the dawn of everything is is trying to undo just to write about even very remote periods of history that we have evidence for um as if there were real people in them which sounds like a ridiculous thing to say but it's very rarely done you know prehistoric people are more likely to be compared to non-human primates than they are to people like URI [Music] what if everything we knew about human history was wrong received wisdom is that humans have been around for two maybe three hundred thousand years but that we only start agriculture in the last 10 to 12 000. after that we have cities astronomy numbers civilization as we know it but according to a book by David wangrow and the recently deceased David Graber that's not quite accurate they say that cities and what we judge as advanced human culture actually precedes agriculture the story of prehistory is far more complex and interesting than we thought and that this has quite remarkable political implications David Wenger welcome to Downstream thanks for having me on you're an archaeologist um you teach archeology at University College London is that a job you always wanted to do when you're a child no it isn't um when I left school I wanted to be in the theater and I I'd already done a fair bit of that I think from the age of about 14 I I fell in love with with acting in the stage and I joined up with the National Youth Theater which was a wonderful time because it was the first time as a Londoner it was the first time I actually met people from all over the country all over the UK and um I did it I left school and um an agent and and did that for a while then did various other things and then I I fell into archeology more or less by accident so how was that wow child actor becomes IQ that's a that sounds like a great story yeah I think it was more of a sort of young adult actor and I mean I've met Child Actors and they're a very specific kind of person but it's never quite one of those um but um what happened basically after trying various other things including a little flotation with journalism uh the BBC Arabic service um and various other things I wasn't really finding a Direction so I had good grades from from school and I decided to apply to Oxford so that's why I want to go best university I can get into I want to go to Oxford and I rode to all these Oxford colleges saying um can I come and do English literature and they all ignored me um and a friend of mine who it was told me it's easier to get into places like that if you apply for a subject that's a bit off the Beaten Track and they had just started a new program new degree called archeology and anthropology which is actually the name of the degree that I teach and coordinate now at UCL so I wrote to one college and here's College asking if I could do that and I got an interview and I went into this interview with uh very formidable woman called Barbara Kennedy she was a geographer because they didn't have any archaeologists at that particular college and she grilled me for a while and I I sort of spouted on about how archeology was my great passion and so on and then she reached down and produced from under her chair all these letters that I'd written to other colleges saying can I come into English literally so I thought well that bulls that up but then she admitted me and um I was technically a mature student although probably anything but um in terms of everything else but then it was classified as a mature student when I started and I nearly made a complete mess of that actually and nearly got slung out after um about six months but I had one teacher it was one of those things where it's just one person actually gets you hooked and gives you the confidence to think you know yes you know you have a place in this you can contribute and that was a guy called Andrew Sherrod who uh passed away very young actually same age as as David 59 and just had a massive heart attack one day um but really sort of got me to pull my finger out and got me addicted to this stuff and I didn't really look back after that because it's something you hear all the time I'm sure that some point most people when their children want to be archaeologists yeah I did have I mean there's obviously something there I can remember a school trip to Old sarum it's on Salisbury Plain it's one of these great NH Hill Forts and I came back from there and went back I used to live with my grandparents a lot in North London I remember going back to their place after that and my head was just full of images you know I could see all the different sort of waves of migrations and invasions and I produced this this sort of tome this is all pre-computers I think I got like a calligraphy pen or something and sort of tried to create a I remember my grand helping me with coffee grinds to sort of age the paper so you know there was something there which is completely irrational where you just feel an attachment to some era and I don't have any family roots in in the British Isle so you know it's not like a local attachment but you just identify for some reason with a place or an era of History and I don't know why that happens um but clearly people who choose to pursue archeology they have they have that in an unusually high dosage it's against the meat of your book The Dawn of everything um the conventional view is humans have been around for 200 300 000 years you can you can give the specific numbers in the answer but we've only engaged in agriculture for 12 000 years 11 000 years 12 000 years and that with the Advent of Agriculture we then get all the things that we associate with with modern humans cities numbers numeracy literacy astronomy civilization your book co-written with the uh the recently departed um David Graber says that's completely wrong or it's it's significantly wrong um Well we'd have to pick apart what you said there a bit Aaron you know um when you say we we started having agriculture 12 000 years ago only a very tiny number of people on the planet started doing that in very specific locations uh specifically the Middle East what they sometimes called the Fertile Crescent most of the world at that time was still hunter-gatherers and Fishes so um you know actually what you've presented as a summary is a classic example of what we would call a kind of stage Theory but you've got these long periods when sort of nothing happens then everything changes you get the Agricultural Revolution populations expand then you get cities and everything changes again then you get civilization and one of the things we tried to show in the book is that actually the process is much more interesting than that and you've got people that what are supposed to be different phases or stages of History actually living cheek by jowl sort of feeding off each other reacting against each other and also consciously planning and designing societies according to different sets of values which you know when we talk about civilization and modernity there's this deeply ingrained assumption to think that it's only us moderns or supposedly moderns you know us post-enlightenment folk who've been able to do that to actually make a decision about the kinds of societies we wish to live in and then consciously try to make that happen and I think that's that's a deeply rooted idea both in the intellectual philosophical and political traditions of the left and of the right in Europe in the European tradition let's say and we think that's wrong and as you say humans have been around as far as We Know humans who are cognitively just like you and I same kinds of brains perfectly capable of having a conversation just like the one that we're having for something in the order of 200 to 300 000 years and what we know about most of that time is vanishingly little but if you think about it that's extraordinary I mean the number of things that could have happened the number of different kinds of conversations and experiments that could have taken place and yet the way we tend to write about and characterize those early periods is the opposite it's as if people were existing in some sort of strange haze just kind of uh you know following patterns or routines until one day somebody invents Agriculture and everything changes and that's the kind of I guess conceptual damage that we do to our own past the the dawn of everything is is trying to undo just to write about even very remote