A New History of Humanity                         Apr 2022 Click square for index   A new book by a social historian and an archeologist brings new findings about the way human societies lived before written history after the last ice age 100,000 to 5,000 years ago. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, Penguin Random House Canada appeared in hardback in 2021.   The book argues against theories on the origins of human societies, in particular against a general model for human social evolution such as the scriptural Garden of Eden. The authors use historical reports on meetings between settlers and previously isolated indigenous communities of North America and on the sociology of some present day isolated indigenous communities. Recent new archeological evidence is key to the book’s reinterpretation of social early history. This book is brimming with insights and information. It also has a message. It calls us to use our ‘third freedom’ to recast our social relationships as some human societies did in earlier times. The book will likely call readers to a second reading.   The chapter titles are informative and this summary uses them to shape the book’s volume of information. As the book is large, so is this summary.   Chapter I, Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood:   This chapter serves as an introduction. The book says it is not about inequality, but that social inequality, hierarchy, classes and ruling classes are matters that recur. They do.   Most of homo sapiens’ 200,000-year history is unknown. A lot happened during the time of the cave paintings at Altamira in Northern Spain that cover 10,000 years from 25,000-15,000 BC, but it is unknown. Early history become the model of theology: a Garden of Eden – freedom; a move to a state with farming; then kings, an aristocracy, taxes and wars. This Eden model is behind two more recent theories.   Rousseau, like the Eden model, regards the “state” - 18th century France - as the end of an idyllic freedom for humanity. Hobbs, on the other hand, regards the “state” as post-civil-war 17th century England and as a necessary ruling body to prevent humans from tearing each other apart in warfare. Both models are untrue since “… accounts of history 1. don’t fit the models” and the models have “2. dire political implications” and “the models 3. make the past needlessly dull”. Being a homo sapiens brings a freedom to collectively define social organization in any era. Early history shows that.   Over 30,000 years, the era of the hunter gatherers was not limited to small egalitarian bands, and it was an era of successive bold political forms. There was no one idyllic egalitarian Garden of Eden. Agriculture did not require private property nor inequality. Several of the earliest cities were egalitarian organizations without authoritarian rulers. There is no evidence that small groups will be egalitarian and that large groups cannot be so. Kings are not necessary. Rousseau himself did not claim to have anything more than ‘thoughts’. There is no actual “state of nature” or claim for a sequence of evolutionary stages required for the development of human society. Nor did Hobbs in his book Leviathan lay out stages for an evolutionary model for history.   Pinker, author of recent works on war and conflict, focuses on the origins of the state. He assumes Hobbs got it right. The 1991 find of a 5,000-year-old corpse with an arrow in its back in a glacier in the Alps is given as evidence of a brutish ancient world. Careful burials are not a norm, but there are finds of burials indicating that communities cared for those with debilitating illnesses.  Pinker was “cherry picking” rather than weighing the body of archeological evidence. Cherry picking is also possible when looking at ‘contemporary ancestors’, that is, tribes still living in the supposed ‘state of nature’. A brutish choice is the Yanomami in the Amazon rainforest, well studied by a controversial anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon. Pinker finds that people today are vastly better off than the ancients. He brushes off the colonial side of the Western European democratic movement and assumes nobody would choose to live with tribes rather than in a modern Western State. The authors of this book give evidence otherwise. A woman born in a modern state who then lived as a captive with the Yanomami and was then freed to a modern state, chose to return to live with the Yanomami! A letter was found written by Benjamin Franklin about people preferring to live with the Indians rather than in the US of his day. The present dominant view on early human development is too big a simplification and one that is no longer justified. It makes early human societies a caricature. They were more interesting and diverse and they showed creative human characteristics.   After Adam Smith, trade and markets were supposed to be in-built human characteristics. But there are examples of long-distance exchanges between societies without markets. There was barter, but early regional networks existed simply to allow friendly visits. They were not for trade. There are examples from North America: 17th century dream or vision quests of Iroquois language speakers; travelling healers and entertainers; and women gambling in inter-village games.   The introductory chapter ends saying the book used discussions between the authors as a basis for starting a new history. If arriving at agriculture and cities did not automatically mean hierarchy and domination, what did they mean? Where did concern about inequality come from? The authors found records of encounters between colonists and Native American intellectuals to be more profound than is usually admitted and these highly likely spilled into the evolving European enlightenment.  The authors begin their book telling readers that story.   Chapter 2, Wicked Freedom.   Attaching historical movements to one individual thinker makes little sense. Rousseau wrote on the inequality of man in a society that followed the dictates of an absolute king, Louis XV. From ship travels, the former world backwater, Europe, was discovering the world and new ideas by its links to Africa, Asia and the Americas. Chinese models of statecraft arrived. Indigenous North Americans, confronted by strange foreigners, developed a remarkably consistent critique of those foreigners. That critique was recorded. And Europe was interested in that critique which fuelled the enlightenment movement in Europe.   For centuries, ranks and social hierarchies were givens going back to Eden where Adam ranked higher than Eve! The notions of egalitarianism and “State of Nature” didn’t arrive until the 18th century. The notion was not inconceivable to Europeans because there were folk movements since the Middle Ages where in carnivals the social order was turned upside down for the day. There was a notion of equal before the law that flowed from citizens equal before the Roman emperor or Christians equal before the Lord. Plus, there were ancient Graeco-Roman orders with egalitarianism. But why would humans outside a civilization live in such a state?   North American indigenous “intellectuals” were capable of abstract argument, of learning European languages and of teaching their own languages. Europeans had an appetite for books on travel and missionary work so Jesuit Relations of New France was popular. Such books contained original ideas. Authors routinely said these ideas were from indigenous thinkers, but that could not be believed in Europe. Rousseau was familiar with these ideas and with the strong critical thinking of the American indigenous about French society and institutions, especially their lack of freedom. Such thinking showed readers other social possibilities. Some of the indigenous thinking makes links to European debates that lead to liberty, equality and fraternity.   The Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq found the French quarrelsome, covetous, thieving, deceiving, not sharing or caring for others and resistant to freedom. Friar Sagard lived among the Wendat and reported similar views in a popular book in 1633. At the same time, there is little mention of equality except between the sexes. The indigenous chief had no power over his people beyond that of persuasive discourse. A Wendat could agree with a request from the chief or disagree. This was anathema to the French. The Wendat saw the French as little better than slaves of their superiors. The Wendat justice system did not target individuals. Although murderers got off, observers noted the Wendat justice system worked surprisingly well. Equality arises as an aspect of freedom: indigenous Americans were equally free to obey or disobey orders. Reasoned debate was used mainly among the Iroquoian language speakers; Wendat or Haudenosaunee nations.   Two important actors were Lahontane, a lesser noble in the French army, and Kandiaronk, a strategist of the Wendat Confederancy. Lahontane wrote memoires of his American exploits including his debates with Kandiaronk. The books won a wide audience in the early 18th century. The debates gave a powerful critique of the European social system and of Christianity. It stimulated similar books. Turgot developed a response to the critique: a justification of a degree of inequality as an outcome of evolution in human society to a commercial civilization. Turgot’s evolutionary theory of human civilization was joined by Adam Smith and others.   Between 1703 and 1751 the indigenous critique made an enormous impact on European thought. And that culminated with Rousseau’s essay that melds the indigenous critique with echoes of the biblical fall narrative and anticipates the evolutionary material development. But Rousseau’s exposition of the critique looses Kandiaronk’s belief in the real possibility of doing things differently. The equality in American indigenous freedom contained a baseline communism – the obligation to feed the starving - whereas the European notion of equality was constrained by ownership of property. Rousseau felt that the beginning of private ownership caused the end of liberty. He is considered a key figure in the founding of the “left” which crystallized at the time of the French revolution when the aristocrats sat on the right of the 1789 French National assembly. Rousseau’s combining of the indigenous critique and the doctrine of progress to counter it did establish the project of the left, and the political right has always been suspicious. The idyllic noble savage was never even a myth and the “noble savage” was an abuse by racists in colonial Britain.   The issue is important because the indigenous critique links to social equality and its relevance as an issue in societies such as 17th century France or American indigenous societies. The book questions whether the lack of rulers, bureaucracies, ruling classes represents a lack of imagination in a society or a greater human imagination. Did imperialists rush to adopt a project to “free” societies from their lack of “evolution”? What does it mean to talk of “egalitarian societies” who revere their old people? Some American indigenous societies could be seen as matriarchal in one sense and patriarchal in another. Histories looking at social equality inevitably, like Turgot, look at ‘civilization’ and that triggers an evolutionary model. The book seeks to examine how rulers arrived without an underlying assumption of evolution. Hence the book avoids the origins of inequality, but does hope to find how a few people ended up controlling the fates of almost everyone else.   Chapter 3, Unfreezing the Ice Age.   Over the last 3 million years there was an age when humans and animals were hard to distinguish. Someone somewhere somehow had to light the first fire, cook the first meal and perform the first marriage ceremony. Human “pre-history” began with archeological finds. In 1858 in Brixton, Cornwall, a sealed cave was opened containing stone axes, a cave bear, a woolly rhinoceros and other extinct species. That pre history was 3 million years - many of them with little other evidence found and during which our ancestors used stone tools. Determining DNA in mitochondria, cell components we get from our mothers, points to a common source of homo sapiens, an ‘Eve’, about 120,000 years ago.   The origin of modern humans, homo sapiens, was Africa, but there were many distinct and highly different homo sapiens populations that co-existed with other human species. Today’s human differences around the globe are trivial by comparison. When sapiens spread from Africa, they encountered and interbred with other less different human groups like Neanderthals. The world at the time was vastly different. A world we might recognize goes back to 40,000 years ago. The societies occupied diverse geographic areas from coast to rainforest to savannah. There was no Garden of Eden, no single ‘Eve’ but homo sapiens emerged.   Evidence of human culture only goes back 100,000 years and depends on conditions favouring preservation. Discoveries in Europe in the 1980s and 90s related to the replacement of Neanderthals with Sapiens around 40,000 BCE. Findings include more advanced hunting toolkits, sculpting of images in bone, ivory and clay, cave paintings of animals, more elaborate clothing and body decoration, musical instruments and exchanges of materials over large distances. The rich European finds may relate to the wealth of contemporary European countries, to the interaction of Sapiens with Neanderthals and to the retreating ice sheets over Europe at the time. More recent cave findings in Kenya and the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi go back millennia earlier.   Upper Paleolythic societies of 15,000 – 50 years ago do not fit our preconceived little bands of hunter gatherers. They have princely burials and grand communal buildings. Although humans inherited the dominance or submissive behaviour from apes, humans had a capacity not to act that way. Humans are political animals. Our genetic history may stem from Hobbs’s view, but our political history links to Rousseau’s view. The hunter gatherers produced grand monuments, “princely” burials and other unexpected features of ice age societies and there are forms of social stratification.   