The real problem with archaeology, as is the real problem with our study of classical history, is that we often use today’s problems as a lens to view what was going on back then.
For example, famously the fall of Rome was attributed at various times in our history to the rise of barbarianism (or rather, illegal immigration), the rise of indecency and sexual promiscuity and a lack of morals, monetary supply problems, even environmental conditions–such as lead in the water supply–have all been proposed by various generations who seemed more interested in advocating their own reasons for why their own civilization was on the downturn. (“The lack of a righteous and moral population today,” one could imagine a statesman saying in 17th century Germany, “will lead to our downfall as surely as Rome did.”)
And so goes ancient archaeology, which has been forever caught between the two philosophers. Rousseau and his “noble savage” ideas:
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
And Hobbes and his Leviathan:
In such condition [one without civilization], there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Many accounts of ancient history seem to side with Hobbes: as populations grew, the necessity to organize those populations for the purposes of survival also grew. This led to things like the Hammurabi Codex in order to promulgate a unified legal system–which presupposes a legal system and system of administration prior to the development of this code. And modern man grew side-by-side with the administrative state, Hobbes’ Leviathan, keeping the wolves of nature and the dark aspects of our own nature at bay.
Of course this account is incompatible with Marxism, whose “end of history” coincides with Hegel’s “end of history” and man’s perfect knowledge of himself. In the utopian end of Marxism is communism: a society whereby everyone acts for the good of others in that society. In this world laws fall away, as do money, as to all the restraints on human nature. And we live in perfect harmony caused by perfect knowledge of ourselves and each other, automatically doing what is good for those around us, and automatically being taken care of by those around us.
A world of perfect happiness because we all know, in our hearts, what needs to be done, and we all learn to do it with perfect love for each other.
In the words of Dr. E.O. Wilson, an entomologist who studied ants:
Wonderful theory, wrong species.
But Marxists keep on trying to push the evolution of man in an impossible direction, against our will, in ways that in the past cost hundreds of millions of lives along the way. (Because you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, right?)
And for Marxism to work, we must in our heart of hearts really believe in Rousseau and his “noble savage” theory. (Of course Rousseau never spent time with the noble savages he thought were living idealistic lives; Rousseau’s life was spent in Geneva and around Europe, in the middle of a continent with few natural features untouched by man. And when you live in the middle of a multi-thousand square mile garden, it’s hard to imagine the natural world not being a garden.)
Don’t get me wrong; Europe is incredibly beautiful. But it isn’t the Mohave desert, or pre-contact Central California, nor is it the frontiers of Alaska–all places man has pushed his reach prior to contact.
And so, into this mix of study of ancient history that is more a commentary about today’s age than it is solid archaeology and understanding the limits of what we know, we find ourselves facing a new telling that sides with Rousseau instead of Hobbes.
Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out: a contrarian account of our prehistory argues that cities once flourished without rulers and rules–and still could. It’s a book review of the book “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” by David Wengrow and David Graeber.
Just from the review itself, there are a few things that make no God-damned sense to me, and I’m speaking as someone with a passing acquaintance with how my Salinan Indian ancestors lived.
Take, for example, this:
Where hunter-gatherers had hunted and gathered only enough to meet the demands of the day,…
That’s bullshit. The year has seasons, and different types of foods are available during different seasons–and some (summer and winter) can be famously less hospitable than others. The Salinan Tribe, for example, would construct these gigantic baskets to store acorns, a staple food available in central California, in order to have food available over the winter when things turned colder and food scarce. Most ancient societies invented the concept of a calendar of some kind–even if it was just verbal knowledge handed down through the generations–in order to track when it was time to gather so to survive the long winter months.
And we have evidence that our ancient ancestors stored food for leaner months going back nearly a half-million years.
Did 420,000-Year-Old Humans Plan Their Diets and Store Food?
Israeli scientists have found evidence that early humans thought ahead and stored fat and marrow laden animals bones for rainy days.
According to a new study published in Science Advances the early humans who populated the Qesem cave near Tel Aviv in Israel, between 200,000 and 420,000 years ago, anticipated their future needs through dietary planning, and the paper is making headlines because previously early humans had not been thought capable of such dietary foresight.
This implies a high degree of organizational foresight that “The Dawn of Everything”–which concentrates itself on the last 12,000 years, completely ignores, instead choosing to see hunter gatherers as:
… [T]hese early hunter-gatherers didn’t have to work particularly hard to fulfill their caloric needs, and they passed their ample leisure hours cavorting like primates.
