The Dawn of Everything

            Co-authors and their Target

            David Graeber and David Wengrow collaborated for over 10 years on conceptualizing, researching and writing The Dawn of Everything. Graeber was a renowned American polymath and prolific author engaged as a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. An academic superstar, he died suddenly of necrotic pancreatitis at the age of 59, three weeks after completing this book. David Wengrow is a British professor of comparative archaeology at University College London.

            Their joint publication is a sprawling treatise, comprising 526 pages of text plus another 135 of notes and bibliography. The most succinct synthesis of their targeted conventional wisdom that I’ve encountered appeared in William Deresiewicz’s rave Atlantic review:

[The Dawn] is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond [Guns, Germs and Steel] , Yuval Noah Harari [Sapiens] and Steven Pinker [The Better Angels of Our Nature]; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes and increasing scale required increasing organization; stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holymen.

Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization – literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us). It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong.

“Human History Gets a Rewrite,” The Atlantic, October 18, 2021.

            The Revisionists’ Retort

            Graeber and Wengrow devote the core of their book to challenging the main tenets of this conventional wisdom about the origins and evolution of human societies. They define that wisdom by asserting that “Big-History” proponents like Diamond and Harari all articulate a similar narrative of a linear progress of civilization. That narrative takes as its point of departure a claimed sudden invention of agriculture about 9000 B.C. stimulating the rise of sedentary societies and states based on inequality, hierarchy and bureaucracy. What Wengrow criticizes as “a mythological conception of history”.

            From this starting point, the authors escort their readers on a broad and deep exploration of recent archaeological sites and social-science scholarship: “a whole new picture of the human past.”

            Their linking thread is that humans’ societal development advanced much earlier than is commonly appreciated: in widely scattered, global venues; with diverse content, forms and priorities. Contrary to convention, there was no standard template, no dominant linear sequence. It was a process of experience and experimentation.

            Here’s a sampling of the revisionists’ findings:

• Africa was indeed the cradle of homo sapiens’ social development, but not solely or even mainly in East Africa. From Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope, a wide variety of complex groupings and behaviors (i.e., cultures) matured that only later coalesced into modern humans.
• Hunter-gatherers did not remain simple primitive nomads, seasonally wandering in small bands. Definitive evidence is emerging of large, non- or pre-agricultural, settlements. (See Cities, below.) Complex economies practiced hunting, fishing, foraging and horticulture, alongside or predating agriculture. Agriculture was neither a prerequisite nor a springboard for population expansion or urbanization. Different societies made different choices in organizing diets, work, wealth and power.
• Nor was adoption of agriculture explosive. It began very slowly, not merely in a handful of breakthrough locations but in at least 15 or 20 known societies at about the same time. Introduction was small-scale, seasonal, along flood-silted river-banks.
• Likewise, hierarchical, bureaucratic societal structures did not universally prevail, even in large cities. Archaeologists and anthropologists have now identified multiple examples of participatory community decision-making (“democracy”) thousands of years before Athens. (In one fascinating case study of contrasts, the authors profile contemporary near-neighbors: the Yuroks in what is now northernmost California and Northwest Coast societies in British Columbia. The Yuroks were egalitarian, “puritanical,” idealizing thrift, simplicity, money and work. They permitted no inheritance; accumulated personal wealth was distributed to the community upon death. Right up the coast prospered the hierarchical, aristocratic, ostentatious wealth-displaying, slave-holding societies of the Northwest Coast.)

            Early Cities

            The Dawn offers an exhilarating, game-changing seminar on early urban developments. Some are recent discoveries; others, long-known by archaeologists but recently reinterpreted. Each contributes one or more components to the authors’ revisionist challenge. Here are my selected shorthand notes from their extensive chronological inventory:

4000-3100 B.C. Taljanky (now in Ukraine). The earliest and largest known Neolithic settlement in Europe. Earlier than iconic Mesopotamian urban centers; ditto, Stonehenge. A round, walled community containing concentric circles of connected, well-built houses, many two-storied. Interior walls and ceilings decorated with red and black designs. Estimated population, 15-20,000; 30,000 with satellites. Pre-agricultural Hunter-Gatherers. Little-known in the West because discovered by Soviet archaeologists in the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War.