Rich burial sites in Europe including two young men with what look to today’s eye royal regalia – hence “princely”. The sites have objects transported from considerable distances. However inherited wealth and social status are unlikely. The princely burials are few and spaced and the usual trappings of power – fortifications, storehouses and palaces – are lacking.     The most famous monumental architecture in Eurasia is the twenty enclosure Gobekli Tepe in southeast Turkey. The enclosures involve 200 T-pillars of rock 16 ft high weighing up to a ton raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture carved with animal images at varying degrees of inlay.  The buildings trace to 9,000 BCE but were modified during the centuries thereafter. The building calls for coordinated activity on a large scale. Human groups not far away had begun crop cultivation, but those who built Gobekli Tepe had not. They harvested wild cereals and plants in season, but were not “proto-farmers”. It is known that hunter gatherers had evolved institutions for major public works and complex social hierarchy before they farmed. The hierarchy and when it operated are not known. There are other monumental stone works going back to the Ice Age such as the “mammoth houses” built around a successful mammoth hunt.   Writers like Harari in Sapiens 2014 admit to little evidence of social arrangements but assume humans are in small groups acting like apes, either the war-like Chimpanzee or laid-back Bonobos. The book says humans, homo sapiens, were political animals from the start citing Boehm’s work. Human conversation is a device that allows the reasoning zone of the brain to keep working for protracted periods – as it does in the dialogues in philosophical works of early history. The 18th and 19th century enlightenment was an expression of a native in-born human political consciousness that humans use to determine their social arrangements.   “Hunter gatherers” didn’t just live in little bands – they gathered to create grand landscape monuments, they created large quantities of stored food, they treated some like royalty – “princely” - and they should not be forced to fit onto some social evolutionary scheme like that of Turcot. No humans are “savages”. Those familiar with indigenous communities are aware their thinking and reasoning is – well – human. It is comparable with people of today who drive tractors, manage restaurants or chair university departments. Indeed, some authors like Paul Radin, who wrote in 1927, felt the indigenous reasoned rather better.   In 1944 Levi-Strauss published an essay about politics of Nambikwara part-time farmers and part time foragers in inhospitable savannah in Brazil. They were viewed as a window on the Paleolithic era. Not so said Levi Strauss. Their ways of organizing gave us wider insights into human politics. Averse to competition they nonetheless appointed chiefs. But the chiefs functioned like a modern European politician to broker two different social and ethical systems in each year. During the rainy season people lived in hilltop villages of several hundred and practiced horticulture. During the rest of the year, they dispersed as small foraging bands. Chiefs acted as heroic leaders of nomadic adventures in the dry season, giving orders and resolving crises in an authoritarian manner. In the wet season, the leader’s personal style attracted followers to a village where the leader used only gentle persuasion and example for the construction of houses and gardens, for attending to the sick and resolving disputes. The society moved back and forth during each year between very different styles of leadership and activity.   In the 1960s studies of African tribal societies categorized the societies studied into a social-evolutionary model. The Levi-Straus findings were by-passed. The societies studied were newly formed, they included refugees from European colonial activity and they were living in places not taken over by colonisation. Such twentieth century groups studied cannot provide a window to the past but they can help with things to look for like seasonal variation of activity or respect for special kinds of people who may have played special political roles. There is some evidence on that front.   A majority of the rich Upper Paleolithic burials show striking physical anomalies. The adolescent boys buried in a princely manner had congenital deformities. The bodies in the Calabrian Romito cave were unusually short. They seem to have been well fed and cared for and they were evidently considered special, but it is very unlikely that a stratified elite emerged in post ice age Europe when the only persons buried were richly buried and were hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs.  These were extraordinary deaths for anomalous people. And they were people in a society evidencing music, sculpture, painting and complex architecture.   Almost all ice age extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that dispersed as foraging bands at one time of the year but gathered in concentrated settlements at another. Upper Paleolithic sites are linked to migration and seasonal hunting of game herds – woolly mammoth, steppe bison or reindeer. An overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labour seems well established at sites from Eastern Europe, French Perigord rock shelters and the Cantabrian coast to Gobekli Tepe.   Use of such sites continued after the invention of agriculture, for example the Neolithic monuments of the Salisbury Plain in England, the last of which was Stonehenge. Interestingly, the people who built it, had adopted Neolithic farming from Europe, then abandoned it. But they kept hold of domestic pigs and cattle and adopted foraging for hazelnuts as staple plant food. The decision to stop cereal farming appears a self-conscious decision. The community gathered for a winter celebration with feasting on livestock, some of which were brought from a considerable distance.   Early 20th century anthropologic studies across groups like Inuit or Canadian West Coast tribes found striking differences in social behaviour with seasonal fluctuations between extremes of authoritarian rule and free family units. Any “soldier” function was intermittent. It seems likely that post ice-age societies lived before recorded history in various forms of flux and change and that there was some kind of conscious use of fluxes to avoid the dangers of authoritarianism. The authors point out that forms of seasonalism remain in our society like the Christian winter holiday season when norms and organization reverse and it is more blessed to give than receive or like the French holiday season July and August when everyone flees the cities into the countryside. Seasonal festivals have a history of ‘play-kings for a day’ which recall the old fluctuations in societies. In medieval times some festivals might lead to some real challenges towards real kings. Now most kings have become the play kings.   The questions are not whether sapiens is brutish and selfish or cooperative and kind. Sapiens is a species capable of negotiating between such alternatives. The puzzle is how and when did sapiens allow permanent intractable systems of inequality to take root.   Chapter 4, Free People, the Origen of Cultures and the Advent of Private Property.   The chapter begins stressing that we could not imagine the extreme social activities of some groups today and are left with our “national holidays”. This chapter examines some. It also looks at how the flexible societies got “stuck” on fixed social patterns where certain individuals or groups were able to claim permanent power over others – these rulers ruled.   Evolution reveals that most people live lives on a smaller scale as populations grew. Somehow particular societies – say Mohawk tribes – emerged. In the Upper Palaeolithic, myths, rituals, musical instruments, carved female figurines and body ornaments were similar across the globe and individuals often travelled very long distances. This is true today for current hunter gatherers in East Africa and Australia. Their larger residential gatherings are a minor fraction of the total population. When they travelled, they could find settlements and kin to stay with over these huge distances. One supposes this could have been the case for earlier hunter gatherers.   For several thousand years after 12,000 BCE different cultures emerged. Some continued to follow mammoth, others settled in coastal areas and others gathered in forests. Different tools emerged with different ways of using grains, cooking vegetables and smoking or otherwise preserving meat and fish in this Mesolithic period. The innovations spread to give a cuisine we would recognize today. Differentiation may have arisen from cuisine preferences and spread to other creations like body ornamentation, but the size of the groups remained big - very much larger than today’s nations.   Very much later one finds a gathering of different “cultures” with different languages assembling along the same river, as in Amazonia. Or the reverse - the spread of imperial colonial languages like English or Han Chinese.  However, the trend was away from huge regions and towards smaller grouping of more parochial populations. The proliferation of separate social and cultural universes seems related to the emergence of more durable and intransigent forms of domination.   An egalitarian society is one whose members feel equal in some agreed important way and that can be achieved in practice. But societies may have different views of important values that form a basis for the sense of equal. Then an outside basis can be imposed like the property arrangements that Rousseau and Adam Smith used leading to a ranking of society by means of subsistence. They supposed that agriculture introduced inequality via the emergence of landed property.   Conventional wisdom supposes that a surplus leads to a group such as a warrior or priestly class living off that surplus. The elites band together and the result builds a state. True, cereal farming and storage made possible Pharaonic Egypt or Han China. But roughly 6,000 years lie between the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of the first states. Ruling classes are simply those who organize society to extract most of the surplus for themselves. Marx imagined using the surplus collectively. However, the only way to maintain an egalitarian society is to eliminate a surplus. Work by anthropologist Woodward on egalitarianism among current hunter gatherers in Africa reveals that everything is shared as it is gathered. There is lack of a surplus or a pending crop. There is awareness of the link between no surplus and egalitarianism. The notion of equality in societies is problematic and a feminist anthropologist favours autonomy rather than equality in a society. Equality in Wendat societies with weak chiefs was really individual liberty. Hierarchical societies can emerge and be largely theatrical. A right to travel is less important than the ability to travel which depends on the social obligation to provide hospitality for a stranger. It is freedom to leave one’s community knowing one would be welcome in faraway lands, the shift between social structures at different times of the year, the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence.   Freedom in our world is a lack of political overlord but a strict chain of command in the area of work and the economy. Work is not the same as property. The sacrifice of the primitive liberties came with the promise of a dazzling increase in overall wealth from the commercial society. The reality was a staggering increase in work hours in the new mills. Human progress came to mean liberation from unnecessary toil. The Victorians argued the awful Dickensian work regimes were improvements on the struggle for existence by European, Chinese or Egyptian peasants.   Sahlin’s 1968 essay The Original Affluent Society challenged the Victorian notion of improving working hours. It was the last speculative prehistory. People were not poorer in earlier ages. It could be said they lived lives of material abundance. This is correct. But the notion that early humans were happy-go-lucky hunter gatherers comes from the particular current tribes assumed to be models. There is a much larger variety of human societies. There are many forms of affluent society and some include hard work. All came before the turn to agriculture. The authors turn from post Ice-Age (or Pleistocene) to the warmer Holocene to examine ancient societies in the Caribbean and Japan.   Poverty Point in Louisiana is a collection of largescale mounds and ridges in concentric circles over a 200-hectare area flanked by enormous mounds. It was the centre of a large sphere of cultural interaction. People and resources came from as far as the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. These people were not farmers nor did they write nor did they trade – they were hunters, fishers, foragers. Thousands gathered at some point in the year to extend complex information across the region which contained smaller sites. The arrangement of mounds and ridges follow the same geometric principles based on equilateral triangles and cords and strings. Research by Clark in 2004 found evidence of a standard measure extending to Mexico and Peru. Similar structures from 2000 BC exist around the Gulf of Mexico and up the Pacific Coast of BC presumably where people gathered at points in the year. In Japan, “Jamon”, another monolithic culture held sway over foragers 14,000-300 BC before rice farming took hold. Documented since the 1960s, cycles of settlement and dispersal took place, monuments of wood and stone went up and were taken down, elaborate rituals flourished and declined, specialized crafts waxed and waned – including pottery, wood and lacquer.  In Europe, post ice-age non-agricultural history includes Finnish “Giant’s Churches” or the “Big Idol” totem pole in the Central Urals. And, of course, there is Stonehenge in the UK.   