ACE.
Here, too, the concept of ‘schismogenesis’ seems to fit the social reality. “While there might be a
recognizable ‘package‘ of Mesoamerican kingship, there also appears to have been a very
different, dare we say republican, tradition as well.“ (Graeber et al. 2021, 332).

Fig 10: A city in the republican style: Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan, a city in Mexico at this time (see figure 10), began with temples and other buildings
that suggest a hierarchical structure. But around 300 ACE these buildings were abandoned or
destroyed and “ (…) instead, houses for all 100,000 inhabitants were built, so they could live in
‘palatial‘, or at least very comfortable, conditions.“ (Graeber et al. 2021, 342).
And more than 4000 years later than the Ukrainian mega-sites, Teotihuacan provides an example
of a much larger city that was self-governing (see Graeber et al. 2021, 330).

4.10 Why the State Has No Origin – The humble beginnings of sovereignty,
bureaucracy and politics
States now enter the scene, and again Graeber and Wengrow do not identify a single line of
development leading to the modern state, but a whole range of very different social organisations,
all of which have been called 'state'. Comparing, for example, the Roman 'state' in republican
times, with all its democratic elements, with the god-like centre of power in Egypt during the reign
of the pharaohs seems of little use.
To resolve this dilemma, they present their theory of the three components of states. For them,
states are “(…) not the result of a long evolutionary process that began in the Bronze Age, but

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rather a confluence of three political forms – sovereignty, administration and charismatic

competition – that have different origins.” (Graeber et al. 2021, 431).
In Egypt, for example, we see a high level of sovereignty, where the pharaoh exercises enormous
power over the lives of all the people living in his territory. This is accompanied by a similarly high
level of bureaucracy to help the pharaoh organise society. What is missing in Egypt, the so-called
earliest state in history, is the charismatic competition that balances the system of power in other
types of state. In Egypt, this force emerges only in the intermediate periods, when local heroes
gain influence and the central power relaxes.
Using their theory as a frame of reference, Graeber and Wengrow describe a vast spectrum of
political systems with different combinations of their three components, some with only one
component, others with two (like Egypt), and only a few with three, like the modern democratic
state.
And to show that this modern state is not the only possible outcome of history, they discuss an
alternative that actually happened: the fascinating Minoan experience. This took place between
1700 and 1450 BCE and included spectacular palaces such as those at Knossos or Phaistos, as
well as a script, Linear A, that has never been deciphered.
Unlike all other palace-centred societies, Minoan Crete shows no sign of patriarchal rule. The
opposite seems to be true: Women dominate both in pictorial art and in the importation and storage
of goods. The partial absence of men is identical to the absence of heroes. Instead, we find a
playful and erotic way of life (see Graeber et al. 2021, 438-9 and figure 11).

Fig 11: Frieze of dolphins in the Cretan palace of Knossos

With regard to the organisation of the Minoan society, “Minoan Crete suggests a system of female
political rule – effectively a theocracy of some sort, governed by a college of priestesses.” (Graeber
et al. 2021, 438). Such a 'state' is obviously also part of human history.

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4.11 Full Circle – On the historical foundations of the indigenous critique

Back to the framework opened in Chapter 2, back to the indigenous critique of the home states of
the Europeans they encountered in North America. How was it possible for people living in hunter-
gatherer societies to develop such a deep understanding of states, kings and so on?
The answer can be found at Cahokia, an authoritarian city-state in the Mississippi region from 1050
to 1400 ACE. It was abandoned at the end of its reign for unknown reasons. Afterwards, the
people of North America looked for other ways to organise themselves. So, it turned out “(…) that
the societies encountered by European invaders from the sixteenth century onwards were the
product of centuries of political conflict and self-conscious debate.” (Graeber et al. 2021, 452).

Fig 12: Collective discussion and decision

Without doubt, the political circumstances between the North American tribes were not all easy and
peaceful. The Iroquois League, although quite democratic amongst themselves (including their
women – see figure 12)), were very aggressive towards other tribes. So, it was not an ideal world
for the indigenous people. But all these historical experiences made Kandiaronk and others
capable of understanding and criticising political systems.
Their discussions with Europeans, say Graeber and Wengrow, influenced European thinkers back
home, especially the ideas we now call the 'Enlightenment'.