periods of history that we have evidence for um as if there were real people in them which sounds like a ridiculous thing to say but it's very rarely done you know prehistoric people are more likely to be compared to non-human primates than they are to people like URI and I love this insert which you have which I'd never ever thought of before maybe we can go into it a little bit about foragers hunter-gatherers being less parochial basically than modern humans I mean maybe not today in the age of the internet but until relatively recently yeah can you talk about that this is this is one of the great um Revelations of modern archeology is you know this whole idea that humans before agriculture lived in these tiny bands sort of isolated isolated pockets of humanity nomadic roaming around the landscape not having much contact is completely wrong like we can trace back now in concrete terms evidence going back tens and tens of thousands of years before agriculture to show that human societies you know way even beyond the last ice age were already highly structured over very large areas interacting moving things around the landscape we've got scientific techniques these days which are pretty good I mean you can actually Trace people's diodes tens of thousands of years ago you can say whether they moved from a coastal environment to a terrestrial environment you can trace movements of plants animals raw materials we have ancient DNA so there are many methods by which we can reconstruct a picture of early human societies and it turns out that the world was highly connected and if you think about it this shouldn't be surprising because of course one of the first things that that humans do um is actually move and actually the word that's usually used is that we colonize the globe which is a strange term to think of in a way because there's nobody out there to be colonized but we move and we we somehow find our way everywhere from Africa down to South America and eventually Australia so you actually start off with a highly uh integrated and connected social Universe which may not demographically involve that many people but they're finding ways to maintain connections and transfer ideas over extraordinary distances in a way that in say the Middle Ages in Europe certainly wasn't the case the average yeah rural peasant wouldn't live there that's right and this is very interesting because it means you have to rethink scale like the whole scale of factor in human history in a way I think the sort of stereotypical picture that most people have is kind of back to front where you know you think you start off with these small isolated groups and then human populations expand and we end up with globalization it's almost the opposite actually if you look at the history of the Middle East for example you go from having these big kind of regional systems to a situation where today you know if you want to move from Cairo to Damascus you've either got to work for the CIA or go through you know about 50 different border checks so in a way actually you know the history of nation states and hard borders we've become much more enclosed over time one thing about megalithic sites which again I've only really discovered in the last several years your book is a part of that is the role of astronomy um obviously there's the equinoxes and the solstices but more besides that too often certain constellations constellations of stars are being sort of aligned and recognized and whatnot so are we looking then at many many societies which didn't have agriculture yet engage in really Advanced astronomy because again that's something people don't really and navigation you know we're talking about human populations finding their way through Ireland Landscapes to remote places out in the middle of the Pacific of course you know they've got to have a superb grasp practically and intellectually of topography and the behavior of of of the Seas um and uh yes I mean there's no question and you see it reflected in in Monumental architecture from very early periods which is often laid out uh in very precise alignments in relation to other monuments in relation to the solstices here in the UK obviously you have famously Stonehenge um that's right I mean people were were clearly uh more than capable of developing very sophisticated mathematical geometrical understandings in different ways to the way we do it now and the most famous I guess sort of discussion of this was the book in the 1960s by Claude levistross where he tried to suggest that there are basically two different forms of science there's our notion of science which begins in the laboratory so you carve out an artificial environment and you have men in coats or whatever um you know trying to generate new ideas and theories which are then applied to the world and he contrasted that with the way that most human Discovery throughout the history of our species has actually taken place which is a world of Discovery in which there are no Laboratories Discovery is part and parcel of social life it's out there in the landscape in people's interactions with plants and animals it's applied from the beginning and that presumably is how all those early systems of navigation Monumental construction Metallurgy all of these things were discovered and generated through other systems of knowledge than the one that we're familiar with which is kind of intriguing in itself well Stonehenge built by people that engage in agriculture do we know that for a fact for instance that was the consensus until very recently but actually what we found out in um in just the last sort of a couple of decades is that the picture is more interesting so Stonehenge by the time it's constructed about 5 000 years ago uh farming has already been adopted in the British Isles as an import from the European continent but then as in many other places of the world and again you know this goes back to your initial characterization of human history where you get Agriculture and then everything changes the British Isles are one of many examples of where people adopt Agriculture and then basically change their minds so the period when Stonehenge and many other great monuments constructed is actually one in which the populations of this island um more or less give up the habit of cereal farming and they go back to foraging wild nuts and acorns and things as their staple plant food they decide to keep they hold on to other things so they hold on to um the farming of animals pigs and cattle in particular there's a site close to Stonehenge called Darrington walls where they've actually found the place where people congregated for seasonal festivals and feasted on huge amounts of meat it must have been a hell of a party and this presumably was at the times when they were also engaging in these big coordinated construction activities that we see there so it's it's a more complex picture they're not Farmers or hunter-gatherers they're some hybrid of like farmer forager herders or something so you're saying essentially it's a social Choice that's being made it must have been I mean I can't imagine any other way in which people from you know um one end of the country to the other turned their backs on a practice like serial I mean how could that happen unconsciously there's no evidence of any sort of massive climatic rupture or depopulation it just seems to be people deciding that that's not actually what they want to do anymore that's quite that's quite an extraordinary political choices I mean it is yeah and Stonehenge is quite extraordinary I mean there must have been pretty extraordinary things going on for people to even engage in those kind of uh you know Feats of construction but for a contemporary audience I mean the equivalent would be us deciding that the Industrial Revolution wasn't a good idea or just you know to stop using fossil fuels wouldn't it I mean yeah they weren't thinking in those terms it's actually yeah uh and and it raises a question right which is uh if people have been able to make decisions on that scale in what we are taught to think of as primitive societies uh why do we struggle so much with those kinds of structural changes now which leads me on to I suppose the central question in the book for our audience which is a political audience there are obviously extraordinary political implications if the generic what you call