Politics and Possibilities in Prehistoric Europe: An Alternative View on Power and Wealth

Summary

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 premises underlying most models of social organization and evolution in prehistory: current Western notions of Power and Wealth. These are fundamentally skewed toward an individualist, exclusive, competitive, and confrontative view of what is considered as “human nature” and thus create an unjustified Eurocentric bias toward such kinds of motivations and forms of behavior, downplaying and neglecting collective, cooperative, and caring practices. As anthropological work has shown that coercive force is largely to be considered as absent in non-state societies, reevaluating power and property relations as mainly collective, consensus-based forces, and differentiating different forms of wealth, it is argued that these concepts mainly work from the bottom up, downplaying the dominant focus on top-down, leadership-based agency. This new conceptual framework enables us to understand the seemingly contradictory evidence in European prehistory, where inequality in relational wealth is often found in burials but is not matched by inequality showing up in the domestic sphere.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38771.0