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4.12 Conclusion – The dawn of everything

In this chapter, Graeber and Wengrow return to their ongoing question: Why did it all go wrong?
First, they very briefly point out that the success of Western civilisation was due to its guns. The
'culture' with the better weapons made it all over the world.
Then they go on to ask: How did it happen that in all parts of the world people and societies lost
their basic freedoms (see Chapter 4.4)? These freedoms, being:
the right to leave the place where you live and move to another place,
the right to say no when someone tells you what to do,
the right to take part in decisions and create new social realities.
“If something did go terribly wrong in human history (…) then perhaps it began to go wrong
precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social
existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed
(…) for the greater part of history.“ (Graeber et al. 2021, 502).

Fig 13: “No one has the right to obey“

As they discussed in relation to Egypt (see Graeber et al. 2021, 408), it may have started with the
combination of power and care. In Mesopotamia after the Uruk period they found similar
processes, such as temples that cared for people like widows, orphans, runaways and others who
had lost the support of their kin groups or other support networks (see Graeber et al. 2021, 517).
These hypotheses are supported by the results of the ethnographic work of Franz Baermann Steiner,
an anthropologist (and poet). In his 1949 doctoral thesis, he studied the societies visited by
ethnologists between the second half of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century. He
found that chiefs began to gather marginal people into their households, initially a very social way of
caring for people who had no support from any peer group. These relationships between chiefs and
marginalised people slowly became an irresistible source of power (Steiner 1949, 248-9 – see the
example of the boi system in figure 14).

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Fig 14: The boi System of the Lushai, Tibeto-Burmese, visited 1912

Steiner, himself a refugee, used these ethnographic field studies to demonstrate a process whereby
refugees or other people who have lost their social network were initially welcomed, but later became
increasingly degraded to the point of losing their basic freedoms (see Graeber et al. 2021, 519-20).
This is a tentative idea of why it all went wrong.
After an analysis of the past, Graeber and Wengrow take a cautiously optimistic look at the future:
“Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this as yet unknowable
future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies - say
bureaucracies that work on a community scale;
cities governed by neighbourhood councils;
systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions;
or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction -
will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids or statues more like
historical curiosities.“ (Graeber et al. 2021, 523).
These concluding words clearly demonstrate the political relevance of all historical sciences. Do
they focus their narratives and research resources on monuments, valuables, elite art production
and so on? Or do they seek out and talk about ordinary people, their lives and choices?

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5. Testing Graeber/Wengrow: Luxury graves in the Upper Palaeolithic

Do Graeber and Wengrow's fascinating ideas fit with the archaeological evidence? As one
example of many, I will now compare the authors' claims about so-called 'luxury graves' in the
Upper Palaeolithic with the archaeological evidence.
Graeber and Wengrow criticise the common archaeological view of the pre-Neolithic period:
People lived in small groups, there was no hierarchy, no wealth, no surplus products. With the help
of several finds, including the 'luxury graves', they try to show that this is not true. Instead, there
must have been a kind of luxury, in some cases with a hierarchy, in others without.
“Let’s start with rich hunter-gatherer burials. (…) Some of the earliest come from sites like Sunghir
in northern Russia and Dolní Vestonice in the Moravian basin, south of Brno, and date from
between 34,000 and 26,000 years ago. What we find here are not cemeteries but isolated burials
of individuals or small groups, their bodies often placed in striking postures and decorated – in
some cases, almost saturated – with ornaments.” (Graeber et al. 2021, 87-8).
Graeber and Wengrow discuss and reject the possibility that these burials were the expression of
elites. One of their arguments is the lack of other evidence for hierarchy and elites, such as palace-
like buildings, storage houses or fortifications. Furthermore, there is no concentration of rich burials
in regions and at times to suggest a concentration of rich individuals (see Graeber et al. 2021, 92).
And then they argue that “quite a remarkable number of these skeletons (indeed, a majority) bear
evidence of striking physical anomalies” (Graeber et al. 2021, 102). Such people could obviously
not have been chiefs, and so their lavish burials speak for egalitarian societies. This, together with
the luxury graves of healthy individuals, leads Graeber and Wengrow to their idea of seasonality
(see Graeber et al. 2021, 104 ff. and also chapter 4.3). This hypothesis means that in such
societies no kind of chieftain or king ever had any permanent power, only seasonal and with the
permission of the community. Leaders were elected for a period of time when leadership seemed
useful.
Are all of these assumptions in line with what the archaeological evidence tells us?
To show just how rich and lavish these burials were, let us start with the supposedly most
outstanding of them, the burials at Sunghir (see figure 15).