stages view of history is incorrect or inaccurate um because this is the Bedrock of most modern political Theory from in different ways lock Russo Hobbs we can talk about that in a second but also more contemporary people you know the Stephen pinkers the Yuval harare's because they're essential formulation is the more complex society becomes the more unequal the more unjust but it creates it creates more abundance therefore there's a kind of utilitarian argument for it you know it's well you're talking you're talking about authors and books who sometimes explicitly model what they're doing on those philosophers of two or three hundred years ago you know people actually say I am a neo-obsian or a kind of neo-russoyan take on human history which is interesting and it's something David and I noticed around the time when we decided to start thinking about these kinds of issues was pretty much exactly the time of the last big financial crash about 2008-9 and you know there was a slew of literature as you might expect on inequality in the roots of inequality and suddenly a lot of those very old ideas you know going all the way back to the 17th 18th centuries really coming back in quite a surprisingly aggressive way you know let's think again about the deep roots of inequality let's go back to Harps let's go back to Rousseau which as you say you know we're talking about the the foundational texts of modern political Theory but it's important to remember that they were completely speculative I mean they were conjured out of the imaginations of those people with no evidence tangibly whatsoever for the nature of human societies hundreds of thousands of years ago so it's these are uh kind of imaginary worlds of pre-history um which is quite a sobering thought you know the idea that modern political thought actually comes out of imagination and its imagination rooted in very specific political contexts you know Leviathan was written what 1651 middle of the English Civil War and it's partly about what is the nature of society without government and why is government necessary Rousseau died what 10 years before the French Revolution you know when he's addressing the question what are the origins of inequality it is the burning question of his time so these are entirely political uh you know they're exercises in the political imagination which are obviously radical and generative at their time but why should we be still asking questions that were pertinent in 1754. in 2022 um is I think an interesting question in itself when we've got all this other information all this other evidence you know why are we still asking the same questions in this slightly sort of sclerotic manner you're an academic you're at UCL I was at UCL as an undergraduate oh yeah I did some modules in political Theory as it goes and what are you taught you know introduction to political Theory Hobbs lock Plato Robert not sick it's a more contemporary political theorist John rules but who if these effectively are building their thinking on the early liberal tradition of Lock and Hobbs and it's basically 101 why you should obey the state and like you say it's it's based on conjecture speculation which is several hundred years old and this is a modern institution in a in a very Advanced Western capitalist market economy where apparently we believe so deeply and passionately and empiricism and yet the very basis upon which we say political sort of political status quo is legitimate is nonsense frankly it's a good example of I think what is wrong with universities quite often because you know around the corner from where you were doing that would have been the place where I worked so we're talking about what the 19 I can't place you yeah and you're very ageless absolutely yes 2003. okay so around the corner from where you were learning about uh lock and roles and all the rest of it would have been the place where I work the Institute of archeology actually I think I probably was already just about teaching there um around that time no sorry 2003 no God no thank God no I wasn't um and yeah um you know just up the road from there you would have had all these people actually studying uh human prehistory but you know it's I guess it's unfortunately in the nature of universities to carve these things up into separate departments which don't actually generate that kind of learning where knowledge Moves In what should be very obvious directions so well how does this stuff look now in light of what we actually know and what are the implications of that so I think it's highly unlikely that archeology students would have been thinking about those philosophers whereas the students learning about those philosophers almost certainly wouldn't have been thinking about the evidence of deep human history and I think that is uh that is a that is a problem I mean it's a lost learning opportunity effectively but isn't it a failure also the academics yeah so like absolutely 100 I mean it just strikes me as completely crazy that yeah yeah talented professional streets in yeah teaching this frankly nonsense to young people but a really important subject well you could teach it you don't have to teach it as nonsense I mean you could see it as part of a tradition you know it is it is it is it is important to to study it but you know within the confines of what it is and actually actually you know when you look closely at these texts they're very openly speculative you know Russo I think sort of spells it out somewhere when he's describing a story very similar to the one you started with about you know how agriculture trapped Us in certain new ways of life in the invention of private property he says do not take this as history this is effectively a thought experiment and you know it's it's meant to make you reflect on what private property is and its place in the world and its effects on us as human beings the distinction of mine and Vine if you like it's not meant to be a reconstruction so actually what's happened with some of the other modern authors you mentioned is also rather strange where you've got what began a sort of radical speculation is now presented as objective truth or even the sort of laws of history and that's what I think sort of provoked us you know David as an anthropologist me as an archaeologist think hold on this isn't okay you know we should try and do something about this basically and that you know that kind of motivated us to um to start trying to liberate um some of this extraordinary body of knowledge from from these rather siled contexts you know get it out from behind the paywall journals and start piecing together a puzzle which is still very incomplete of human history but there's already enough pieces there to say that it looks nothing like the stories that we've inherited from the enlightenment let's talk about indigenous American society um again there's a few more questions particularly around this which I I think are so impressive just the The Source material that you cover in the book and things I've just also learned in recent years again let's go back to um stereotypes and received wisdom the idea is that Europeans discover the Western hemisphere in 1492 will leave Leif Erickson to one side and just came back from Sweden actually yeah they haven't forgotten they have no they haven't that's it's interesting it's interesting how they do really emphasize that isn't it the nordics um we discover effectively a backward civilization which we then broadly exterminate through a combination of Guns Germs and and steel um that's not quite right though is it no and I mean I've been very fortunate in the last year to be able once travel became possible again after the pandemic took spend some time in Canada and in the US including talking with indigenous Scholars and historians from various campuses um about this um and it's not there is a lot in the book I wrote with David about the pre-columbian Americas and about early colonial contacts between European colonizers and native peoples and um it's not an area that is actually you know particularly within either of our wheelhouses you know David's field work as an anthropologist was in Madagascar my PhD and most of my field experiences in North Africa and the Middle East so this was a steep learning curve for us which I'm still very much on but it was necessary in order to answer the questions we were asking