3500 B.C. Uruk, Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq). 500-acre area. 20,000-50,000 estimated population. Earliest surviving examples of cuneiform writing. Urban landscape evidences public monuments, religious temples, communal governmental bodies, no military or monarchical institutions.

2600-2100 B.C. Indus Civilization. Mohenjo-daro (now Sindh Province, Pakistan.) The world’s most completely preserved Bronze Age city. Street grids, gated neighborhoods, walled residential compounds, sophisticated drainage and sewage. Large public bath plus smaller neighborhood equivalents. Possible evidence of caste system but not of aristocracy, military or kingship. (Companion center of Harappa is 370 miles to the north.) Excavated 100 years ago but recently reinterpreted.  Estimated population: 40,000. Cultural influence extended to current Afghanistan and western India. Writing script never deciphered. Realistic images of elephants, rhinoceroses, water buffaloes and tigers in tiny stone amulets. Also unicorns.

2000 B.C. Shimao (now in China.) 1,000 acres, surrounded by a stone wall, with palaces, step pyramids and a surviving trove of sophisticated weapons and crafts. All this, previously unknown, in the far north, on the Mongolian frontier, beyond the later Great Wall. 1,000 years older than the oldest Chinese royal dynasty.

1600 B.C. Poverty Point (now in Louisiana, USA.) Massive earthworks, including two major mounds in shape of birds. 500 acres. Complex, standardized geometric and mathematical measurements. Evidence of religious ceremonies. No evidence of agriculture; instead, hunting, fishing and foraging. A superabundant source of nutrition in the lower reaches of the Mississippi delta. Also no writing. But an extensive, ambitious procurement network: minerals and other resources from as far as Lake Superior and the Gulf of Mexico. Antecedent remains in the area dated to 3500 B.C., comparable with earliest Eurasian cities.

100 B.C.-600 A.D. Teotihuacan (now in Mexico’s Central Valley.) 8 square miles in surveyed area. Estimated central population of 100,000; 1 million in the surrounding, dependent area. Authors say, in scope and sophistication, on a par with its contemporary, imperial Rome. Teotihuacan’s founders first built a hierarchical society like later Mayans, with two huge pyramids, an imposing temple, a presiding elite and human sacrifices of captives. Later, amazingly, they dismantled the hierarchical monuments and substituted an egalitarian metropolis. Hundreds of attractive, standardized apartments and neighborhoods, what the authors call “social housing.” Sophisticated construction, waterworks, household murals and artful ceramics. This apex period lasted 200 years, starting about 350 A.D.

Photographer: Skubasteve834

600-1400 A.D. Cahokia, (now southwestern Illinois, USA, directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, MO. “The largest ancient city in North America north of Mexico.” Explosive expansion about 1050 A.D. Six square miles in area, with an estimated core urban population of 10,000, embracing 40,000 in the surrounding area. Not a centralized empire but an intricate regional alliance.

Indigenous Continent

            The Dawn of Everything revises the global history of human settlements. Indigenous Continent revises the North American history of contact between Native Americans and European colonists. Paralleling the approach of Graeber and Wengrow, author Pekka Hamalainen examines familiar historical narratives from a fresh perspective, in his case studying and reporting on how cross-cultural contact was experienced from the Indian side. And again like those co-authors, he launches his revisionary challenge by summarizing the prevailing paradigm (Conventional Wisdom):

There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes something like this: Columbus stumbles upon a strange continent and brings back stories of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing New World as possible. Even as they clash, they ignite an era of colonial expansion that lasts roughly four centuries, from the conquest of Hispaniola in 1492 to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. Between those two moments, European empires and the nascent American empire amass souls, slaves and territory, dispossessing and destroying hundreds of Indigenous societies. The Indians fight back but cannot stop the onslaught. Resourceful and defiant though they might be, they are no match for the newcomers and their raw ambition, superior technology and lethal microbes that penetrate Native bodies with shocking ease. Indians are doomed; Europeans are destined to take over the continent; history itself is a linear process that moves irreversibly forward Indigenous destruction.