Most of this evidence has not dispelled the dominant myth of happy simple foragers. Yet there is additional evidence from indigenous activity of landscapes farmed in very different ways – controlled burning, pruning, terracing plots, building clam gardens, creating weirs to fish for salmon and the economic base might have supported priests, kings or armies as in the Kingdom of Calusa, Florida when Europeans arrived. This was not an isolated case of foragers who developed complex forms of land tenure or who worshipped kings.   Another myth is that foragers who settle in territory that lends itself to foraging are unusual. Those living off the land now are living off land nobody else wanted in deserts or the artic circle. That was not the case 10,000 years ago when everyone was a forager and it should be self-evident that they chose places where wild resources were abundant – rivers and coasts – until settlers or colonizers arrived.   Humans did not live like Kalahari bushmen until agriculture arrived. The construction of major earthworks like Poverty Point required organization, a strict regime and enormous amounts of human labour. The form of ownership in these societies is not known but it does appear that all the places involved were in some sense sacred. Ownership is part of the realm of otherness that the sacred occupies.   In otherwise egalitarian pygmy societies, an exception arises for religious objects linked to cult male initiation rites that have exclusive claims to ownership and are hidden in secret places protected by secrecy deception and threat of violence. Ownership can mean excluding its use by others – like owning a car. In some societies, things like hunting knives are shared but the ritual power to ensure luck in the chase was not shared. In other societies ownership in the natural world becomes taking care of. Roman law ownership is the right to use and the right to take benefit from the fruits of say a tree, but also the right to destroy. In some Australian indigenous groups, there are strong cults associated with initiating the passing on of responsibility to look after the tribe’s lands represented by passing on of carved wooden religious symbols and by rituals like circumcision. Here in an egalitarian free society in this context is its opposite: a hierarchy imposing precise controls on others.   Looking back at prehistory one cannot know the forms of property or ownership that existed at Gobekli tepe, Poverty Point or Stonehenge, but these were the kinds of context where exclusive rights over property together with strict demands for unquestioning obedience were likely among otherwise free people. How did this come to order to many aspects of human affairs?   Chapter 5, Many Seasons Ago: Why Canadian foragers kept slaves and their Californian neighbours didn’t; or, the problem with ‘modes of production’.   The world before widespread agriculture was not dominated by roving bands of foragers. In many places there were already ancient sedentary towns or villages as well as monumental sanctuaries and stockpiled wealth from ritual specialists, artisans and architects. These should be considered in their own right and not put into the mould of some theory of evolutionary history and passed over. On the Atlantic coast nearly all indigenous peoples adopted some food crop, those on the Pacific coast rejected them all. In Mesolithic times the post ice-age trend of human groups to differentiate from their neighbours continued in culture and in language.   Using North America, the authors examine the notion that languages naturally drift apart with time and cultures develop within these linguistic groups. However, there are cases where cultural groupings extend to neighbouring groups across linguistic boundaries. The naming of ‘culture areas’ by museums arose because it worked. Artefacts appeared to have much in common among Eastern woodland tribes of North America. The idea also worked for archeological findings among neolithic villages in Central Europe. The idea was extended to ‘areas’ more widely in America. Yet there are great differences between the US Southwest and adjacent Canadian Southwest tribes.   Mauss tackled ‘culture areas’ in essays 1910-30. He argued Mesolithic people were well travelled and aware of other cultures. Ideas could easily be assimilated but there could be conscious refusal to adapt other cultural ideas. For example, tribes could insist on continuing to use their own inferior style of kayak. Societies live by borrowing from each other, but define themselves by a refusal to borrow. Thus, the formation of ‘culture areas’ is a political process. The authors use this analysis with the Pacific coast tribes.   Before the Gold Rush, pacific coastal North America was populated by two culturally distinct groups of tribes. Both areas supported higher populations of hunter gatherers than inland areas with maize beans and squash agriculture. The Californians, especially the Yurok tribe in the North, used a form of money and lived under a series of ethical imperatives: to work; to have property, to have individual responsibility and limited sharing; to live modestly – simple houses, simple meals; to abstain from indulgences – they used sweat lodges; no inherited ranks or titles.   This differed dramatically from the tribes of the Canadian Pacific coast. Here tribes had large coastal villages in Winter with complex ceremonies and smaller groups gathering food inland in Spring and Summer. These included warrior aristocracies engaged in inter-group raiding and capturing slaves. There is an exhibitionism in the exotic carvings of totem poles and the like. They were notorious for shows of excess in ceremonies know as potlatch where excessive gifts were passed out to followers. The society consisted of nobles, commoners and slaves with artisans among the commoners attracted to a particular noble’s village. Nobles enjoyed the prerogative of consulting with spirits and thereby receiving honorary titles. Each of the ‘fisher kings’ might attract 100-200 followers. The book’s authors give greater details of all aspects in their aim to show the ‘puritanical’ Californians were in apposition with the Canadian ‘fisher kings” rather in the manner of Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece. There is a discussion of the role and meaning of slavery in this particular context. There is a discussion of the economic challenges of managing the situation faced by a fisher-king who faced a shortage of labour under command for the times when intense fish harvesting was needed. There is a warning about using slaves. Then a conclusion adds thoughts.   The authors argue against both deterministic and random explanations for the evolution of the various different cultures after the ice age. That would mean human society is already trapped in a particular mould. They argued that it was reasonable to assume that humans had a degree of political self-consciousness and could think of the relative merits of other ways of living with one another when deciding to spend half the year one way and half another. Here they argue that this political self-consciousness also lies behind the intricate web of cultural differences that came to characterise post ice-age human societies. They acknowledge there is no way to know the role of human agency.   The conclusion takes a look at freedom and finds that ‘complexity’ such as coordination of labour or of elaborate ritual need not mean domination or slavery. But domination begins at home, even if slavery finds its beginning in a war. Hierarchy and property may stem from notions of the sacred, yet the most brutal exploitation comes from intimate relations - perversions of nurture, love and caring. Surprisingly, equality and hierarchy tend to emerge together as complements – the Northwest coast commoners are equals and free with an aristocratic chief and slaves. Californians are so distinct in the nature of their wealth – unique items that cannot be inherited - that comparisons among them are difficult and equality does not arise.   Chapter 6, Gardens of Adonis. The revolution that never happened: How Neolithic people avoided agriculture.   Gardens of Adonis were planted in tubs in summer with little chance of fruition because they were associated with a women’s cult. The authors use this symbol to question the usual view that agriculture began as a response to the need for more food for a growing population. The authors turn to the town of Catalhoyuk in Turkey, occupied from 7400 BC to 523 AD, and one of the first large settlements whose inhabitants practiced agriculture. The town lacks a centre and communal buildings and consists of connected houses entered by ladder from the roof. Inside, decoration was skulls and horns of cattle, vivid paintings and covers over the remains of some dead family members. Most of their nutrition came from cereals, pulses, sheep and goats.   The authors note the work of Gimbutas who had supposed the society dominated by a goddess. She supposed an ‘Old Europe’ that lasted until cattle-keeping people migrated around 3,500 BC. Her work was somewhat unfairly discredited by excavations which revealed that the cattle were not domesticated, places supposed to be shrines were reinterpreted as houses for everyday tasks – cooking, eating or crafts, and images of fertile looking women need not be assumed to be goddess figures. However, there was indeed a dominance of female figures, the latest DNA archeological data supports a big migration around 3,500 BC and it is not unreasonable to suppose matriarchy in the sense of women being head of a household.   The female figurines represent mature women who were not objects or worship or dolls but possibly matriarchs of some kind revealing an interest in female elders. There is not equivalent representation of males. Evidence shows parity between males and females in diet and health. Wall decoration reveals scenes of hunting game animals by men and boys. Household organization dominates and there is little evidence of any central authority. Each house provides for its own storage production and consumption. There was routine. Houses seem to have been rebuilt every 100 years or so for 1000 years. New clay walls went where old ones went. Ovens and storage were rebuilt as before. Over time houses seem to acquire cumulative prestige – more hunting trophies, burial platforms and obsidian. However, there is nothing to suggest a different rank nor is there anything to suggest a self-conscious egalitarianism. The more prestigious houses are distributed throughout the settlement. Remarkably, art and ritual make no reference to agriculture yet cereals and livestock were more important for nutrition than wild resources. The cultural life remained tied to hunting and foraging for 1,000 years!   The settlement was built in wetlands seasonally flooded by the Carsamba river. Winters were cold and damp. Summers oppressively hot. Livestock would have been moved away from pens between spring and autumn. Arable crops were likely sown in spring on the receding floodplain of the river. While all tasks took place near the settlement, there was likely some seasonal variation of social arrangements. The settlement was designed for a winter arrangement. Much material equality existed between the houses. But some hierarchy would have developed for rituals linking the living and the dead.   In summer, shepherding and cultivation surely involved a strict division of labour to safeguard the crop and protect the herds. If so, it found little space in the ceremonial life of the household which drew its energy from older sources, more Adonis than the goddess of agriculture, Demeter.   Today it is known that cattle and boar were domesticated 1,000 years earlier further East in Asia in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys known as the Fertile Crescent. Catalhoyuk obtained the basis of that farming economy including domestic cereals, pulses, sheep and goats but not domestic cattle and pigs. The art and ritual suggest the people valued wild boar and wild cattle as prey and for men prestige was involved and a certain kind of society was to be lost in adopting domestic cattle and pigs. These animals remained wild and glamorous until 6,000 BC!   The Fertile Crescent is where farming began, a roughly crescent shaped area of arable lands bounded by deserts and mountains. There are really at least two crescents or ecological areas. Since the last glacial period at around 10,000 BC the areas developed in two directions. The upland crescent runs from foothills north to the border between Syria and Turkey and includes a belt of oak-pistachio forest and game rich prairies with river valleys. The lowland crescent has Pistacia woodlands tracts of arable land with rivers lakes artesian springs beyond which are desert areas. Different changes occurred 10,000-8,000 BC. Both developed a complex mix of settlements, seasonal camps, centres of ritual and ceremonial activity with impressive public buildings. Both also developed some cultivation and livestock management alongside a range of foraging and hunting activities. However, the north took a sharp turn towards hierarchy among settled hunter gatherers shown at the megalithic Gobekli Tepe centre and recently discovered Karahan Tepe centre. In the Euphrates and Jordan lowlands that lack such megalithic centres, things took a different turn.   The lowlanders and uplanders were linked by trading. A trade circuit wound through the Damascus basin and into the Jordan valley contracting as it went. It is known as the “Levantine Corridor”. Obsidian from the Turkish highlands flowed south from uplanders and shells from the Red Sea flowed north from the lowlanders. The lowlanders living along the route were devoted craft specialists and traders. Each hamlet developed its own expertise like bead carving and the industries developed special cult buildings or seasonal lodges pointing to control by guilds or secret societies. By the 9th century larger settlements had developed along the main trade routes. Lowland foragers occupied fertile pockets of land along the drainage of the Jordan valley using trade wealth to support increasingly large settled populations. Sites of impressive scale sprang up such as Jericho and Basta approaching 10 hectares. There were constant opportunities for foragers to exchange products on account of the intimate contrasts and conjectures of the landscape. Exchanges could be foods, medicines, drugs or cosmetics. Farming may have begun as a niche activity.   