And it has always fascinated me in any retelling of ancient history that, given all the massive disadvantages of humanity’s large brains–being born with soft heads to allow passage through the birth canal, children which take at least half a decade to reach sufficient maturity to integrate into the tribe, and 15 years to contribute to food production (compare to other animals where the infantile stage is less than 1 year), and of course our brain’s massive caloric intake–and yet somehow we never really got around to using those incredibly evolutionary disadvantageous brains of ours that started developing perhaps a million years ago, only in the last 12,000 years.
So this idea that until 12,000 years ago people basically just hung around and did nothing but sit around naked, munching on grass, telling stories and having uninhibited sex?
Yeah, I gotta call bullshit on this.
Twelve thousand years ago, give or take, the static pleasures of this long, undifferentiated epoch gave way to history proper.
As an aside, I have a feeling the reason why the history we know about started 12,000 years ago, is perhaps because the history prior to that is either underwater, as civilizations tend to gather around coastlines, and those coastlines shifted massively over the millennia. Or swept away during the last ice age 21,000 years ago. And the only signs of civilization we have pre-dating this were essentially isolated remote communities high up in what used to be distant, remote mountains in foreboding places. And which may be as representative of civilization at the time as are those folks living in the high desert in mobile homes on the outskirts of San Bernardino today represent the people of Los Angeles.
So what we know is through a very distorted lens.
An to Graeber and Wengrow’s credit, they do note the limitations of our knowledge:
In the past three decades, however, new archeological methods have disturbed many of these long-standing assumptions. The “shrines” were, Graeber and Wengrow tell us, just regular houses; the female figurines could be the discarded Barbie dolls of the Anatolian Neolithic, but they could also be a way of honoring female elders.
But supporting a community of 5,000 without any social or cultural organization?
Here I have to call hogwash. We may not know how they organized themselves. But we do know how pre-contact civilizations of the more recent past did.
It all boils down to one of the Achilles heels of Marxism and anarchism in general: Dunbar’s Number.
Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.
We see this, for example, amongst the Salinan Indian tribes: individual settlements more or less numbered around 100 or so–familial groups who then interacted with other settlements via well-organized trade that was tracked using money beads and other accounting methods. We know they seldom intermingled with other tribes surrounding them, because of the number of stable language groups in California (around 80), often unintelligible amongst each other. (People who mingle eventually share a common language.) And even within the three major subgroups of the Salinan Indians, language drift occurred–indicating sparse contact between the major groups.)
And each ‘village’ (called ‘rancherias’ by the Spanish Missionaries) of 100 or so souls were led by an elder leader–someone selected that people mutually trusted, who could enforce peace and order within the group.
Go beyond Dunbar’s Number–and you need a way to organize those groups beyond just “everyone knowing everyone else.” Because you can’t have stable relationships with 500 souls, 5,000 souls, or 5,000,000 souls. It’s just physiologically impossible.
And our human brains treat those we don’t know as “others”–“friend or foe.” Someone who we need to be afraid of, until we get to know them.
Someone we are unable to trust.
So what was actually going on in Çatalhöyük? Graeber and Wengrow interpret the evidence to propose that the town’s inhabitants managed their affairs perfectly well without the sort of administrative structures, royal or priestly, that were supposedly part of the agricultural package. “Despite the considerable size and density of the built-up area, there is no evidence for central authority,” the authors maintain.
Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.
And the way the 2,000 souls of the Salinan Indians–equally intelligent, similarly prone to a form of primitive agriculture which encouraged certain plant varieties to grow by pushing seeds into the dirt, equally understanding of the environment in which they found themselves–organized themselves was through isolated communities and informal central organization in the form of trade and the exchange of ideas, as well as elder leaders cooperating with each other.
Of course none of this resembles the modern royalty or priestly structures we see in Europe, nor does it entail formal administrative structures or formal written laws. Salinan Indians relied upon story telling to share ideas of community and common ontological beliefs. But the structures were there, nonetheless, sized as appropriate for the 2,000 or so souls that lived proximate to the Spanish studying them.
And in the 5,000 people living in Çatalhöyük? I suspect similar things: not just primates playing house while lazing about naked, munching grass, telling stories and having sex. But social organization would have had to exist, if only to prevent people from stealing from each other and to settle disputes. Theft and disputes which were not unknown to the Salinan people, disputes that were settled by the elder–a man often selected in part for his ability to knock heads together. (My grandfather was an elder in this spirit–and he was both levelheaded and was capable of brawling with the best.)