            Challenging Those Conventions

            Before diving into four centuries of revisionary history, Hamalainen inserts what purports to be a mere “Technical Note on Terminology and Style.” This bland pause turns out to be loaded with editorial implications. The author signals that, in the interest of facilitating readers’ understanding, he’ll be substituting a few terms for conventional Anglo nomenclature about Indians: “soldiers” for “warriors” [or presumably, “braves”]; “leaders” for “chiefs”; “Nations” (with a capital “N”) for “tribes”. And Indigenous names for familiar group designations; e.g., “Lenapes” for “Delawares.” (Interestingly, he retains “Indians” as an acceptable synonym for “Native Americans.”)

            At a stroke, he has accomplished multiple objectives. By rejecting most Hollywood labels, he has begun shaking readers’ assumptions and expectations. By introducing generic terms like “leaders,” he has leveled the playing field between colonial and Indigenous organizations. By upgrading “tribe” to “Nation,” he has discredited colonial condescension. And by introducing Indians’ own unfamiliar names for their own groups, he is tacitly encouraging readers to think in new ways. Deliberate revisionism has commenced on page one.

            Proceeding decade by decade through the 16^th, 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries, and region by region from North America’s East to West Coasts, the author gives a detailed account of contact groups, key personalities and interactions. In every chapter, he utilizes ground-level case studies to discredit core components of conventional wisdom.

            When Europeans began arriving at the beginning of the 16^th century, North America was densely and widely populated. For centuries after first contact, the Indians outnumbered the colonists. Numerous Indigenous Nations had sizeable populations. Several Eastern and Western societies lived in compact settlements. The chief driver of subsequent drastic population decimations was infectious diseases imported by European settlers: first and foremost, smallpox, but also measles, cholera and influenza.

            Although mainly hunter-gatherers and seasonally mobile, Native Americans did not exist only or even primarily in small, independent bands. Most affiliated on the basis of language and kinship in lasting Nations. Multinational Indigenous confederations played a significant contact role.

            Despite European colonists’ racist and religious prejudices, North American Indians were not “primitive savages.” They had sophisticated social and governing structures. Many practiced participatory, communal decision-making, giving equal power to women. Many had centuries-old legacies; most had rich spiritual beliefs and practices.

            Despite inferior weapons, Indians sustained protracted, often successful, warfare with Europeans for centuries. They perfected guerilla strategies and tactics. And they conducted sophisticated diplomacy in their foreign relations, playing off British, French and American governments against each other.

            Despite resisting and retreating from foreign settlers’ encroachments, Indians did not seek geographical isolation. Their sustainability goal was not separation but sovereignty. In fact, they actively sought to maintain trade with the colonists: bartering beaver pelts and deerskins for guns, ammunition, other metallic goods, implements and utensils.

By John Verelst – compiled from 4 images at Library and Archives Canada, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17882490

A Case Study

            The Iroquois illustrate all of Hamalainen’s revisionist points. A “Confederacy” of five linguistically-linked, northeast Nations (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca), the quintet added the Tuscarora in the early 1700s. Assembled in the mid-15^th century, the Confederacy grew in strength for 300 years and was the most powerful (though ever-shifting) Native American partner and opponent of European and American colonists until the American Revolutionary War. At their peak, the Iroquois occupied lands from the Atlantic Ocean to the western Great Lakes, and from Ontario, Canada to Maryland and Virginia. Their longhouse settlements were seasonally occupied by 2,000-3,000 adults and children. With a maximum population estimated at 20,000, their numbers shrank by two-thirds due to epidemic diseases. The Iroquois governed through a Council of sachems(leaders), with Clan Mothers exerting vigilant matriarchal influence. Decisions were taken by unanimous consent. The Iroquois practiced effective diplomacy in relations with French, British, Dutch and American governments, negotiating treaties and sending ambassadorial representatives to Europe. They conducted warfare against other Nations, mainly to capture replacements for deceased members of the Confederacy and to defend their lucrative fur trade. Although the Iroquois Confederacy was an unusually expansive union, many other Indigenous Nations practiced comparable social, political and economic behaviors.