The founder crops of early agriculture – emmer wheat, einkorn, barley and rye – were developed at different steps along the Levantine Corridor. At higher altitudes in the upland crescent came the earliest evidence for the management of livestock, incorporated into the seasonal rounds of hunting and foraging. Cereal cultivation began as a supplement to economies based on wild resources like nuts and berries. Cereal production brought people together in news ways. It was repetitive work, labour intensive and no doubt infused with symbolic meanings.   Domestication of a crop like wheat under cultivation means genetic mutation of the wheat produces a variety that can no longer reproduce without human aid. Wheat and barley were among the first to be domesticated along with lentils, flax, peas, chick peas and bitter vetch. Since wild varieties still exist, scientists have shown that the key mutation in wheat could take place within 20 – 200 years using simple farming techniques like pulling or cutting with flint sickles then sowing new seed on soil without wild varieties. Such techniques would have been routine for foragers and they would also be used to harvest straw. Straw was used before agriculture began to help light fires, to make baskets, matting or thatch, or to make buildings and storage vessels when added to clay. Domestication of crops could have occurred within one or two human generations, but evidence shows domestication was not complete until some 3,000 years after cultivation began.   Cultivation is hard work. However, the flood retreat farming as was done at Catalhoyuk has nature do the tilling, sifting and refreshing of soil. Flood retreat land is ready for broadcasting seeds. It has an inbuilt resistance to enclosure and measurement of land by boundary stones and so farming such land tends to be a collective activity.  And this type of farming was a feature of neolithic economies in the more arid lowland areas of the Fertile Crescent particularly the Levantine Corridor. Since the densest stands of wild stock tend to be in the upland areas with more rainfall, those living in lowland sites had the opportunity of isolating cultivated from wild stock, selecting in the highlands and broadcasting in the lowlands. So the long time for domestication is the more remarkable. It seems the inhabitants were doing the minimum cultivation to allow them to stay in their given locations – locations chosen on non-agricultural grounds like fishing, trading or foraging.   The authors point out that others often forget women in their accounts of the start of agriculture and the Eden narrative itself casts women in a negative role. In contrast, the harvesting of wild plants and turning them into food medicine or structures like baskets and clothing has been widely viewed as female activity – even if practiced by men. The association of women with plant-based knowledge goes back as far as can be remembered. Such plant-based knowledge is extensive: food development; identifying spices and medicines, pigments and poisons. There are fibre-based crafts and industries: textiles; basketry; matting and cordage. These most likely developed alongside cultivation of edible plants. With such crafts and industries came more abstract mathematical and geometrical knowledge about structure and space - literally entwined in the practice of the crafts. Women’s association with such things goes back to the female figurines of the last ice-age with their woven headgear, string skirts and belts of cord. When scholars note the flowing of Neolithic experimentation and of Neolithic scientists, the fact that women likely played a significant part deserves mention but has been overlooked.   Moreover, Neolithic cultivation is better considered as what it is – biology and gardening - rather than starting from outside notions of agriculture and domestication. There are not fixed fields. They chose garden plots from time to time to encourage the growth of weeds, drugs, herbs and foods side by side.  They exploited alluvial soils on the margins of lakes and springs which shifted from year to year and they worked to cajole the flow of things. And this Neolithic method worked well to foster the incremental growth of settlements and populations for three millennia. Treating this as a transition misses the point rather like not noticing the female figures everywhere misses the role of women. A kind of concrete science went beyond an economy of cultivation spilling into a social revolution involving media, architecture, mathematics, religion and gender roles in the lowland parts of the fertile crescent. Things beyond the megalithic architecture and the Gobekli Tepe structures emphasised the different culture of the upland populations who were also village dwellers who adopted forms of cultivation and herding while deriving the bulk of their diet from non-domesticated sources.       The huge stone pillars upland evoke a different world than the small figurines of the lowlanders and the carved imagery on them are wild and venomous animals, scavengers and predators almost all sexed male and in threatening postures. Repeated images show raptors taking human heads. Heads and headless bodies feature and there are headless burials. The meaning is not known, but archeologists are reluctant to suggest conflict or predation since there is little evidence for war at this time.   A site of prehistoric settlement north of Gobekli Tepe, Cayonu Tepesi, with houses on stone foundations and public buildings has a “house of skulls”, a large building holding the remains of 450 people, including headless corpses and 90 crania. Skulls were left bare and were of young adults or adolescents. With human remains were remains of prey animals. Blood analysis on a stone table suggested it was an altar used for animals and humans. The house of skulls came to an end in a violent conflagration after which the people covered the areas with a deep blanket of stone and pebbles. Perhaps this indicates a shift in hunting from survival to predation and a way of modelling and enacting dominance over other human beings. So far human remains are rare at Gobekli Tepe itself, but 2/3 of the prehistoric human bones found are segments of skull or facial bone.   The chapter ends with a recap. Farming was much less a rupture in human affairs than supposed. Neolithic farming began in southeast Asia as a series of specializations in crop raising and animal herding spread across the region in zones used by groups for hunting and gathering. It was linked to trade or socializing. This farming was tied to broader changes than a new economy. There were new patterns of life and ritual that persist: holding harvest festivals; entering through doors; looking through windows; putting cheese on bread. But there were two interacting models. Upland settlements were associated with grand monuments of stone with symbols of male virility whereas lowland settlements present women in symbols and symbolized by soft modelling with clay or fibres. Both seem to have attached great ritual significance to human heads, but treat them in different ways.   It is noted that the lowlanders developed macabre skull portraits by removing heads from burial and used clay and plaster to fill in for flesh and finished with red and white paint. They appear to be revered heirlooms of ancestors. The tradition of revering skulls appears to go back before the Neolithic era in the coastal regions.   All this negated the traditional account of human development. No switch was thrown to change Palaeolithic foragers into Neolithic farmers. In any case, there was no Eden to switch. And while “agriculture” – or better cultivation of some crops - allowed the possibility of unequal concentrations of wealth, this did not begin to happen until several millennia later. In the Fertile Crescent, if anything it is among those further from agriculture in the uplands that social segregation and violence become more entrenched whereas the lowland settlers who linked rituals to crop production are decidedly more egalitarian.   Chapter 7, The Ecology and Freedom: How Farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed its way around the world.   The Fertile Crescent is the most studied area and it can easily be seen that there is no one cultural consequence of adopting some cultivation and animal husbandry. There was no need to begin social inequalities or to privatize land. Forms of common tenure carried on in lands for centuries later and periodic redistribution of lots was not exceptional. Such arrangements continued across Europe from the Russian mir to the Anglo-Saxon run-rig and from Ireland to India. There is no basis to suppose that cultivation required a change from forager egalitarianism. Moreover, there was not one single centre from which agriculture spread.   Archeology has found 15 to 20 independent sites of crop domestication many of which followed different paths of development in China, Peru, Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia. To these early farming centres must be added the Indian subcontinent, the grasslands of West Africa, New Guinea, South America and the Eastern Woodlands of North America. None made a transition from food cultivation to state foundation. Nor is there reason to suppose that cultivation rapidly spread to neighbouring areas. Cultivation did not appear attractive to foragers and hunters. It's important to remember that itis difficult to talk of the spread of cultivation when in talking of Neolithic times alone one talks of several millennia. Only for the last few centuries can it be said that old world cultivates spread to the Americas and Oceania. “Spreading” of cultivation requires comparable climate, ecology and geography and the interest of human societies may need to undertake major preparatory work like the terracing of hillsides. So, there are questions about how geographical or climatic conditions affect such things. There is also the impact of old-world crops in temperate North America where they flourished to the detriment of the Native ecology creating areas of neo-European ecology.   Since our species arrived some 200,000 years ago there have been only two sustained periods of warm climate that might support an agricultural economy: the Eemian interglacial 130,000 years ago and the present period beginning 12,000 years ago. Homo Sapiens was very restricted in range at the time of the Eemian interglacial. When the Holocene began Sapiens was on all continents and in many different kinds of environment. We are now in the Anthropocene in which human activity has taken over from the Holocene period, possibly beginning with the impact of the European arrival in the Americas, but certainly with the Industrial Revolution by the end of the 19th century.   The Holocene was the Golden Age for foragers and the most vigorous expansion of foraging populations took place in the coastal areas newly released by the retreat of the ice. Scrub and forest replaced open steppe and tundra. Expanding woodlands offered a superabundance of storable foods: nuts, berries, fruits, leaves and fungus. Hunting shifted from seasonal coordination of mass kills to opportunistic and versatile strategies focussed on smaller animals with limited ranges: elk, deer, boar and wild cattle. Famers were cultural underdogs that filled spots left by foragers - spaces too remote, inaccessible or undesirable enough to hold the attention of the hunters, fishers and gatherers. Even then the cultivation results were mixed, with a dramatic failure of an early Neolithic central European farming initiative.   Several villages with similar cultural outlook known as the Linear Pottery tradition were established on the loess plains of Austria and Germany around 5,500 BC. These were among the first farmers, but each ended in a period of turmoil marked by digging and filling of mass graves. The farming community was carried by migrants from the southeast. The settlements suggest a free society. The family unit was in a timber long house. Settlements were surrounded by ditches which yield evidence of warfare - arrows and axe heads. When sites were overrun these ditches became mass graves. After an initial upsurge in population, there was fluctuation then 5,000-4,500 BC something of a regional collapse. It took another 1,000 years before farming took off again.   It seems success in early farming was related to an “ecology of freedom”, that is “play farming” – the direct opposite of being existentially involved with farming like those in Austria and Germany! Moving in and out of farming is something Sapiens has successfully done for a large part of the past – combining gardening, flood retreat farming and small-scale landscape management like terracing or burning or pruning. This could be done sustainably for thousands of years.   Neolithic farming appeared in Africa at about the same time as the Linear Pottery settlements. It began with the same package suite of crops and animals, but the first African farmers opened the package, threw out some contents and repackaged it in distinct ways. Farming began in the Nile valley of Egypt and Sudan – a place previously ignored by foragers. By 3,000 BC the political integration with the Nile delta would produce the first kingdom of ancient Egypt. But the farming began more firmly in Africa and away from the Mediterranean. This economy relied heavily on livestock herding with annual rounds of fishing, hunting and foraging on the Nile floodplain and in the oases and streams (wadis). New forms of personal adornment were developed using cosmetic pigments, beadwork, combs and bangles made of ivory and bone. Before there were pharaohs, almost anyone could hope to be buried adorned like a king or queen!   