particularly about the origins of inequality which is how the the project started if you look at the literature around the middle of the 18th century take a figure like Russo and the intellectual milia in which they're debating the ideas they're thinking through you cannot avoid the Americas and particularly that part of North America that's now split between Canada and Upstate New York basically the the Great Lakes region and what's sometimes called the Eastern Woodlands which is where Europeans encountered societies that were organized on radically different lines much more democratic lines with levels of Freedom particularly for women which were unheard of in European societies at the time and which clearly had an enormous impact on the European imagination including on the political imagination and we found it was impossible really to understand what was going on you know when we once we decided that we didn't want to uh fall into that trap of just recapitulating these questions and stories from hundreds of years ago we started asking well how did they come about in the first place and that does lead you down a certain line of questioning which leads to the Americas and that's why the book ended up it's such a strong Focus there let's talk about candy Rock a candy honk maybe you've got a really good French accent I have no section some videos I watched for this um he is and actually existing figure it seems I definitely I mean you can if you want to Google it you can see an image from 1701 of a treaty called the Great Piece of Montreal and you can see candy around signature his mark on it so what's candy Rock's importance who is he candy rank was a very well known figure person here on wendart's Nation which is is very much still a thing it has its administrative Center which I I was lucky enough to be invited to on the outskirts of Quebec City where they have a small street called Candia um so we were joking that maybe should extend it a bit now because he's he's um he is um a key sort of um individual in in our book um because we have various independent accounts of this person which tell us that uh in that time so we're talking about the uh the end of the 17th century this is someone who's playing a pivotal role um in diplomacy Warfare and in um trying to negotiate a better future for his own people in the midst of a highly complex Colonial situation with French English Dutch colonizers and so on in the mix someone who was multilingual and who in addition to all of those qualities was clearly an extraordinary intellect and a brilliant speaker and we have various independent accounts of this but for reasons which are very contingent um some of those kinds of conversations and ideas that would have been exchanged between candy Rock and European interlocutors at the time found their way to a much larger audience in Europe we know that around that time the governor of what Europeans then referred to as part of New France that part of the colonies would actually invite candy Rock to his table to engage in debates purely for pleasure he says you know I did it to entertain my officers because this guy was just so funny and witty and they would debate many of the topics that would later become Central to what we think of as Enlightenment thought you know rationality versus revealed religion sexual habits marriage Customs questions of Freedom the role of money in society um and in the mix of people who witnessed those conversations was a minor French nobleman who went by the name lahonto the baron La Junta who is a person who went over to the colonies in his youth I think at the age of 17. lived there for a decade spoke at least two indigenous languages um and was deeply embroiled in the goings-on of of those tumultuous times but also seems to have been a bit of a troublemaker they didn't get on with authority ended up getting kicked out of the colonies and found himself more or less penniless on the streets of Amsterdam and he writes these books these sort of travel logs and finds his way back into favor at court um and one of those books is the one called curious dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense who has traveled and it features these conversations between LA Hotel playing himself a character called adario who everyone accepts is based on Candy Rock and in these dialogues adario slash khandirong gives the most brilliant sort of scathing withering analysis of European civilization and this is the book that takes off like wildfire and inspires countless imitations it's it's a bestseller it's translated into multiple European languages uh stage plays which run for years are based on it and it becomes the foundation of a whole genre of such dialogues that almost every major Enlightenment thinker had a go at so they will take the substance of the dialogues and put them in the mouth of some completely imaginary exotic you know other person maybe a Tahitian or Chinese or you know there are many different examples but the the context that it comes out of is is a real one of culture contact and exchange and the effects on the European thoughts we would argue were explosive so candy rank in other words ought to be considered part of the story of what we call the enlightenment in the same way as Voltaire did era and all the rest I mean importantly it precedes all of them so and it precedes them all by some decades so you have what you might call a sort of proto-enlightenment Salon before the appearance of the the famous salons in Europe you call this the indigenous critique um which again reading it I was like it seems obvious in in retrospect so for instance you know you have engagement between the Americas and Europe between 1500 and let's say you know the early 18th century 200 years there of of cultural to and through and clearly there would have been these kinds of dialogues and there would have been some transmission back to Europe it may not have been as much as one would have hoped to have liked but it would have been significant we took about 200 years and yet that barely figures in our in our understanding of the exploitation and the colonization of the Americas it's seen as purely one way in terms of ideas in terms of capital and humans um but what you say which I think is actually very empowering for for for peoples and ideas which aren't in the global North the most powerful countries is actually it went both ways and that you can actually situate an indigenous American or you know a whole sort of school of thought which is you know coming out of the Americas within that European Enlightenment which is just I think really powerful well isn't it isn't it it's actually Earth chat isn't it isn't it odd that we even have to make that point I mean you know what what's the other implication that these people were you know either living in in some utterly different uh sort of mode of reality um which cannot be entirely true given that we're talking about a period of trade and military alliances and you know very intense interaction um it's not controversial to point to the fact that Europeans adopted a lot of material habits from the Americas at that time many of which are actually linked to the habit of sitting around having those kind of intellectual conversations you know smoking tobacco from pipes drinking caffeinated Beverages and yet there is a great resistance to the idea that along with those substances and material habits came ideas you know then you get real Kickback and um that's kind of interesting in itself because all we're trying to argue in a way is that ideas particularly about democracy and freedom which European enlightenment philosophers themselves attributed to the Americas were actually theirs and I think there is something disempowering about the idea that Notions of freedom um do not come from the oppressed or do not come from the colonized but there's something to do with ancient Greece or you know somehow sort of rooted in Europe actually in the soil of the colonizer I think that is disempowering um and there is something uh for those who haven't already realized this there is something emancipatory in understanding what perhaps should be obvious that actually ideas about um how to free oneself from oppression come from the oppressed let's talk about some particular places in the Americas there's one place called Cahokia yeah I was there not long ago about eight