Sidebars

            Hamalainen’s overarching focus is on colonial warfare: tensions and eruptions, alliances and adversaries, encroachments and resistance, raids, retaliations and retreats, treaty negotiations, renewed hostilities. Beyond the author’s detailed reports of hostilities and casualties, he greatly enriches his revisionist history by providing contextual background – cross-cultural, geographical, even zoological. Here are four glimpses I found particularly informative.

• Indigenous women as power brokers. I was aware that Native American women were active contributors to their communities’ survival: gathering and preparing foods, processing pelts for trade, raising and protecting children, preserving spiritual myths and ceremonies. Beyond traditional domestic responsibilities, Hamalainen emphasizes Indigenous women’s pervasive leadership, influence and independence. Here’s one of his Deep South examples:

In the matrilineal Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Muscogee societies, women were powerful political and economic actors who decided the fate of captives – a major source of labor – and enjoyed substantial personal freedom, which multiplied the pool of gifted leaders. Land was used rather than owned, allowing a flexible property regime. Matriarchs owned their families’ houses, and women controlled the crops they grew; wealth and power resided in the maternal line. Unmarried women possessed complete autonomy, and many chose to enter into marriages with Carolina traders to secure access to goods for their families. By doing so, they stabilized potentially fraught commercial transactions between Indians and Whites through kinship, while shrewdly challenging European gender roles. Cherokee women could become “war women” who went to battle.

       What a provocative counterweight to European colonists’ own gender constraints.

• Waterworld. Hamalainen emphasizes that communication, transport and trade in colonial North America were overwhelmingly water-borne. There were some long-distance overland Indian trails in use before and during contact. And “pioneers” increasingly followed trails to the West Coast after mid-19^th century gold strikes. Transcontinental rail connections were completed across the United States in 1869 and Canada in 1885. But waterways provided the main channels and outreach bases during the previous four hundred years for European and Indigenous travelers. Spanish, Dutch, British and French explorers all crossed the Atlantic and sited their foothold settlements along the East Coast shoreline. The French and Northern Indians utilized the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes as their main military and fur-trade arteries, dotting the banks with forts and trading posts. The Hudson River supplied New Amsterdam. The Ohio River was a key north-south connector and its valley a contested settlement basin. The Mississippi River linked Canada to New Spain and the Caribbean. The Missouri River pushed into the Great Plains. Even in the Far West, the Colorado, Rio Grande and Columbia Rivers were the principal lifelines. To a degree almost incomprehensible today, colonial contacts and conflicts were mostly accessed with sails, oars and paddles. And doing double duty, major rivers demarcated negotiated boundaries between Indigenous and European land claims.
  
   
• Four-legged Game-changers. Growing up in California, I learned how the Spaniards’ importation of horses enabled Cortes to conquer the Aztecs and Pizarro, the Incas. Hamalainen carries that same story north, writing evocatively about how the arrival of horses shocked Native Americans and swiftly enhanced their military power. His account is broadening in reminding how Indigenous Nations had competitive, combative relations with each other at the same time they were contesting territory and sovereignty with Europeans:

The creature had many names, each revealing the awe it elicited among the people who encountered it. For the Comanches, it was “Magic Dog”…The arrival of the horse was a galvanizing moment for numerous Indigenous peoples in the North American West, and a turning point for their continent as a whole…. The horse frontier moved rapidly outward from New Mexico along the ancient Indigenous trade routes that webbed the Colorado Plateau, the Rocky Mountains, and the Great Plains. A Rocky Mountain trade chain had carried horses to the northwestern plains by the 1730s, moving them across several climatic belts which required careful modifications in the ways of tending, feeding and using the animals….

The arrival triggered a revolution. Wherever horses became available, they spawned profound economic, military and political changes…. Not since the spread of corn across the continent had Native Americans experienced such an increase in power. Equestrian nomads could do almost everything – move, hunt, trade, fight, kill, evade and protect themselves – faster and more efficiently. There was the time before horses and the time after them.