Another Neolithic expansion took place on islands in Oceania at the other end of Asia in the rice and millet growing cultures of Taiwan and the Philippines and with roots in China. Around 6,000 BC a striking dispersal of farming groups took place ending 5,000 miles to the East in Polynesia. Known as the ‘Lapita horizon’ this expansion called into being deep-ocean out-rigger canoes and is connected to the spread of Austronesian languages. Rice and millet, poorly suited to tropical climates, were dropped and replaced by tubers and fruit crops. Pigs joined the animals together with dogs and chickens - plus some unwanted rats! Animals and plants travelled to previously uninhabited islands including Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Lapita groups avoided forager strongholds like Australia. Lapita groups diversified their crops as they went and left a trail of distinctive pottery and some new materials they encountered – like particularly valued shells.   The seemingly dissimilar neolithic variations in Europe, Africa and Oceania share common features. All these were committed farmers. The Linear Pottery was most deeply into cereals and livestock. The Nile Valley was committed to its herds and the Lapita to its pigs and yams. The species involved were fully domesticated. All of these took farming into lands largely unused by existing populations. The Nile Valley seasonally moved into unsettled steppe-desert avoiding the Nile delta and major oases. The Linear Pottery took root in niches left open by Mesolithic foragers. The Lapita horizon was a relatively closed system with its own patterns. Serious farmers formed hard boundaries. Yet in the lowland tropics of South America a more playful tradition of Holocene food production continued into the twentieth century.   The Nambikwara in Brazil’s Mato Grosso region spent the rainy season in riverside villages clearing gardens and orchards to grow a panoply of crops in a relaxed fashion. With the dry season, these gardens were abandoned and the entire group dispersed into small bands to forage and hunt. The process was repeated the following year in a new location. Such seasonal moves are documented for a range of indigenous groups in Greater Amazonia and are of considerable antiquity. There is also a tradition of making pets of orphaned animals. The pattern of in-and -out agriculture seems to have continued since 500 BC with networks spreading inland along the rivers that allowed trading by canoe. By the Christian era the Amazonian landscape was studded by towns, terraces, monuments and roadways reaching from the highland kingdoms of Peru to the Caribbean. Lively floodplain settlements were described by 16th century Europeans and they are supported by archeology. What made farming of a wide range of crops so productive in doorstep gardens and small forest clearings was the ongoing creation of rich “black earth” and “brown earth”. Such low-level food production has characterized a range of Holocene societies including those in the early Fertile Crescent and Mesoamerica. Domestic forms of squash and maize existed in Mexico from 7000 BC, but only became staples 5,000 years later.   In China, millet farming began on the northern plains on a small scale around 8000 BC as a supplement to foraging and dog-assisted hunting and continued for 3,000 years until cultivated millets were introduced into the Yellow River basin. On the Yangtze River, domesticated rice strains appeared 15 centuries after the cultivation of wild rice in paddy fields. In China, long after their domestication, pigs came second to boar and deer in dietary significance. So Holocene developments in old and new world are similar in overall pace of change.   In summary, farming started as an economy of deprivation – when nothing else could be done. Since the famers built baked mud houses they are more visible to archeologists. Seasonal monuments indicate that things were going on among the hunter gatherers. The largest communities of them were around lakes and coasts in southern Mesopotamia and the lower Nile.   Chapter 8, Imaginary Cities: Eurasia’s first urbanites – in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, Ukraine and China – and how they built cities without kings   Humans think of relationships with humans they know – family, friends, neighbourhoods – differently from states they belong to or a big city they live in. These latter have always been abstract and imaginary. In practice one may only know the tiniest part of a city one claims to belong to. To think of early cities is to think of ancient Egypt, states, kings, pyramids. Surprisingly, recent evidence shows that in some regions cities governed themselves without temples and palaces - they could emerge later. In some cities temples and palaces never came. In many cities there is no evidence of a class of administrators or any sort of ruling stratum. In others, centralized power seems to appear and then disappear. Urban life does not seem to require any particular form of political organization.   There is a rethinking of the “common sense” and conventional wisdom about “scale” in the associations of groups of people – pair-bonded family; bands of 5 or 6 related families; clans or residential groups of around 150 for ritual or special hunting occasions; then tribes - larger groups without trusting relationships. Off the top it is noted that people don’t necessarily like their families! Hadza in Tanzania and Mardu in Australia, modern hunter gatherers, have residential groups that are not made up of biological kin at all. It seems anyone recognized as Mardu can join any Mardu band. And kinship seems to be a metaphor for social attachments – like saying all men are brothers when we talk about internationalism. The metaphor existed over enormous distances – like the Turtle or Bear clans in North America. Humans tend to live simultaneously with the 150 odd people they know personally and inside imagined structures shared by millions of other humans. Modern foragers are no different from modern city dwellers or ancient hunter-gatherers. Scale, in the sense of absolute population size, makes no difference. Mass society lives in the mind before it becomes physical reality and, importantly, after it becomes physical reality. Living in an ancient city would not seem very different from being part of a tribe that extended over hundreds of miles.   For most of human history the typical geographical range most humans were operating in has been shrinking. Neolithic and Mesolithic culture zones covered more ground than contemporary ethno-linguistic groups. Cities were part of the contraction since urbanites could spend their entire lives within a small radius. Settlements inhabited by tens of thousands of people began in isolation on almost every continent 6000 years ago. Then they multiplied. The diversity is surprising. It’s not just that some show no signs of class divisions, wealth monopolies or hierarchies of administration. They exhibit extreme variety - as if they are all experimenting with urban form. Surprisingly few show signs of authoritarian rule. Initially, they showed little sign of living off serfs working in the hinterland but rather used small scale gardening and animal-keeping and drew from the resources of rivers and seas and some hunting and some collecting of seasonal foods.   Cities defined a new phase in world history that has parts that seem so familiar and parts so alien. There are grand self-conscious statements of civic unity, built spaces in harmonious patterns reflecting planning on a municipal scale. Where there was writing, large groups refer to themselves as ‘people’ of the city, united in devotion to the founding ancestors, gods or heroes, infrastructure and ritual calendar with occasions for popular festivity. People in cities came from far away. Fourth century Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico had people from the Gulf Coast and from the Yucatan. Ancient cities divided themselves into quarters marked by gates, walls or ditches - not too different from modern counterparts. Yet there was no technology like metallurgy, intensive agriculture, administrative records or a wheel. Before the Europeans arrived, the Americas lacked metal tools and lacked horses, donkeys, camels or oxen and wheels. Everything was by boat or on foot. Yet cities like Teotihuacan dwarfed the early cities in China or Mesopotamia. The cities of Mesoamerica had the largest populations but they lacked a state and a bureaucracy. There is no single reason why they attracted huge populations, but a series of earthquakes and other natural disasters seem to have driven people from their homelands so that they then settled in Teotihuacan.   It is worth noting that in parts of Eurasia and a few parts of the Americas the appearance of cities followed two changes in the environment. First, at the beginning of the Holocene the world’s great rivers were wild and unpredictable. Then around 7000 BC flood regimes became more settled creating wide fertile floodplains along the Yellow River, the Indus, Tigris and other rivers. Secondly, in the Middle Holocene the melting of polar glaciers slowed enough to stabilize sea levels. The combination of the two effects allowed the great fan-like deltas of today at the head of the Mississippi, the Nile or the Euphrates. Such environments were major attractions for human populations.   Neolithic farmers with their crops and livestock were attracted. This was like areas where Neolithic farming began but better because a marsh oceanside acted as a buffer with extra resources of reed and wildlife as insurance to farming. Plus, there were rich alluvial soils inland. This encouraged specialized farming in Eurasia using animal drawn ploughs, adopted in Egypt in 3000 BC, and the breeding of sheep for wool. Extensive outcomes may have been a consequence of urbanization rather than a cause. Choices of crops were less about subsistence than the industries: textile production and urban cuisine like alcoholic drinks, leavened bread and dairy products. Hunters and foragers, fishers and fowlers were as important as farmers and shepherds.   Floodplains and marshlands have not helped the archeology of early cities. They can be under deposits of silt or may have been built over more than once.  In China settlements of 300 hectares or more emerged recently on the lower reaches of the Yellow River, like Yaowangcheng. These go back to 2,500 BC – over 1000 years before the earliest royal dynasties on the plains of central China. Ceremonial centres of great magnitude were recently uncovered that developed in Peru in the Rio Supe valley, notably at Caral. Here plazas and platforms 4000 years older than the Inca Empire were uncovered.   The book turns to some actual early cities, beginning with those in Ukraine. For places around the Black Sea there are ancient tales of warrior kings, aristocratic tribes and lavish tombs full of treasure – gold. There are also cities. Mega cities older and bigger than before were found in the 1970s in Ukraine and Moldova. They date from the fourth millennium BC. Taljanky is an example. They are all huge but show no signs of centralized government, administration, ruling class or communal storage. Hence, they are called “simple” in the inadequate professional scheme of civic evolution. The reason for huge cities in this area is the extremely rich “black earth” in a region of prairies and woodland that is capable of supporting a large population. Moreover, earlier Neolithic villages in the area were previously loosely linked in an extended community and it appears these populated the huge cities.   Taljanky, the biggest, covers 300 hectares. There are no government buildings, fortifications or buildings of monumental architecture. There are some 1000 houses 16 ft wide and twice as long made of wattle and daub on stone foundations arranged in concentric circles with an empty central area. There is a central pathway and signs of different areas. It is surprising that these huge settlements of some 10,000 people each are located quite close to each other – 6 to 9 miles apart. They would be expected to have drawn from a common hinterland, but their ecological footprint is light. The belief is they were neither permanently inhabited nor strictly seasonal, hovering in between. It is possible the inhabitants consciously avoided large scale de-forestation. Archeology suggests small scale gardening in the settlement, keeping livestock, cultivating orchards and a wide spectrum of hunting and foraging. The diversity and sustainability of the diet is remarkable. Salt was imported in bulk, flint was extracted by the ton, copper arrived from the Balkans and there was a household pottery industry. Details are not known, but a surplus was produced and over the eight centuries, there is no evidence of warfare.   The appearance of uniformity gives way to variations in detail – some houses closer, some closer to being in a circle. Their pottery expresses a particular aesthetic for a particular house. And there are indications that women played a prominent role. Each area had access to a larger house – an assembly house? Archeologists reason that community organization was bottom up. The authors turn to modern French Basque communities in SW France to gain ideas about how communities organized in a circle might function. But much remains unknown. Then in the middle of the fourth millennium BC, the cities were abandoned with no clues as to why.   Mesopotamia means land between two rivers – floodplains cross the otherwise arid landscape of southern Iraq turning to marshland near the head of the Persian Gulf. Urban life here goes back to 3500 BC. In the more northerly lands between the Tigris and Euphrates where the rivers cross rain-fed plains cities may go back beyond 4000 BC. Mesopotamia was known by biblical references – Babylonia, Assyria, Nineveh. And early archeologists did find evidence of these and more: a law code Hammurabi, ruler of Babylon in eighteenth century BC; clay tablets with copies of Epic of Gilgamesh fabled ruler of Uruk; the Royal Tombs of kings and queens of Ur in southern Iraq. The oldest remains were of Sumerians who used a language unrelated to the common source of Hebrew and Arabic. A surprising find of early archeology in the 1920s associated Mesopotamia with empire and kings. Current archeology shows Mesopotamia was not always a land of kings.   