months ago so around a thousand years ago this place is the same size as London so about a thousand A.D it's got a population in the tens of thousands you know ballpark it's a it gets up estimates are something like around perhaps forty thousand people at its height um around the the 14th century yeah so maybe Norwich or something you know it's a largest European city what happens to it um this is very interesting and a little bit uh controversial but what is clear is that having grown and extended I say I was walking around in this place with colleagues of mine including an archaeologist who's worked there all his life like about 30 years which was great because when you go there um there isn't a lot to explain to you what you're walking around there's this enormous Mound called the Monk's Mound there are many different Earthworks and mounds there and this thing is huge and it's in the middle of what is now a kind of national park that has a road running through the middle of it and you know this unfortunately has been the fate of of many important indigenous Heritage sites um in North America um we may have a road running through it um you get very good Mexican food there's little restaurants and things and you're actually standing in the middle of the largest uh pre-columbian City the largest indigenous settlement in North America and it has these great monuments archaeologists have have worked there over the years um it becomes uh the center of a whole Regional system not probably an empire in the sense that we think about it but the influence culturally and politically of Cahokia spreads on a really extraordinary scale throughout the Mississippi basin and um it's clear that certain things are going on there um which are predicated on her um various forms of hierarchy or inequality there's a mound which is is actually full of the bodies of young women who seem to have been richly killed in in some kind of horrible ceremony um on the Monks Mound itself there's an incredible ability to have surveillance over the whole settlement and we know that when the site centralizes the surrounding Countryside sort of empties out so you get these housing districts which would have all been visible from up there you get fortifications forming and it seems to be going in that kind of Direction and then everything changes and the area is abandoned depopulated archaeologists for Generations have referred to the whole region around Cahokia as a sort of vacant quarter um and it appears to have been um almost forgotten I guess to the extent that we don't even know you know the name of this place the genuine name of this place it doesn't really feature in any clear way in later oral histories so people in somewhere rather turn their back on Cahokia and there are various theories about this to do with environmental collapse um which are in my opinion not entirely compelling um and increasingly I think people are looking at this situation in the same way that they're beginning to look at the the so-called Puebla civilizations of the American southwest where again you have these um you know quite big centralized sites which are subsequently abandoned is that well why shouldn't we at least consider the possibility that people are genuinely uh walking away and deciding to create a different uh a different kind of social order different kind of social arrangements and actually when you start looking at it that way it enables you to join the dots or make a bit more sense of the kinds of societies that Europeans did eventually encounter few centuries later in the same regions some of which were still very hierarchical like little mini cahokias but others had developed this highly egalitarian way of living which you know the natural assumption for Europeans to make is that they've just always been that way um but of course we're talking about people with fully developed historical consciousness who do have in their own histories the history of kerokia and the whole Regional system that it generated which goes almost as far north as the Great Lakes so there is a hierarchical past there that people have for one reason or another turned their backs on and created a different form of society um and uh that's something that we um we dwell on a bit in the book because it just you know it enables you to get past this idea um that we're talking about people who are somehow you know Frozen in one pattern of culture uh or sort of have no history there's also this other great example of I'll get this right trt huacan which is I think that's very good but I'm told by my Mexican colleague that um even Mexican Scholars don't always pronounce it quite huacan which she tells me is better but you hear teotihua Khan anyway I think we're I think we're fine yeah it's possible um so this is a city that in terms of its size scale magnificence it Rivals Rome um very centralized very authoritarian then something changes and you sort of imply it's almost like a you know this is the Paris commune in the sort of Western Hemisphere but potentially there's a big sort of political shift for the archaeologists to a guy called Renee Milan who produced this extraordinary map of which we um we're very fortunate to get permission to reproduce the map so you can see it in the dawn of everything and he um directed one of the most incredible ground surveys ever undertaken in the history of archeology because we're talking about absolutely vast settlement which at its height around 300 A.D would have had well conservative estimates say a hundred thousand people I've seen estimates that go up to double that big place and uh Milan himself and some later Scholars argued that there was a a turnaround like a complete reversal of of Fortunes for that population where it begins on a very hierarchical path you know if you go there today as a tourist or just Google some pictures of the site you'll see the two great pyramids pyramid of the Sun the Pyramid of the moon this other great structure called the Temple of The Feathered Serpent these are all later names that the Aztec actually invented for teotiwakan we don't know what they were originally called so it begins in this very hierarchical way and again you've even got evidence for ritual killing and Human Sacrifice they buried the bodies of captives under the foundations of the pyramids it's quite disturbing the hands type mind their backs and they built these structures on top of them but then something changes around 300 A.D 250 300 A.D there is no more Monumental construction on that scale and all of the labor and resources that presumably went into building great temples and pyramids go into something else and that's something else is housing and they cover the entire settlement on a grid formation with beautiful housing apartments these are Apartments which are low rise so I want to talk about apartment compounds we're not talking high-rise we're talking something more like a villa with a number of a small number of nuclear families big Central Courtyards subfloor drainage gorgeous murals on the walls actually when archaeologists first started investigating those housing complexes they thought they were palaces then they realized that everybody in the city was living in a palace um now how are we to conceptualize this um we don't have uh any detailed written sources from the time archaeologists have tried in various ingenious ways to sort of reconstruct what was going on but what you can say is that people in that City from that point onwards had a really good standard of living and that it was generalized to uh you know the whole Urban population which is pretty extraordinary and we know you know you talk about Guns Germs and Steel if we skip ahead uh some centuries to the um the beginning of the uh the Spanish Conquest when we do have uh eyewitness uh Chronicles and uh accounts of the kind of cities that existed in that region uh from say um the 16th century onwards um there are a whole different range of them you know we tend to think about tennis titlan and Montezuma and sort of Aztec Empire and that it's all very hierarchical actually and we we go into this in the book The City where Hernan Cortez and the Conquistadors make alliances that enable them to go and challenge the the might of the Aztec empire is a city uh by the name of class color which had a relationship to the Aztec capital that was a bit like Athens and