• Indigenous Slave-trading. I didn’t know or had forgotten that Native Americans in the thousands were sold as slaves; and that Indigenous Nations closely partnered with European colonists in conducting and expanding this trade. Hamalainen offers dozens of examples. Indians operating as professional slave hunters and traders sold captured Indian slaves to Virginia tobacco-plantation owners. Parallel commerce flourished with South Carolina planters. British and Muscogee slave trackers captured thousands of Apalachees in Northwest Florida and sold them as slaves. Spanish soldiers and colonists in New Mexico captured hundreds of Pueblo and Apache for transport through Mexico to work as slaves in Spanish Caribbean sugar plantations. Two main Indian objectives apparently drove this involvement: banishing/neutralizing soldiers of rival Nations and trading slaves for European guns and ammunition. Many large Indigenous Nations also actively captured Indian slaves for their own employment, before and after European contact.

Partisan Overreach

            My one reservation about both books was that I found they strayed from history to political polemics. David Graeber had been a prominent anarchist, well-known for co-founding the Occupy Wall Street movement. He made clear in The Dawn ­that a major part of his research and writing motivation was to contest the convention that social history led exclusively towards inequality, authoritarianism and bureaucracy. By highlighting egalitarian precedents with communal decision-making, he hoped to open doors to future enlightenment. To my mind, this political agenda distracted from and threatened to compromise his historical credibility.

            Likewise, Pekka Hamalainen makes no effort to conceal that his sympathies in the North American colonial conflict lie firmly with Native Americans. But his choice of language and interpretations of events are disturbingly slanted. Here’s a representative passage:

Indigenous power in North America reached its apogee in the mid- to late nineteenth century… This was the period when the United States emerged onto the world stage….Subduing independent Native Nations and erasing their sovereignty seemed to the imperial United States a straightforward problem of plying its overwhelming military might and technological advantages, including railroads. But the Indigenous nations too reinvented themselves. The Comanches forged an empire that reduced much of the Mexican Republic to an extractive hinterland. The Lakotas, relying on their equestrian mobility, their broad alliance network and their generations-long experience blocking colonial ambitions, emerged as the leading guardians of the Indigenous continent. Over a period of seven decades, they foiled U.S. expansion again and again…There is no way to measure the lives saved, but given the palpable genocidal tendencies of the American settlers, the Lakota Empire’s protective presence may have been the most significant single entity keeping the continent Indigenous. Seen from the Indigenous perspective, Custer’s Last Stand was neither an aberration nor an atrocity; it was expected and necessary.

            I don’t ask that serious historians be dispassionate. If you’re going to invest 10 years in researching and writing a revisionist text, followed by vigorous blowback from entrenched status-quo scholars, you’d better care deeply about your convictions. But cherry-picking the evidence and spinning its interpretation cross the line. Better to leave partisan polemics on the editing floor.

Reverse Osmosis

            Here’s a coda from The Dawn that could equally have been featured in Indigenous Continent.

            Kandiaronk was a late-17^th-century Huron/Wendat sachem widely respected for his brilliance as an orator, statesman and negotiator. He’s recorded by contemporaries to have significantly facilitated communication and cooperation between Indigenous Nations and the French colonial administration. A serious student of European political, legal and religious institutions and practices, he was a regular interlocutor of the Count de Frontenac, resident Governor of New France. There is even evidence that Kandiaronk traveled to the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.

            In Amsterdam in 1703, a French aristocrat, Louis-Armand Lahontan, who had known Kandiaronk when serving as de Frontenac’s Deputy Governor, published a series of essays with the irresistible title of Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense. A continental bestseller, the volume was translated into Dutch, English, German and Italian. In it, Kandiaronk levels a reasoned Indigenous critique of French society and values: the absolute authority of Church and State, an absence of communal decision-making, limited personal freedom, an obsession with acquisition of private property and wealth, and a harshly punitive criminal justice system. While some historians have questioned whether Lahontan might not have invented the supposed conversations, Graeber and Wengrow cite recent scholarship lending credence to Lahontan’s insistence that his text was closely based upon his notes from actual exchanges. The co-authors credit Kandiaronk with “enormously” influencing the European Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions. How’s that for revisionist history!