Cities in Mesopotamia from the fourth and early third millennia BC have no clear evidence of monarchy in marked contrast from 500 years later (~2800 BC) when evidence appears in many places: palaces; aristocratic burials; city defence walls; and militia. Cities and civic life began before this. So, the corvee, or obligatory labour on civic projects, predates rulers. In one way or another every free citizen did them and they appear to have been undertaken in a cheerful spirit - even in monarchic times. They came with rewards of bread and beer, dates cheese and meat. They could become times of carnival when the city spun off its axis and distinctions between citizens dissolved. Plus, there could be lasting benefits like debt cancellation. There seem to have been other institutions that began at this early time so that rulers were accountable to town councils, neighbourhood wards and assemblies. The sons and daughters of a city could be heard on matters from taxation to foreign policy.   Although named aspects of “primitive democracy”, popular councils and citizen assembles were stable part of government and they spread beyond Mesopotamian cities and their colonial offshoots to neighbouring peoples. True, it is not always clear how they worked and whether they were truly democratic or oligarchic. Between 7th and 9th centuries BC loyal citizens were respected even under Assyrian emperors like Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal because governors stationed far from court in major southern towns like Babylon, Uruk, Ur sent letters with information about decisions of civic councils. We learn ‘the will of the people’ from letters recovered from excavation of royal archives at Nineveh. But it’s not clear how government worked in practice.   Sometimes an authoritarian ruler could send urban life into reverse. The Amorite Dynasty of Lims made Mari (now Tell Hariri) centre of operations and occupied government buildings at its heart. The population left for smaller townships or tent dwelling herders. Before Hammurabi of Babylon sacked Mari in 1761 BC the last city of the Amorite kings was little more than the royal residence, Harem, attached temples and a few other buildings. It appears Mesopotamian cities did not need rulers to manage urban life. The authors turn to Uruk (now Warka) for different insights that influenced earlier opinions.   The Uruk of 3300 BC had a population 20,000 to 50,000 and covered 200 hectares. It dwarfed neighbouring cities. Cuniform script likely originated here as was the development of numerical tables and administrative notation mainly for bookkeeping in the city temples. Unlike the Ukrainian cities, Uruk comprised of many monumental central buildings with little known of the residential area. The public district Eanna (House of God) stood in a high acropolis dedicated to the Goddess Inanna. At the summit were nine buildings on foundations of imported limestone. Roofs must have been from exotic timbers. The public buildings were great assembly halls modelled on houses but built as houses for gods. There was a Great Court with an enormous sunken plaza 165ft across surrounded by two tiers of benches and equipped with water channels to feed trees and gardens that offered shade for open air gatherings. This is consistent with Uruk governed by popular assembly.   Then things changed. Around 3200 BC the original buildings were razed and covered with debris. The landscape was redesigned around gated courts and ziggurats. By 2900 BC local kings of rival city states were battling for supremacy of Uruk and a 5 ½ mile fortification wall went around the perimeter. Within a few centuries, city rulers were neighbours of the goddesses and gods - building their own palatial houses next to the House of Heaven. Evidence of royal rule is unmistakable when it appears.   Uruk’s fame comes from writing and innovating training programs for scribes – training that still forms the basis of classes for children learning write. The houses for gods were more like factories than churches. In addition to training programs, they also innovated workloads and units of time (base-60) that are still in use. It’s not clear who the workers were but on the Sumerian model they were likely the city’s needy – widows, orphans and others vulnerable by debt, crime, conflict or disability who found the temple a place of refuge and support. The cuneiform accounts reveal large scale dairy and wool production, manufacture of leavened bread, beer, wine - including facilities for standard packaging. There were many varieties of fish along with oil and food products stored in temple repositories. This work was unlike the maintenance of irrigation dykes. It was work under central administrative control. No doubt the gods were given an illustrious residence and their cults were looked after. Surprisingly, it has been found that Uruk had ‘colonies’, small trading outposts and religious centres along trading routes as far as the Taurus mountains and the Iranian Zagros.   The Arslantepe site in the Malatya Plain of eastern Turkey tells another story. As Uruk was becoming a large city, Arslantepe grew to be a significant regional center. It likely began as a seasonal trade fair and never became a large settlement. Around 3300 BC a temple was built on the site resembling that at Uruk with archives for administrative seals and storage areas for food. Within a few generations, this was dismantled and replaced with a massive private structure enclosing an audience chamber and living quarters including an armoury with swords and spearheads – a celebration of the means to enact violence. Excavators labelled the building “the earliest known palace”. From 3100 BC across the hilly country of eastern Turkey is evidence of a warrior aristocracy living in hill forts or small palaces. For the first time there are tombs of men considered heroic individuals. There are cemeteries full of tombs with food, drink, jewelry, magnificent heirlooms that reveal a spirit of extravagance for these living on the frontiers of urban life. Here is the beginning of aristocratic ethos on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities.   Archeologists have recently discovered that there is a pattern of heroic burials and an emerging cultural emphasis on feasting, drinking and the beauty and fame of the individual warrior. It appears time and again on the fringes of urban life in similar forms over the Eurasian Bronze Age. There was no single centre, just competing heroic figures. Such groups resisted some of the features of urban society such as writing, internal commerce and currency or credit, preferring unique material treasures.   Later than Uruk, on the banks of the Indus River in what is now the Pakistani province of Sindh in 2600 BC, the city of Mohejo-daro was founded on virgin soil and remained for 700 years. It is the best expression of a new form of society known as the ‘Indus’ or ‘Harappan’ civilisation – South Asia’s first urban culture. It is also the best-preserved bronze age city. Brick built houses of the Lower Town make up most of the city with a grid arrangement of streets, boulevards and sophisticated drainage and sanitation, terracotta sewage pipes, private and public toilets. Above this is the Upper Citadel, a raised civic centre which contains the Great Bath – a large sunken pool, brick lined, sealed, and entered by steps with timber treads along its sides. All the city stood on massive foundations of heaped earth lifting it over the flood plain. The Upper Citadel was encased all round in a wall of baked bricks made to standard dimensions. The Indus civilization had its own script, now vanished with the cities, but remaining in short captions on things like amulets, storage jars and tools. Sadly, the early 20th century archeologists did not distinguish the evolutions of the city.   More recent Archeology finds no concentration of wealth in the Upper Citadel. Rather, metals and gemstones were widely distributed in the Lower Town as were standard weights and measures and evidence of craft occupations and industries. The Upper Citadel is defined by its civic buildings. There are no monuments to rulers. There are no signs of personal aggrandisement. The authors suggest it was the Bath itself and bathing that became the focus of social life and labour. They question whether this was the locus of some special pure or priestly caste. That is speculation, but even if true, allows the possibility of public assembly policy making. The caste system arrived much later and included a warrior caste as second in status. There is a tendency to default away from egalitarian society and democracy, but the authors add that in the time of the Buddha, 5th century BC, there were public assemblies that the Buddha used as a model for his monks. The book goes on to give other examples of caste and kingdoms that nonetheless have consensual public decision making.   Here the authors take stock. The Ukrainian settlements had governing public assemblies with an egalitarianism that saw individuality in cultural items within each household. Mesopotamian cities had standardised measures and bureaucratic controls but were governed by popular assemblies. The Indus civilization likely had an aesthetic priestly group but were otherwise governed by popular assemblies and had at least standard brick sizing. Like Ukrainian cities, those on the Indus were replaced by a series of smaller societies where heroic aristocrats held sway. In Mesopotamian cities, palaces eventually appeared. In China, the traditional view was that history began with the Shang royal dynasty in 1200 BC. Today archeologists in China talk of the Late Neolithic – a period marked by cities.   By 2,600 BC in China there is a spread of settlements surrounded by rammed earth walls across the Yellow River valley from coastal Shandong to the mountains of southern Shanxi ranging in size from 300 hectares to tiny principalities or fortified villages. The main demographic hubs are far away. Many larger Neolithic cities have cemeteries where individual burials contain tens or even hundreds of carved ritual jades. This represents a big change in presumed history in space as well as date. Neolithic leaps to urban life are found in the far north – the Mongolian border. This area was presumed barbaric by historians describing later empires!   Excavations at Shimao on the Tuwei River have revealed a 4,000-year-old city of over 400 hectares with a great stone wall enclosing palaces and a step-pyramid lording it over a rural hinterland 1,000 years before the Shang. There were sophisticated crafts such as bone work and bronze casting as well as warfare with the mass killing and burial of captives. At Taosi, contemporary of Shimao, there were 3 expansions between 2300 and 1800 BC ending as a city of 300 hectares. Taosi gives signs of social stratification with rigid separation of commoner and elite quarters in a city of massive enclosure walls, road systems and big protected storage areas. In 2000 BC everything changed and the excavator found the city wall razed flat. There was evidence of loss of elite areas. The authors re-interpret the evidence as revealing a change to a period of widespread prosperity following the end of a ridged class system. Perhaps this was the first social revolution in an urban setting.   Chapter 9, Hiding in Plain Sight: The indigenous origins of social housing and democracy in the Americas.   Around 1150 AD the Mexica people migrated into the Velley of Mexico and eventually created an empire, Aztec Triple Alliance, with capital at Tenochtitlan, an island city in Lake Texcoco. They modelled their capital on a ruined and abandoned city Teotihuacan, ‘Place of the Gods’. Teotihuacan was big, alien and alluring and the Mexica surrounded it with myths and named its features. Archeology shows it was founded ~100 BC and declined ~600 AD with a population ~100,000 and ~1 million in the surrounding Valley. The evidence points to a city that found a way to govern itself without overlords.   In the wider region, are a set of dynastic polities in the Yucatan Peninsula - far from the Valley of Mexico. Historians describe these polities as Classic Maya (150-900 AD) – a term that also refers to their language. They have royal temples, ball courts, images of war and humiliated captives, complex rituals and biographies of living kings. Indeed, this is viewed as a standard package of kingship that extends more widely in Mexico. But not in Teotihuacan. There, citizens were craft specialists – in monumental stone, small terracotta figures or vivid wall paintings. But of a different kind. Their crafts omit reference to royalty involved in crafts elsewhere. It appears to have been a city set up on egalitarian lines. Moreover, there are signs of ‘republican’ tendencies elsewhere - large scale projects of social welfare and indigenous forms of democracy. The chapter looks at the Maya kings, Teotihuacan and then at an Indigenous city.     In the 5th century AD something remarkable happened in the Maya cities and in the largest, Tikal. Carved scenes on monuments show figures on thrones wearing foreign, Teotihuacan dress and weaponry – distinct from the garb of local rulers. Near the border of Honduras and Guatemala at the base level of a temple at the Copan site, what seem to be actual burials of the stranger kings were unearthed. The temple went through seven further phases of construction. Inscriptions describe some of them coming from the Land of the Cattail Reeds. Was there an invasion from central Mexico? Were these kings really from there. More likely local lords dressed in Teotihuacan dress – dress of an exotic distant place with which people had contact. Teotihuacan deities wore green quetzal feathers from the Mayan lowlands and Maya gods wore obsidian from Teotihuacan. Another possibility is that among travellers were unscrupulous people or groups who claimed status and were assumed to be nobility by the Maya cities. The names and stories of some are known and others are known to have led colourful previous lives.   