Sparta there's one's very hierarchical the other one's very Democratic classical clearly was a republic of some sort with its own Parliament and we even have records in Spanish of the kind of debates that went on there and this just doesn't feature in our world histories you know we're quite rightly taught that the fall of tenashtitlan was in in a sense you know the beginning of um Western global domination what we're not taught is that one of the things you know one of the steps on that pathway was this extraordinary encounter between uh European conquerors and an indigenous Urban democracy of sorts and I've got no hesitation in calling it a democracy at a time when you know cities run on that kind of basis were extremely usual in Europe itself and you know none of this is terribly sort of secret you don't have to delve very deep into the sources we've got the letters that Cortez himself wrote back to the king of Spain saying I found this place it's it's weird you know there's no King it's it's maybe a little bit like some of our Florentine or Venice you know it's run on some other principles all this stuff is out there um but um oh it really isn't given the prominence that you know you think it it probably ought to have I mean that sounds what you're describing in um and you know these are obviously people who have no connection whatsoever to the Mediterranean you know ancient Greece Rome nothing to do with it this is an indigenous form of urban government what you were describing in trt huacan um sounds like a revolution essentially or a social Revolution yeah there are yeah absolutely and and there are um experts uh on on that site uh who have have suggested that that may have been the kind of thing that took place there's no absolute consensus on it in the way that there's generally very little consensus in archeology but I think uh everyone would accept um that there is a profound transformation that takes place there and that's kind of fascinating because you know one of the things that we're told in the traditional Narrative of human history is that once you have very large dense human populations and once hierarchy sets in in those kind of settings it is irreversible whereas here we seem to have a situation where there is a reversal yeah like you say in um in in in Western political history people say though isn't a successful slave revolt until Haiti for instance which is you know as far as we know is broadly correct but that may have not been the case in America because you make this great sort of rhetorical question in the book which is what we talk about the abolition of slavery um and of course we talk about the story of Simone de Bolivar and Tucson levature and the abolitionists and whatnot but perhaps it was abolished numerous times many times in history yeah I mean I think this is just sort of classic eurocentrism you know the idea that yeah maybe these things were happening elsewhere but they don't really happen until they happen in a European context I mean it's just a kind of sorting and filtering mechanism which allows you to say that Europe has some kind of Monopoly on Progressive politics which you know even if taken to an extreme length can become a justification for colonialism genocide and all the rest of it is say well at least we were bringing this kind of um you know these sort of progressive concepts of democracy um which were completely lacking in all these other places so you know despite the fact that we decimated them ruined their Landscapes and and killed most of the people at least you know we sort of again you're back to Stage Theory at least we moved them on at least we got them out of that that kind of malaise that they were clearly stuck and well no you know one of the things we show in the book is that uh far from it you know there's a huge array of uh conscious political experimentation going on outside European contexts and we have evidence uh for it your area of expertise is West Asia Northeast Africa um although you're very lucid on the Americas and elsewhere you had to research it for this ginormous 700 page book um what I want to talk about is you've got sites like Gobekli Tepe in um Eastern Turkey you've got these incredible megalithic sites in in Malta this might sound a strange question because it's not in the book is it possible that if cities precede agriculture that you have Homo sapiens living alongside archaic humans potentially in urban environments because you know neanderthals were around until relatively recently in Europe do you think is it is it plausible that there were I mean permanent settlements that sort of see them featured together or is that just something we can never even speculate on I wouldn't personally refer to quebecue Tepe which is much later I mean there's no neanderthals around at that point so we're going back about um to about 9000 BC here in um in the Middle East and I wouldn't personally characterize quebeco Tepe as a city I think we're dealing with a a site which is clearly uh permanently settled but where you have periods when people are coming together and aggregating and coordinating their activities in very large numbers okay so I'll rephrase it yeah it's a built environment which is a permanent built environment yeah it's plausible that you had humans operating alongside archaic humans and those in those kinds of places well if we go back let's say a bit further a lot further like 50 000 years ago um we know at that point there are at least four probably five different species of humans around the planet there's us there's the Neanderthals there's the denisovant there's homophoriensis in Indonesia which are the little people sometimes playfully called Hobbits and there's also some more recent discoveries from Luzon island in the Philippines so this is a situation with no modern parallel when you've actually got different varieties of the human species interacting we know genetically that there was interaction of the closest possible kind that was reproduction across those species some of them um so yeah I mean and actually when you go back even further to the origins of our species the picture now looks rather like that so we're going back now to Africa to the African continent where you know there used to be this idea of sort of mitochondrial eve and that there was one ancestral Savannah environment where suddenly we became humans actually the modern uh fossil evidence and genetic evidence suggests that that's wrong and that actually we evolved on the African continent but in multiple different environments between about five hundred thousand two hundred thousand years ago Coastal environments Forest environments and Savannah environments and there were periods of isolation and periods of contact between ancestral human populations which could be very long so you actually get a huge amount of physical variation you see it in the fossil evidence and if you think about physical variation imagine what was going on with language or child rearing habits or social customs so again you know it flies in the face of this very entrenched philosophical habit of trying to reconstruct the original form of human society there wasn't one and just the panoply of experimentation and social forms which is kind of inconceivable to us but actually that's where we that's where we come from yeah we're a product of this um this kind of composite uh composite of different subspecies and different traditions let's talk about pseudo archeology if that's the right word there is such a word pseudo archaeologists pseudo-archeology um and I I feel like particularly with the rise of the internet YouTube it's it's probably increasingly something of an entry point for people who eventually end up in sort of more formal archeology is not the right word archeology proper I suppose they might that might be the Gateway that then sends them to somebody like yourself maybe yeah it could well be why do you think pseudo archeology is increasingly popular why isn't this there's clearly a there's clearly a desire for it in the cultural Zeitgeist well let's be clear what we're talking about because I don't think it's immediately obvious to a lot of people what the difference would be between what you're calling pseudo-archeology and what people like me do and teach for a profession um pseudo-archeology I guess or at least my mental picture of what you're talking