Now replace “social organization” with formal social organization–and I’m onboard. There’s always been more than one way to skin a cat when it comes to large groups that grow beyond Dunbar’s Number to get along than formal structures and formal laws. We even see this today with non-profit groups and how they come together.
And in fact, there seems to be a proportional relationship between organization size and the need for formal organizational structures. You don’t need Kings and elected officials and representatives and ‘representational districts’ and ‘town halls’ in a village of 100 people. On the other hand, a single elder who can knock sense into people is not going to be enough for a city of 1 million.
And this is where archaeology as us desperately looking for a reflection of how we want the world to be in our ancestors comes into play.
This is where Graeber–self-proclamed anarchist–and Wengrow–fail.
If cities didn’t lead to states, what did? Not any singular arrow of history, according to Graeber and Wengrow, but, rather, the gradual and dismal coalescence of otherwise unrelated, parallel processes. In particular, they think it involved the extension of patriarchal domination from the home to society at large. Their account of how household structures were transformed into despotic regimes requires some unconvincing hand-waving, but throughout they emphasize that any given process can be historically contingent without being simply inexplicable.
(Emphasis mine.)
The problem really boils down to regardless of how large cities grew, they did. And as large cities grew, they required a different organizational structure to maintain coherency than smaller groups required previously.
A single tribal ‘strong man’ trusted by all yields to informal structures involving a few select traders sharing stories, yields to a group of tribal ‘strong men’ who come together to coordinate action, yields to the customary structures we know of in classical history of Roman senators (who represented ‘families’–essentially the tribal villages of the Salinan People, which were comprised of interrelated familial members) coordinating society, which yielded aristocrats and manor Lords of the middle ages.
All to work around the bug of Dunbar’s Number when applied to very large groups.
Now none of this is inevitable. Remember: there are many different ways to skin a cat. But this?
Graeber and Wengrow point to moments in the distant past in which they see instances of deliberate refusal: communities that weighed the advantages and disadvantages of one ostensibly evolutionary step or another (pastoralism, royal domination) and decided that they liked their current odds just fine.
The story here is that groups knew the advantages of large cities–but deliberately refused to go along.
This is not the story we see of Salinan Indians on contact. Instead, the story we see is of a group who did not know there was another way to live. Or rather, they may have known there were other ways of living but did not have the knowledge to live that way.
Because you don’t just one day wake up and decide to build timber houses with fired-clay roofs, and engage in mass agriculture. All these things need to be learned or invented–and without them, you can become caught in a sort of cultural ‘rut’, where you know there may be better, but you simply don’t have the knowledge to actually change. And the incentives to gain that knowledge may weigh against you.
Consider it mathematically a ‘local maxima’ in the bumpy space of cultures. That is, imagine the space of culture like a mountainous landscape. You may be on top of a hill–and it could be a very nice hill. But to go to a higher peak–and enjoy the fruits of that higher peak, you first have to descend your local hill into a not so pleasant valley. The cost to descend into that valley may simply be too high–and day by day it’s far easer to survive on your local hill than figure out how to traverse to the adjacent mountain where they enjoy a higher standard of living.
And we saw that with the Salinan Indians. When the missionaries set up in the Salinas Valley–many tribes came to the monastery to learn. They weren’t seeking religious conversion–though that’s how the Spaniards interpreted it. They were seeking knowledge: how to make the clay tiles that roofed the monastery and kept water out better. How to make the softer cloths and better shoes than the woven reeds the Salinan Indians were used to. How to make the timber and adobe walls that kept the elements better at bay than reed circular houses.
And the clothing!
Hardly a single photograph of my ancestors exist that does not involve the women getting dressed up in the latest European fashions, such as this, a photograph that I believe is of two of my great grandparents.
Though Graeber and Wengrow have marshalled a vast amount of archeological evidence, they acknowledge that much of what anyone has to say about ancient societies is speculative.
That is absolutely spot-on correct.
However, remember: the lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.
Graber (noted anarchist) wants to argue that there was no organizational principle, while many archaeologists in what this essay wants to call “Big History”–because “accepted history” doesn’t sound sufficiently ominous–want to argue that the people of Teotihuacan had a central King (which presumes the attributes of absolute rule and hereditary rights). And while we can and should assume there was organization, it does not necessarily imply the formality of royalty, a King, rights of succession, or the hereditary ownership of land.