The book questions what Teotihuacan itself was if not a monarchy and suggests no one answer satisfies its 5-century life as it moved into its present-day form. Its beginning 5-150 AD links to evidence of largescale migration from other villages towns and cities from earthquakes and volcanic activity. Supposedly leaders of these migrating communities together guided the creation of a city on the basis of a parish system with local shrines serving particular neighbourhoods. At this time, 100-200 AD, it must have resembled an enormous shanty town. Maize was widely farmed. Turkeys, dogs, rabbits and hares were kept and eaten. Beans were grown and there was access to deer, peccaries and wild fruits and vegetables. But how things worked is uncertain. The citizens’ efforts for civic identity involved monuments: the sacred city in the wider urban sprawl. This involved two pyramid mountains and artificial rivers from the diversion of the twin rivers. This was the basis for the Pyramid of the moon and sun and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Each phase required human sacrifices and the bodies were laid in a ground plan.   At around 300 AD something changed. The Temple was desecrated and its stores of offerings looted. It was set on fire. Gargoyle-like heads of the Feathered Serpent on the façade were smashed or ground to a stump. A large stepped platform was constructed to the West to hide the remains of the temple from view from the main avenue. There is no further evidence of ritual killing at the Pyramids which remained in use until 550 AD. From 300 AD resources went into provision of excellent stone-built housing not just for wealthy or privileged but for the majority of the 100,000 or so residents. Groups of families lived in single-storey buildings with integral drainage and finely plastered floor and walls. Each nuclear family lived in its own set of rooms within a larger apartment block, with private porticoes to let light into the otherwise windowless rooms. It seemed that this was a form of social housing. Strict uniformity was avoided. The life seemed comfortable with access to imported goods and a good staple diet. However this change happened there is little sign of violence except for the burning of the Temple. It is clear this was not run by a top-down system. More likely there was a system of local assemblies linked to a governing council. The apartment complex walls carried vibrant mural art.   The authors offer no clear reason for the end of Teotihuacan. They speculate on the tensions from the mix of many different groups and kinships and of the flux of people in and out of the city. Without any armed attack, the social fabric was breaking down from within by 550 AD and what had been a great city dispersed as rapidly as it had formed.   The book turns to Tlaxcala, an indigenous republic that defied the Aztec Empire and joined with the Spaniards by a decision that came from democratic deliberations in a parliament. The book challenges the account in Charles Mann’s book 1491 etc… that describes Cortes and the Spanish in 1519 making an alliance with the “four kings” of Tlaxcala – a city that never had kings. Cortes was dealing with a popular urban council whose decisions had to be collectively ratified. The Tlaxcalans were out to settle old scores with the Aztec Triple Alliance. This section of the book is mostly consumed with explaining the strength and significance of its various written resources on the matter. It concludes using archeological evidence on the nature of Tlaxcala with its lack of palaces or ball courts in marked contrast with very different archeological evidence from the Aztec imperial capital. These indigenous citizens were not the imagined “Indians” - a huddled mass in some alternative quasi-mystical universe. These were skilled in oratory, listening and compromise and were involved in a process of sober deliberation over decisions that changed the course of world history.   Chapter 10, Why the State Has No Origin: The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics.   This long chapter assumes that Egypt of the Pharaohs was a ‘state’ and that Babylon was a state until trying to define what a state is. The book gives some definitions of the past century and shows they exclude situations that we would think of as states. So the book suggests we take entities like ancient Egypt and modern Britain which we think are states and explore what things they have in common adding “There is no doubt that, in most of the areas that saw the rise of cities, powerful kingdoms and empires also eventually emerged.” The authors ask what their arrival tells about human freedom and equality or its loss and how they make a break with what went before. The authors then suggest exploring forms of domination – a kind of opposite from forms of freedom: to move; to disobey orders; to reorganize social relations. They remind us of Rousseau’s view that the ownership of property – especially land – was a basic form of domination.   Here the book shows that the ownership of land means the ability to deny its use by others, some understanding to that effect and some instrument of force to ensure it. The book moves to show that information can be power and can apply to forms of ownership. One example is the key to the safe where one’s necklace is protected for one’s personal use alone. The book summarises that: control of violence; control of information; and personal charisma are the forms of domination. The authors then suggest that each is considered an element of a modern state. Although the modern state may be considered democratic, it is far removed from the workings of a public assembly in an ancient state which collaboratively deliberated on common problems. Rather it is a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals with the rest onlookers. In Athens, the aristocracy was presumed to be a collection of the best and election of them was by lottery. In Mesopotamia, the cities with public assemblies were alongside the heroic polities in the hills. At some point such elements came together to produce the modern state.   The authors suggest this coming together might happen in various ways. Conventional wisdom has cities grew to complex societies that required leadership and a state: Administration – Sovereignty – Charismatic Leadership (eventually) Then there is the Mesopotamia model where urban administrative systems seem to inspire a cultural counter-reaction of squabbling highland princedoms and princes who establish in cities:             Administration – Charismatic (by counter-reaction) – Sovereignty There may be charismatic figures who inspires people to follow a new path that eventually gives rise to officers and an administration:             Charismatic vision – Sovereignty – Administration. The authors question whether history has to go this way by turning to some of the early states.   The current consensus is there were two states in the Americas at the time of the Spanish conquest, the Aztec and the Inca. Cortes wrote of cities and kingdoms and occasionally republics – the concept of ‘state’ was not current. Aztec men were raised as warriors but women for other tasks. Although women had important positions as merchants or doctors in the capital Tenochtitlan, they were excluded from the ascendant class of aristocrats that held power from warfare predation and tribute. It was a ‘capturing society’ whose enemies taken in war ended up as human sacrifices. Monarchy, official ranks, military bodies and organized religion were highly developed. Moctezuma was officially the ‘first speaker’ in a council of aristocrats in a ‘Triple Alliance’ of 3 cities – a confederation of noble families.   The Inca, in contrast, was the incarnate sun – Sapa Inca - a unique focus of power. Mountains were the backbone of this super kingdom named Tawatinsuyu with a capital in Cusco, Peru. It comprised 4 administrative units. From Cusco, Inca of royal blood collected a rotating labour tribute or corvee from millions of subjects over the 2,500 miles from Quito to Santiago. Bodies of dead kings were mummified and were produced for some public events. Important officials became honorary Inca but the Sapa Inca was needed for important matters. The Sapa Inca moved continuously through the 4 quarters over well-developed mountain road systems provided with way stations stocked and staffed by royal coffers. Accounts were kept on a knotted string system, quipu.   The focus of power in individuals and capitals made the Aztec and Inca territories easy to conquer. The Spanish replaced the points of power and then ran the system that had been provided. This approach was difficult with the Maya people in the Yucatan Peninsula, the highlands of Guatemala and in Chiapas. The Maya had been organized into kingdoms in the Classic Maya period 150 – 900 AD.  Cities had once existed and ruins can be visited.  Archeologists argue still about what happened. But after the Classic period Mayan societies became decentralized into a variety of townships and principalities, many without kings. The Spanish faced on-going rebellions from many.   The book makes a diversion to point out the tendency to suppose that civilizations grow and bloom and decay like flowers. Kroeber’s research around 1940 found no consistent connections between blossoming of arts or other periods of creativity and the rise and fall of empires. The term ‘collapse’ is often used – and it may work for the Maya kingdoms. But the supposed collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt amounted to a swift fall in the power of the elites ruling it from Memphis. The term ‘Post Classical’ is used for Maya history 900-1520 AD as if the only thing to be said is the waning of a Golden Age. Some periods are preludes to ‘real history’; some are postludes. Museum goers will find ancient Egyptian history is in Old, Middle and New Kingdom, each with an ‘intermediate’ period. These labels only appeared in the late 19th century. Significant political innovations can be overlooked on account of being cast into an intermediate period. The elegance of Middle Kingdom literature and the proliferation of Osiris cults likely offered little solace to the thousands of military conscripts, forced labourers and persecuted minorities of that time, whose grandparents had lived peaceably in the preceding ‘dark ages’. Space is treated like time in history. The last 5,000 years is a checker board of cities empires and kingdoms whereas most people lived in territories described as things like ‘tribal confederacies’ to avoid those fixed overarching systems of authority. A radical history would retell it from the perspective of the time and space in between. The authors pull back from that. Instead, around the usual points where the birth of a state is typically marked, they look for how different kinds of power crystallize out of the mix of violence, knowledge and charisma. They turn to the Olmec case.   The Olmec were a ‘cultural style’ in Guatemala, Honduras and Southern Mexico from 1500 – 1000 BC identified by kinds of pottery, human figurines, and stone sculpture. They are the base culture of the region bringing a calendar, glyphic writing and even ball games. There is no reason to assume they were ethnically or politically unified but there is archeological evidence of a homeland around Veracruz, Mexico. Their cities are poorly understood, but consist of sprawling suburbs spreading out around a ceremonial centre marked by pyramid mounds.   There were elites who drew on skill and labour at certain times of the year. Links of the centre with the hinterland were slight – the collapse of the city of San Lorenzo had little economic impact. Their signature achievement was the creation of individual colossal sculptured heads carved from basalt. Details of the ball games are uncertain, but competitive games are likely linked to the rise of the Olmec aristocracy and preceded a major role for ball games in Maya and Aztec periods. The games were grand fleeting spectacles during which ‘theatre states’ have been said to exist.   In South America, a series of other societies existed before the Inca within the area they came to control. From 600 AD many used knotted strings for record keeping. As far back as 3 centuries BC monumental centres existed in the Rio Supe region, but between 1000 – 200 BC Chavin de Huantar in the highlands of northern Peru influenced a wider area and gave way to 3 regional cultures: the militarized Wari; a metropolis Tiwanaku on the shores of Lake Titicaca using raised fields for crops on the Bolivian altiplano; the Moche culture on the shores of northern Peru with its archeological evidence of female leadership involving warrior-priestesses. Influence seems to have involved cultural images – ceramic vessels, items of personal adornment – rather than the spread of administrative, military or commercial institutions.   As for Chavin de Huantar itself, it has sophisticated stone cut architecture, much monumental sculpture and Chavin motifs on pottery, jewelry and textiles over a wide area. Yet it was not the base for an empire or state. That would have bold simple unifying images. Here the art is highly complex and not for the uninitiated. Rather the art appears to have been a form of aid-memoire for those remembering. It appears the images were of shamanic journeys. There is evidence of use of hallucinogens and thoughts that this was a place of pilgrimage for visions and oracles. Chavin is a remote precursor of the Incas and if it had power as a kind of empire, it was an empire built on images linked to esoteric knowledge – clearly nothing like the places that are usually thought of as empires. The power of Chavin was control over certain kinds of knowledge. There is no evidence of military power. Neither is there evidence of charismatic power tied to any kind of sovereignty.   