In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

“The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow has been one of the most widely read and impactful archaeological books published in recent years. The book has been enthusiastically received by the general public but has received both praise and criticism within the academic community. Many critiques of the book have focused on specific disagreements with respect to the ethnographic or archaeological record, rather than discussing the book’s main arguments and theoretical contributions. In this session we seek to engage with the book’s overarching ideas and move forward its core claims for the diversity of human social organization and lived experiences. We bring together scholars from around the world who have found the book’s claims both provocative and useful. We hope that participants will not only discuss the book’s arguments but also expand these concepts to other archaeological cases. Our goal is to build constructive criticism and foster an engaging discussion that moves these concepts and contributions forward toward a better understanding of our shared past and wider understandings of the possibilities for future forms of social relations.

Other Keywords
Social and Political Organization • Theory • Neolithic • Bronze Age • Power Relations and Inequality • Chronology • complexity • practice • Iron Age • egalitarianism

Geographic Keywords
Isle of Man (Country) • French Republic (Country) • United Kingdom of Great Britain and Nort (Country) • Ireland (Country) • Kingdom of Belgium (Country) • Bailiwick of Guernsey (Country) • Principality of Monaco (Country) • Bailiwick of Jersey (Country) • Kingdom of the Netherlands (Country) • Kingdom of Spain (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)

  • Documents (10)
Documents
  • How to Avoid Getting Stuck: Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Anarchy in Southern California (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikael Fauvelle.

    This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precolonial California was home to some of the highest degrees of linguistic and cultural diversity seen in human history. This rich variability provides an excellent example for scholars to compare historical trajectories to understand how different societies developed along different...

  • Painting Pictures: There Is Madness in Archaeological Methods (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Artur Ribeiro.

    This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the critiques *The Dawn of Everything* was subject to was that it failed to provide a clear method or had no method at all and that it was unscientific. There is some truth to these critiques since *The Dawn of Everything* does have its problems. However, underlying these...

  • Participation, Choice, and Institutional Change across the Eurasian Bronze Age (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti.

    This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Theories of “complex social organization” have long linked institutional formations to increased concentrations of power, centralization, and inequality. However, for more than a decade, novel models of “non-uniform complexity”—wherein economic, social, ritual, and practical...

  • Politics and Possibilities in Prehistoric Europe: An Alternative View on Power and Wealth (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Furholt.

    This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An overarching idea of *The Dawn of Everything* is that archaeologists should be encouraged to explore the past as a world of possibilities, not the least with regard to social and political organization. Taking up this call, this paper will reexamine two of the main conceptual...

  • The Possibilities of Sociopolitical Forms: An Archaeological Existentialism for Collectives (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Bill Angelbeck.

    This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In *The Dawn of Everything*, Graeber and Wengrow present a thought-provoking archaeological history of humankind that challenges common understandings of our pasts. Instead of a linear progression from egalitarian pasts to state-based hierarchies, they show the spectrum of variability...

  • Rethinking Egalitarianism and Segmentarity from Archaeological Analysis (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ines Sastre Prats. Brais Currás Refojos.

    This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For a researcher raised on a political-economy archaeological tradition, the assertion that the origin of inequality is not the relevant point in anthropological research is a shake. But after a careful reading of *The Dawn of Everything*, we are still persuaded that social relations...

  • Schismogenesis on the Scandinavian Peninsula during the Late Neolithic Transition (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Ivar Austvoll.

    This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A pungent statement in *The Dawn of Everything* is that the enormous diversity in hunter-gatherer societies makes it impossible to talk about one transition to agriculture. There are several consequences to this statement. One is that hunter-gatherers did not wait for an inevitable...

  • Thinking about “The Dawn of Everything" in Black and Red (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall McGuire.

    This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “The Dawn of Everything" urges us to rethink the most basic concepts of culture and cultural evolution. Waving the black flag of anarchism, Graeber and Wengrow question the widespread idea that inequality and exploitation were unavoidable consequences of human technological...

  • Unfreezing Archaeological Palimpsests: A View from the Iberian Peninsula during the Third and Second Millennia BCE (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katina Lillios.

    This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. *The Dawn of Everything* is a deep well of insights, provocations, and information about the human condition and the human capacity for creativity, particularly with respect to social organization and inequality. The fundamental question the authors ask is “how did we get stuck?”...

  • Worlds Prefigured: Settler-Colonialism, Anarchism, Indigeneity, and the Dawn of Everything (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lewis Borck.

    This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many, *The Dawn of Everything* emerges as a watershed moment in their perception of a new history, how that history impacts the present, and the implications these cast on the future. For others, it is a brazenly biased distortion of history. For still more, the book creates waves...