Fig 15: Sunghir site in Russia

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According to the latest published results (Trinkaus et al. 2018, Sikora et al. 2017), they date to
around 34,000 BP. The finds include the double burial of a juvenile and an adolescent (Sunghir 2
and 3) as well as a single burial of an adult (Sunghir 1). While Sunghir 1 'only' offers about 3000
mammoth ivory beads, Sunghir 2 and 3 are decorated with about 5000 beads each. Figure 16 may
give an impression of the former.

Fig 16: Sunghir 1, lavishly decorated

White has done a lot of studies including experimental archaeology in order to get information
about the time necessary to produce the precious objects in the Sunghir graves. He came to an
estimate of 45 minutes for each bead, which comes up to at least 2000 hours of work for Sunghir 1
and 3500 for Sunghir 2 and 3 (see White 1999, 330).
While the deceased adult in Sunghir was clearly healthy during his lifetime, and the skeleton of
Sunghir 3 shows an obvious femur anomaly, the status of Sunghir 2 is still debated.
With Sunghir we have rich burials, presumably two of them with abnormal individuals. There are
other spectacular findings of rich graves and also such with abnormal individuals, e.g. Dolní
Vestonice in Moravia or Romito Cave in Calabria (see Formicola 2007, 447-9). Are all these
extraordinary burials outsiders or regular parts of Upper Palaeolithic funeral culture?
Pettitt collected all excavated burials from the 'Mid Upper Palaeolithic' in the UK, France, Portugal,
Czech Republic, Austria, Italy and Russia in one table (Pettitt 2011, 154-167). Their 14C
measurements cover a time range from about 25,000 to 22,000 BP. I extracted the abnormal and
the lavish burials from Pettitt's table and excluded four burials that did not fit into the mentioned
time period, including Sunghir 1-3, in order to have as representative a sample as possible (see
Appendix).

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Pettit's table contains 74 burials, of which I have categorised 51 as 'rich' and 12 as 'abnormal'. I
preferred to exclude Predmosti with its 20 burials, not only because of its high number, but also
because the questions about the presence or absence of grave gifts are still unclear (see Svoboda
2008, 15). So, we arrive at 54 burials with 31 (57%) rich and 12 (22%) abnormal burials. Almost all
of the abnormal burials (11) are classified as 'rich'. And all but one of the abnormal burials coincide
with burials of healthy people.
Trinkaus et al. see a slightly higher percentage of abnormal individuals in burials: “Indeed, in the
Mid Upper Palaeolithic, individuals with marked developmental or degenerative abnormalities are
relatively common in the burial record, accounting for a third of the sufficiently well-preserved
individuals.” (Trinkaus et al. 2018, 17). They also do not support Graeber and Wengrow’s thesis of
a majority of abnormal burials.
In summary, we can confirm the following claims of Graeber and Wengrow:
There was wealth in the Upper Palaeolithic. It must have taken a lot of work to produce all the
jewellery and other prestige goods for the 'luxury graves'.
It also seems clear that among the burials unearthed there were a considerable number of skeletons
with anomalies indicating serious illness in the deceased, although - according to recent research -
not ‘the majority’ as Graeber and Wengrow claim.
Many of these diseases would have rendered these individuals unable to feed and care for
themselves. There are many theories (see Formicola 2007, Pettitt 2011, Trinkaus 2018) as to what
this might mean: Were they being fed to be sacrificed later? Were they feared for their otherness
and therefore not harmed? Or were they revered as special individuals with spiritual significance and
abilities? In any case, these societies must have invested a lot of resources in keeping these
individuals alive, resources that could not be invested in feeding elites and could better express
interpersonal relations based on care and respect for the individual.
On the other hand, the burials with prestige goods and healthy people show a higher percentage
than the abnormal burials and also than burials without goods. These people could well have been
chiefs. Since in the sample that I took from Pettitt 2011, healthy and abnormal burials regularly
occurred in the same burial context, Graeber and Wengrow's interpretation sounds plausible: The
societies are egalitarian with high levels of mutual care. The chiefs, as seasonal leaders, were buried
in luxury not because they had personal control over these goods, but as a symbol of the role they
played for the community.