about is probably largely written by people who've never actually Taken part in an archaeological field project or you know aren't actually engaged in producing any of the evidence that you and I have been talking about today but who for other reasons um choose to present a reconstruction of the past which is often presented as rather mysterious or even conspiratorial as though people like me you know the reason we devote our adult lives to learning all these skills and teaching archeology is because we want to cover up the truth okay and the truth is actually available to people who don't do that right who may have had entirely different career paths and you know I don't want to come off snobbish you know there's nothing wrong with people speculating and reaching their own conclusions but actually what is often presented as some great new revelation is actually just a very old rehashed obsolete theory that comes out of what was probably mainstream archeology you know sometime in the early 19th century like you know lost city of Atlantis that kind of thing it's nothing new about those ideas and you know as I hope comes across in our book and in our conversation the real evidence is fascinating and it's puzzling and it's challenging on its own terms you don't need to you know come up with Confections and elaborations to make it interesting just try and get to grips with it is already challenging and stimulating enough without you know it's trying to surround it with some fabricated area of mystery it's always the way with conspiracy theories because you you talk to somebody and they'll say oh this person is controlling this and it's this secret cabal of these people and look there's a great deal of exploitation um in the world and yes the powerful regular system and in extraordinary ways which actually we can discern and understand you don't need to you don't need to be talking about the Bilderberg Group or I I God knows what no but you know it's really important and I do get a little bit irritated sometimes with colleagues of mine and the way that they respond to what you've called pseudo archeology um which is to say um you know we're the scientists we know best and um if you believe any of that stuff you're just a lunatic well I think I think that's um you know it's obviously true in a sense but you have to look also at the history of our own disciplines um which again as we've been talking about are very strange in the way that they will deny humanity and Consciousness to whole populations and whole groups of people you know when when Europeans first saw those monuments at places like Cahokia they couldn't fathom you know the idea that native people would have constructed these things they came up with all kinds of wacky theories about Leif Eric's or you know Vikings coming over or you know whatever it may be lost tribes of the Israelites and those sort of ideas were coming out of what was then mainstream European scholarship you know in Egypt where I've done a lot of work on the the origins of ancient Egyptian civilization the period before all of that you know the pyramids and mummification all the famous stuff is what archaeologists call the pre-dynastic I mean it's almost if you don't want people to be interested if you go to a conference on the pre-dynastic they'll be talking about like you know we measure this kind of pottery and it's slightly different from that kind of pottery and you know it's all a huge turn off for anyone who's trying to figure out what's actually going on um and if you go even deeper you know where I work at UCL where you studied you have the Petrie Petri Museum if you ever stuck your head in there wonderful place which is now very openly engaged in looking at its own history and Flinders Petrie the archaeologist who it's named after was a eugenicist he believed that non-europeans were intellectually inferior and he was very into this whole business of phrenology you know measuring people's skulls and that sort of thing and he actually had a theory in the late 19th century that ancient Egyptian civilization could not have been created by Africans and that there had been an invasion of what he called the new race okay so we're talking about theories which are at least as wacky as the kind of stuff that you'll see on Netflix now but they're coming from within our disciplines and it's easy frankly to you know empirically refute those kinds of theories about some lost race of people from Atlantis or whatever but I think that's only half the battle we also have to introspect a bit and ask the more difficult questions about how how did those spaces open up in the first place in which that kind of theory is able to gain traction and I I do think a lot of that does have to do basically with racism and the idea that people long ago on different continents could possibly have been as intelligent and creative as us albeit in different ways you know if you have a mental block with that I think you have to ask yourself why but there are more ambiguous examples of this aren't there so you know there's there's people out there who say that the Sphinx is significantly older than the pyramids it's still constructed by people in Egypt you know not by a sort of race of aliens and that actually we're really wrong and it's thousands of years older than we presently think would you call that a conspiracy theory no it's a completely legitimate line of questioning um it just happens I think not to really lead anywhere terribly interesting I mean there are ways of investigating that sort of thing and you would also have to put it in the context of what we do know about what was going on before the pyramids and the construction of the Sphinx um in the fourth Dynasty which is fascinating in its own rights you know I mean I've been to a place called omelkab which is in the south of Egypt which is where you have the earliest Royal Cemetery what's sometimes called Egypt's first dynasty and it is fascinating and you've actually got a very disturbing phenomenon there that we talk about in the dawn of everything which is the burials of the earliest Egyptian kings and queens these great sort of holes in the ground with all these elaborate staircases and Furnishings completely surrounded by smaller sort of cubicles where other people were buried and I'm talking about hundreds maybe evens of thousands of other people who it is generally thought by archaeologists were ritually killed in order to be buried around the tombs and it's not just people actually one of the earliest Egyptian kings goes by the name which we can read in early hieroglyphs amazingly his name is Aha and it's transcribed into English as aha um and aha's team actually has not only human beings in pits there's also like three Lions buried in it nothing to do with the England football team um and um you know that isn't that fascinating enough you know let's try and get our heads around what's going on there which we do in chapter 10 or something of the dawn of everything let's talk about that that's kind of intriguing you know why does the beginning of what we call the ancient State involves this extraordinary carefully orchestrated violence against people um and you know the Sphinx has no place in that context let's but we can reconstruct something of what was going on and it's perfectly interesting in its own right but I suppose a pseudo-archaeologist respond to you they'd say well this civilization is older than the first dynasty perhaps they could say that it's a It's A Lost Civilization well again we know actually quite a lot about what's going on that's actually one of the things I wrote my PhD about is uh it's the fourth millennium BC so that long period That's referred to as pre-dynastic because if all they were trying to do was build dynasties um we actually know quite a lot about what was going on in those periods and you can go and see it I mean go to a museum go to the the British museum go to the ashmolean museum in Oxford it's fascinating stuff you know they had these beautiful Artistic Styles this is one of the things I wrote about in my PhD actually you know we all get obsessed with The Monuments the Sphinx the pyramids um what you see if you focus on Ordinary People and particularly their burials because we have a lot of evidence for how people were treated in funerary rituals Egypt is incredible in that sense that you can trace