Prateek Dasgupta and I have a running joke in the DMs about how often we we see praise for this book on substack, of which there has been a lot lately, because we think it’s among the most misrepresentative books on the study of prehistory out there. While I would give Graeber (who sadly passed away not longer after the book’s publication) and Wengrow some credit for trying to jettison the tired dichotomy between Rousseau and Hobbes’s opposing views of human nature in the opening chapter, the rest of the book is littered with incredibly poor scholarship, which is all clearly steered towards a distinctly 2010s flavour of politics. A full rebuttal would take up a whole post, but in a few quick bullets:

• Every chapter is a whistle-stop tour of carefully cherrypicked examples, with no attempt at systematic comparison

• They claim novelty for arguments which have a long history in the literature (e.g. they present the idea of cities coming before states as a totally new conception of history, but it’s not, some archeologists have been arguing this for a while)

• They criticise other scholar’s arguments as sloppy (often straw-manning them), but then use the exact same methods of argumentation (e.g. argument by analogy) themselves with no sense of awareness

• Some of the work they cite does not say what they claim it says, and other times they don’t even do the citations properly, like the bibliography is literally wrong

• In their discussion of urban development, they confidently claim the Cucuteni-Trypillia mega-sites are cities, but never define what a city actually is, which is far from a settled question in archeology/anthropology, and then claim these sites are ignored by the field, which is so incorrect (they’ve been the hottest topic in urbanism for years) that either they, credentialed academics, are wholly ignorant of the literature or are deliberately lying about it to further their argument

• They downplay the large amount of evidence that factors such as scale and density are at least in part responsible for differences in societal organisation, in favour of their preferred argument, human agency, which again they rest entirely on cherrypicked examples and flimsy paleopsychology

• They generally misrepresent the fields of archaeology and anthropology (on cities, governance, inequality) throughout, to the point where a lay-reader would come away with a totally wrong conception of the current state of the historiography

It’s not a serious book!