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6. Personal conclusions
If you have read my thesis so far, you may have already guessed what I am about to reveal: I am a
real fan of this book. For me, it is the beginning of a new kind of archaeology that focuses on three
central aspects:
1. Not only to critique old, conservative narratives, but to dare to call for a new narrative of
human history as a whole (see Robb et al. 2023, 23, for writing about gender in the past). Many of
Graeber and Wengrow's critical predecessors stopped at the assertion of diversity and regional
uniqueness rather than looking for new guidelines.
2. To relate their new theories to contemporary social and political issues. Archaeology, I
believe, cannot avoid being asked to provide general answers to general and contemporary
questions such as social justice, war, democracy, freedom. The two authors take up these
challenges and try to take part in today's debates.
3. With their concept of the three freedoms (see chapter 12), they have found an important key
to understanding the frustration that many people in our democratic countries experience in their
everyday lives, where freedom as defined by the three freedoms of Graeber and Wengrow is usually
out of reach.
This book is full not only of new ideas but also of open questions. One question I find particularly
interesting concerns the concept of ‘schismogenesis’. Go back to chapter 4.5, which describes two
very different societies around the Klamath River in present-day California. As Graeber and
Wengrow point out, there was an exchange of information and supposedly trade goods between
them. This sounds like a peaceful kind of neighbourhood. Could war between neighbouring societies
have been a later development, and how did this come about? With all the current divisions within
and between societies today, can we learn from the past how to respect people with very different
views and practices from our own?
Of course, there are exaggerations and mistakes in this book. I reported one of these in Chapter 5.
Others will be (and certainly have been) found by many experts in all the many fields Graeber and
Wengrow cover. I am prepared to excuse them. Science is a collective process of producing
knowledge and part of that process is making and correcting mistakes. I would like to be part of the
process of testing, improving and spreading the new concepts of Graeber and Wengrow.

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7. Bibliography
Formicola 2007 V. Formicola, From the Sunghir children to the Romito dwarf: aspects of the
Upper Palaeolithic funerary landscape. In: Current Anthropology 48, 2007,
446-453.

Graeber 2020 https://davidgraeber.org/about-david-graeber/

Graeber et al. 2021 D. Graeber/D. Wengrow, The dawn of everything. A new history of mankind
(Dublin 2021).