the evolution of a ritual it's a funerary ritual you can trace its Evolution over thousands of years we know how people were buried and what you see is kind of fascinating in the build up to the time of the the first dynasties and the first pharaohs and pyramids people lose a lot of the capacity to conduct their own rituals so you start off with a situation where almost anyone can be buried like a prince or a princess with sort of gorgeous elaborate ornamentation and very individualized pottery and beautiful cosmetic articles and with the rise of the of kingship and the pharaonic state people seem to lose a lot of that kind of aesthetic control over their own lives and no longer able to conduct their own rituals which is kind of fascinating you see something similar with the rise of the Inca Empire where we do again have you know Spanish Colonial accounts and descriptions of what's going on where in order to perform an important ritual like a a marriage or a funeral or honor your ancestors you need certain resources you need a bread and beer What's called chicha in order to just perform the ritual and do the right thing but of course not everyone can get their hands on those resources in the same way that in Egyptian funerary rituals at a certain point you have to have bread and beer but to have bread and beer you know you have to have access to Estates where cereals are farmed and you have plow agriculture so people who can't actually look after their families in a cultural sense I'm not talking about biological survival but you know who can't actually complete their uh their necessary social rituals begin falling into debt uh relations of debt um or we'll go we'll have to go to extraordinary lengths and make sacrifices just to be able to do that and that seems to be a big part of what creates hierarchies and systems of dependencies is people either abdicating or somehow losing control um over over their own um yeah their own sort of basic uh basic kind of Life rituals or life cycles what future projects you have lined up I'm involved with various um sort of side projects at the moment I don't find the time right now to do much Research In Depth so I'm actually involved with projects which are not strictly writing projects but just trying to keep myself you know moving on a bit so I'm involved with the new collaboration with a group that you might have heard of called forensic architecture based at Goldsmith's College that's an interesting one because they do mostly human rights work and they use architectural Theory and principles of modeling to go to court over a whole range of different issues from deforestation in the Amazon they did the mark Duggan case in Tottenham extrajudicial killings there's archaeologists Architects Architects architecture forensic arches forensic architecture et al weitzmann his amazing team um so he came to an event a big event in Germany in Berlin about the dawn of everything which was called the civilization questions big three-day event and the the curator of that invited ayal who gave a presentation that just sort of blew me away and when we got back to London he's based here you know we just sort of went out for coffee we had the most incredible conversation of you know his take on the book it's all very much through the lens of what they do and at first I couldn't really see the connection because the scales are obviously radical different but he read our book as a kind of extended case study in forensic architecture in the sense that it's an anti-state narrative where as in some of the cases I've mentioned you know you can't always prove definitively the other version of events like the non-police version or the non-official version but you can just poke enough holes and cast enough doubts on the official narrative so that it starts to wobble doesn't stand up in court in the court of judgment in our case and in the process of making it wobble you open up other possibilities for speculation and I thought well this is intriguing you know it's right I mean what it's describing is a very similar kind of logic to our book so we decided to collaborate on something so we try try and experiment I can't say too much about it right now but I'll be able to say more about it early in the new year and it's going to focus on these incredible archaeological sites in Ukraine in Ukraine you have cities going back as early as the earliest ones that we know of in Mesopotamia in what's now Iraq and parts of Syria so we're going back around 6 000 years ago you have these huge cities that present no evidence of centralization not in political or economic terms and there is a big debate about whether they should or should not be referred to as cities or rather as something else like overgrown Villages or Mega sites you know you get lots of sort of euphemistic terms being used and essentially what it makes you do is reflect on what we mean by a city um and what are the assumptions that are baked into that so we're going to produce a kind of installation Which models these rival accounts and debates doesn't necessarily try to prove one version but which visually kind of immerses you in the questions if that makes sense so that's one project I'm doing I've also been talking I mean one of the things that's really um just been kind of overwhelming about the the response to the dawn of everything is the creative response and I'm not talking particularly about um people writing or you know academic writing or even essays but musicians uh artists filmmakers I was just the other week with a a fantastic uh singer and artist she's based in Paris Yasmin Dubois her stage name is La founder and um she wrote a song called the dawn of everything and she came here to London and performed it you know a few weeks back at the the Festival Hall they had the women life Freedom event for human rights in Iran and she performed it there and I I was very upset actually I was just getting back from Chicago and couldn't quite get through my jet lag to actually physically make it but we met up afterwards and um you know that kind of thing is um it's incredible you know to me and I think it's a huge tribute to David you know to my late co-author uh I think he had that incredible capacity to take some of these rather obscure topics and Concepts and write about them in a way that touch people and made it personal and made them want to engage and and create and in a way I see it all as a kind of extended tribute to him which I've just been a lucky sort of Passenger final question just on David if that's possible um David grayber was your co-author on this book he tweeted in 2020 I believe how he'd finish the manuscript that's right yeah he he put out a um sort of faux Jim Morrison quote Yeah my brain is bruised with numb surprise we finished or something like that yeah and then he passed away a month later yeah about three weeks three weeks after we finished the manuscript so what's it been like to publish a globally best-selling book and it's been it's been translated into multiple languages you've worked on it for a decade alongside somebody yeah and then they're not there to share in the success yeah um well you know you have to kind of I have to sort of pinch myself in two senses there's there's the kind of good pinching yourself the the the the reception is so extraordinary and you know suggested to me recently by someone who's apparently got some figures that were you know getting up to a million copies worldwide which is just can't really get your head around it but then there's also the other kind of pinching yourself which is very painful which is you know just constantly having to accept that David's not around to witness any of it um and he was really looking forward to it I mean this book he couldn't wait to get out there and have these kinds of conversation it should have been the two of us really sitting here having fun with with you shooting the breeze about all the stuff so it's very painful and very paradoxical and the only thing that I can really hold on to in the middle of it all is that he would definitely want me to be out there working hard talking about the book telling people about the book and just trying to get the work across as well as I'm capable of see doing it partly for him as well when you got that extra mile yeah yeah 100 yeah David wengro thanks for joining us my pleasure thank you [Music]