Critiques of grand narratives have been important to the modern self-image of these fields—in part as penance for having once been happy to serve the priorities of empire, peddling “civilization” as a gift to the “primitives.” One consequence, however, is that wholesale synthetic accounts of human history tend to be written in the extravagantly roughshod mode of Harari’s “Sapiens” or Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel.”
And now we get to the real problem, the “tearing down of the Grand Narratives”–which, while useful, because sometimes you have to revisit a theory when you’ve clearly drawn the wrong conclusions–can go really off the rails. As it has with those schools of thought which believe there are no grand narratives, or rather, there are no conclusions you can conclude.
All knowledge in these circles are a social construct, which seems reasonable when we talk about things like religion or politics–but goes really off the rails when we talk about mathematics or science. (The German NAZIs believed in the ‘social construction’ of science–which is where they got the supposedly superior “German Science” and the supposedly inferior “Jewish Science.”)
It even can go off the rails when talking about history. While we may lack knowledge to draw firm conclusions, it does not mean history is whatever the hell we want to make of it.
Just because there is a plethora of possible ways of creating a society does not mean any mechanism for creating a society can work. Nor does it mean that the way society organizes itself is just an illusion: tell that to the judge sentencing you for trying to seal someone else’s car, as he sentences you to that illusionary prison.
It does mean we need to be open-minded to alternatives, but not so open-minded our brains fall out.
Notice further, throughout the essay, the value judgement being made against “the patriarchy” and “aristocratic organization” and the trappings of feudalism throughout the Middle Ages, as if the entire grand experiment was a mistake and perhaps, in the words of Douglas Adams, we shouldn’t have bothered coming down out of the trees.
It’s well and good to focus on those groups we paid little attention to: the tiny bands of foragers who were not central to the customary story of Kings and Great Monuments and Social Planning.
But even Graeber and Wengrow, in their rush towards tearing down the Grand Narratives of Kings and Aristocratic Rule, commit the ultimate sin of all post-modernists.
They build new Grand Narratives without realizing it.
Yet pre-agricultural people erected great testaments to their ways of life in the absence of those structural supports—at Göbekli Tepe, also in Turkey, as well as on the Ukrainian steppe and in the Mississippi Delta.
Are you sure?
After spending so much time telling us that we lack evidence to draw conclusions–that those fat female figurines may have been the ancient world’s equivalent of the Barbie doll–here we are, drawing conclusions about how people without organization built Göbekli Tepe.
How do we know Göbekli Tepe wasn’t, in fact, akin to the ancient world’s Bohemian Grove in Northern California, where those who could make the journey from those distance shores of Doggerland would come for purposes unknown to us?
But where I really get impatient–and yes, I just subjected you to a few thousand words to get to the bottom of my stack, is with shit like this: shit I agree with, but I impatiently wait, waiting for the person to take the next–to me, incredibly fucking obvious–step in all of this:
As they put it, “Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.”
So… the next question is not even “when” or “how”.
It’s why.
Why does a band of 100 people need an elder to ‘knock sense’ into folks?
Why do traders need money beads, accounting knots, or other means of tracking trade?
Why do larger bands wind up forming councils for formal or informal organization?
Why did ancient man eventually arrive to a point where an entire law had to literally be written in stone?
Why go through all this trouble of forming societies and civilization?
But no-one seems to be interested in “why”–or worse, dismissing the question out of hand before it can even be formulated by “power-hungry people gotta be assholes”, which is what a lot of critiques of “Big History” seem to ultimately boil down to.
Certainly the review of “The Dawn of Everything” wants to make the case that the “why” question is somehow moot: that it all was a terrible experiment gone wrong, that perhaps we shouldn’t have come out of the trees.
Peter Thiel wonders why we don’t yet live in the future of our dreams. Graeber and Wengrow think the first step forward is a reminder of the past we deserve.
That perhaps we deserve better.
And until you can ask “why”–and do so without either appeal to authority or appeal to the desire of Post-Modernists to view the world as hateful people hating, and codifying their hatred in these societally constructed “Grand Narratives” to cement their hatred–you can never then ask “how”.
Because without the “why” of a thing, you can’t figure out the “how” of a thing.
Fuzzy little things that I find interesting. 