Pettitt 2011 P. Pettitt, The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial (London 2011).
Robb et al. 2023 J. Robb/O. Harris, Rethinking Neolithic and Bronze Age Gender: the
challenges. In: B. Gaydarska et al., To Gender or not To Gender? Exploring
Gender Variations through Time and Space, European Journal of
Archaeology 2023, 20-24.
Sikora et al. 2017 M. Sikora, Ancient genomes show social and reproductive behavior of Early
Upper Palaeolithic foragers. In: Science 358 (6363), 2017, 659-662.
Steiner 1949 F. B. Steiner, A Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery. PhD at Oxford
University, 1949, parts I–III PDF available, Oxford University Research
Archive: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ed6cbb50-fc74-4df3-b491-
d323f0db93f5
Trinkaus 2018 E. Trinkaus, An abundance of developmental anomalies and abnormalities in
Pleistocene people. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115
(47), 2018, 11941-11946.
Trinkaus et al. 2018 E. Trinkaus/A. P. Buzhilova, Diversity and differential disposal of the dead at
Sunghir. In: Antiquity 92 (361), 2018, 7-21.
Wengrow 2023 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/people/david-wengrow-professor-
comparative-archaeology
White 1999 R. White, Intégrer la complexité sociale et opérationnelle: La construction
matérielle de l”identité sociale à Sungir”. In: M. Julien et al. (eds), Préhistoire
d’os: Recueil d’études sur l’industrie osseuse préhistorique offert à Henriette
CampsFaber (Aix-en-Provence 1999), 319-331.

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8. Illustrations
Fig 1: https://davidgraeber.org/about-david-graeber/
Fig 2: https://www.cluster-roots.uni-kiel.de/en/news/news-archive/special-guest-in-
kiel-panel-discussion-with-and-lecture-by-david-wengrow
Fig 3: https://www.afrika-intensiv.de/botswana/okavango-delta/
Fig 4: https://www.donsmaps.com/images31/mammothhutreconstruction.jpg
Fig 5: Trinkaus et al. 2018, 10 (see bibliography)
Fig 6: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klamath_River#/media/Datei:Klamathmap.jpg
Fig 7: https://www.lsu.edu/textilemuseum/exhibitions/threads.php
Fig 8: http://www.archaeologie-rekonstruktion-modellbau.de/projekte/
Fig 9: Graeber et al. 2021, 292 (see bibliography)
Fig 10: Graeber et al. 2021, 338 (see bibliography)
Fig 11: https://www.veniceclayartists.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/Knossos_2.jpg
Fig 12: https://gamesmartz.com/definitions?definition=9231&Iroquois-League&s=38
Fig 13: https://twitter.com/dlf/status/955800309670055936?lang=ar-x-fm
Fig 14: Steiner 1949, 245 (see bibliography)
Fig 15: Trinkaus et al. 2018, 7 (see bibliography)
Fig 16: Pettitt 2011, 204 (see bibliography)

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9. Appendix
This is an extract from Table 6.2, Pettitt 2011, 154-167, as described and discussed in chapter 5.
Pathologies: I gave this a "1", based on the information under "Age, Sex, Pathologies", without
looking at the details.

Rich: I gave this a "1" based on the comments, especially in the "Context" column.

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Specimen Number Pathologies Rich

Paviland 1 1 1
Eel Point 1
Cro-Magnon 1 1 1 1
Cro-Magnon 2 1 1
Cro-Magnon 3 1 1
Cro-Magnon 4 1 1
Cro-Magnon 5 1 1
Cussac 1 1
Cussac 2 1
Cussac 3 1
Vilhonneur 1 1
Pataud 1-6 6 3
Lagar Velho 1 1
Brno 1 1
Brno 2 1 1 1
Brno 3 1
Pavlov 1 1 1 1
Dolni Vestonice 3 1 1 1
Dolni Vestonice 4 1
Dolni Vestonice 13, 14, 15 3 1 3
Dolni Vestonice 16 1 1 1
Krems-Wachtberg 1 2 2
Krems-Wachtberg 2 1
Arene Candide 1 1 1 1
Barma Grande 1 1
Barma Grande 2, 3, 4 3 3 3
Barma Grande 5 1
Barma Grande 6 1 1
Grotta dei Fanciulli 4, 5 2 1 1
Grotta dei Fanciulli 6 1
Baousso da Torre 1 1 1
Baousso da Torre 2 1 1
Baousso da Torre 3 1
Grotta del Caviglione 1 1
Paglicci 2 1
Paglicci 3 1
Ostuni 1 1 1
Ostuni 2 1 1
Veneri Parabita 1, 2 2 1
Kostenski 12 1
Kostenski 14 1
Kostenski 15 1 1
Total sums: 74 12 51
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