The authors explore sovereignty without a state, turning to eighteenth century French accounts of the Natchez of southern Louisiana, who called themselves ‘People of the Sun’. This was the only divine kingship north of the Rio Grande. The ruler had absolute power of command, but they had a minimal bureaucracy and no competitive political field. This arrangement would not be called a ‘state’. Religious practices were at the Great Village, two large earthen platforms: one a temple; the other a kind of palace – house of the ruler ‘the Great Sun’ but big enough for 4,000 people. The king, brother and eldest sister were treated as if worshiped and the king rarely left the Great Village. The king had absolute power, could execute, could take all people owned. As a consequence the great village had few cabins and many villages were formed some distance away. There, Natchez lived differently, often showing disregard for the wishes of the rulers. These people had the freedom to move. As well, they had some freedom to ignore orders.   Such situations recur in history. Kings who are gods cannot be judged as humans and do not follow human law - yet are expected to give laws like the Great Sun. Such power is hard to delegate to have affect at a distance from the king – and it was for Louis IV. Even non-gods like Frederick the Great had problems getting orders passed along the line to take effect. There is an unfortunate tendency for people to see the person who successfully carries out arbitrary violence as having some kind of transcendental power. The person gets tokens of respect but on earth they tend to attract restrictions and can end up virtually imprisoned in their palaces.   Like the Natchez, the Shilluk in South Sudan in the early 20th century had a king, the reth, who resided in an isolated capital conducting rituals for the gods. The reth had henchmen that could take action if the reth’s decision on a dispute was defied. An offending village could be raided and cattle and goods carried off. Yet in everyday affairs the Shilluk maintained a fiercely independent attitude, an aversion to taking orders and resistance to attempts at any administrative apparatus such as collecting tribute from defeated peoples. Unlike the Shilluk reth, Chavin and Olmec elites could mobilize large amounts of labour or corvee. But it is not certain if this was via a chain of command. The authors recall that in ancient Mesopotamia corvee or labour service could be a festive public-spirited occasion. They note that in ancient Egypt the most authoritarian regimes managed to continue something of the same spirit for the corvee.   Having shown that under simple regimes people could remain free to move and free to ignore orders, the authors finally question whether basic regimes allow a freedom to shift and renegotiate social relations either seasonally or permanently. (At certain times of the year for the makers of Stonehenge the entire social apparatus of authority would disappear.) For that, the authors turn to ancient Egypt – generally regarded as a state.   The First Dynasty Egyptian kings from around 3000 BC were buried with many dozens of human victims killed for the occasion. This practice was widespread, especially to mark the founding of a new empire, then the practice faded away. The Shang on the central Chinese Plain used it to kill war captives from rival lineages effectively denying rivals the possibility of becoming ancestors of a dynasty and living members of lineage the possibility of taking part in care and feeding of their own dead kin. Egypt is different. True, the first kings and one queen were buried with victims, but archeological evidence near ancient Abydos has victims only from their own inner circles around each royal tomb. On one hand, this seems to have demonstrated the caregivers loving concern to continue offering loyal service in the king’s afterlife. On the other, it demonstrates that for the ruler these were mere owned objects to be disposed of like blankets or gaming boards. The mix of relatives and servants makes some kind of levelling in the death. Indeed, when sovereignty becomes an organizing principle of society, violence is turned into kinship – the servants are imagined members of the household – all working to care for the king. The extreme forms of ritual killing ended with the Second Dynasty but the notion of the wider family of caring, the authors’ ‘patrimonial polity’ continued reshaping the lives of internal subjects. Within a few generations, the Nile valley and delta divided into royal estates each dedicated to provisioning the mortuary cults of different former rulers. Not long after came ‘workers towns’ devoted to the construction of the Giza pyramids drawing corvee labour from up and down the country. Here is some sort of state. It seems ‘state formation’ began with some kind of Natchez individual sovereignty  bursting out of its ritual cage such that the royal death became the basis for reorganizing human life along the length of the Nile.   To examine how that happened the authors go back to look at pre-First Dynasty Egypt, 4000- 3100 BC, recalling the Neolithic in Africa put an emphasis on cattle and on body ornamentation so by the First Dynasty combs and stone palettes for makeup of men and women occur. The human body became a kind of monument and experimentation with techniques of mummification took place before the First Dynasty. Archeologists have found evidence of petty monarchs at points along the Nile valley. Most kingdoms were small with few larger but not controlling extensive territories and little military or bureaucratic development. It seems the transition to an agriculture arose from the belief around 3500 that ancestors got hungry and required leavened bread and fermented wheat beer, whose pots appeared in graves. Arable wheat farming, long familiar along the Nile, became refined about this time in part from demands of the dead.   Permanent land division along the Nile was always challenged by periodic flooding, but the social requirement allowed divisions to become entrenched. It was not just about having enough arable land, but also about the means to maintain ploughs and oxen. Families without these resources had to buy beer and loaves elsewhere. So began networks of obligation and debt. Class distinctions and dependencies began to emerge and a sizeable sector of the population was deprived of the means to care independently for ancestors. Something similar took place in Peru as the Inca sovereignty extended and maize beer became a ritual necessity and symbol of the empire.   In Egypt around 3500 BC the remains of baking and brewing facilities are found side by side, first alongside cemeteries, then attached to palaces and grand tombs. By the time of the Great Pyramids, ~2500 BC, bread and beer were being manufactured on an industrial scale to supply armies of workers during their seasonal service on royal construction projects when they got to be relatives or care-givers of the king and were temporarily well provisioned and cared for. The workers town of Giza produced thousands of ceramic moulds used to make huge communal loaves, bedja, eaten in large groups with meat from the royal pens and washed down with spiced beer – of special importance for the solidarity of the seasonal work groups in Old Kingdom Egypt. The all-male groups that passed through age grade rituals, modelled themselves on a boat crew. So Egyptian boat crew were the model for production-line techniques, creating vast monuments, dividing tasks into simple mechanical components – the cutting, dragging, hoisting, polishing. Perhaps this reveals what the state is: a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all devoted to acts of care and devotion.   There is a paradox between caring labour and mechanical labour. Caring labour recognizes the unique qualities and needs of the cared for in order for them to flourish. For today’s states to be comparable, the caring must be shifted onto abstractions like the nation. In Egypt, popular devotion was diverted on to grand abstractions too – the ruler and the elite dead. This made possible the sense of a family and the machine. From the seasonal work to daily servicing of the ruler’s body human activity was directed to living or dead rulers or assisting them with their task of feeding and caring for the gods. All gave a downward flow of divine blessings and protection that took material form in the great feasts of the workers’ towns. Peru is perhaps the only comparable case. Both Egypt and Peru had some hesitation about urban life. Their capitals were ceremonial stages for royal display. They had relatively few permanent residents. They managed to combine sovereignty with a bureaucracy to extend themselves uniformly across the territory.  Other early states were different.   Early Dynastic Mesopotamia was made of many city states of various sizes with charismatic virile warrior kings vying for dominance. The cities had been around for centuries and had their own traditions, gods and self-government so there was administrative order in the river valleys. Sovereignty belonged to the gods alone. And there are the Maya. The Classic Maya ruler, ajaw, was a hunter and god impersonator – a warrior who entering a battle or ritual dance took on the spirit of an ancestral hero, deity or dreamlike monster. Ajaws were like tiny squabbling gods. Classic-period rulers lacked a sophisticated administrative apparatus but they imagined the cosmos as some sort of administrative hierarchy with predictable laws and an intricate set of celestial or subterranean wheels within wheels such that they could determine the birth and death dates of major deities. But it would never occur to them to register the numbers, wealth or even the birthdates of their own subjects. These so called ‘early states’ have some common features. There was spectacular violence at the top. The societies mimicked the patriarchal households. The government rested on a division of society into classes. But these could exist without a central government. China adds other complications.   Late Shang society, 1200-1000 BC, does have features of some other ‘early states’, but it is really unique. Like Inca Cuzco, the Shang capital Anyang was designed as a pivot of the four quarters, a cosmological anchor for the whole kingdom and laid out as a grand stage for royal ritual. The city was shared by the worlds of the living and the dead with royal cemeteries and their temples but also a living administration. Its industrial areas produced bronze vessels and jade – the tools used to communicate with ancestors. But there are differences. Unlike the other ‘early states’, Shang rulers did not claim sovereignty over an extended area. Safe travel and their commands were confined to band of territory along the Yellow River near the royal court.   Also, the huge role of divination distances the Shang from others. Any Shang decision proceeded only if approved by the gods and ancestral spirits. Diviners appealed to the gods through burnt offerings and ‘reading’ cracks on turtle shells and ox scapulae put into the fire. The oracle was recorded by an etching onto bone or shell and then stored. These texts are the first written inscriptions in China, but there is no clear evidence for other forms of administrative activity. Like Maya, Shang rulers waged war to acquire human victims for sacrifices. Rival courts seem to have recognized the Shang as paramount in ritual contexts, but this did not prevent war. This is typical of a ‘heroic society’. Eventually, a rival dynasty, the Western Zhou, defeated the Shang and claimed the ‘Mandate of Heaven’.     It seems clear that although one or two of the three elementary forms of domination can be present, only in Egypt and Peru did an entire regional system fall under one government. Egyptian kings had two faces: the supreme patriarch guarding an extended family (Great House = Pharaoh); and the war leader controlling the wild frontiers. This is not heroic violence and wars are not political contests. And public contests of any sort were non-existent. The king can only affirm his sovereignty. The problem of delegation meant state officials and major land holders were made part of the king’s own person by titles like Keeper of the King’s Secrets. This is often held out as the first state because it created absolute sovereignty with the monarch apart from human society and engaged in arbitrary violence with impunity using an administrative apparatus that could reduce almost everyone to cogs in a single machine. It lacked only heroic competitive politics that it pushed off into the world of the gods. The great exception came in those periods when central authority broke down – ‘dark ages’ – like the First Intermediate Period ~2181-2055 BC.   When the central government split between rival centres, Herakleopolis and Thebes, local charismatic leaders took over the functions of government. In fact these took on some qualities of heroic politics – charismatic and just as vainglorious and competitive as in ancient epics but less bloody. And in this period a hereditary aristocracy came into being as local magnates transferred powers to their offspring and relatives. Also in this period came a shift in emphasis – from the people’s care of god-like rulers to the care of the people as a legitimate path to authority. Such is the significant political change that can take place in ‘dark ages’!   The authors return to consider the role of bureaucracy. It was the blend of sovereignty and administration the came together in Egypt. The book has shown that bureaucracy was not needed to run complex irrigation systems – farmers could handle that. Cities were places that had bureaucracy and rulers were happy to let city administrations handle that. Moreover cities ran with a level of participation likely superior to cities of today. Also, when early regimes based their domination on knowledge, it was ritual like the shamanic, psychotropic revelations that inspired the builders of Chavin de Huantar. Yet early functional administration in the sense of lists, ledgers, audits and files seems    to have come from the ritual contexts like the Mesopotamian temples, Egyptian ancestor cults and Chinese oracle reading. Bureaucracy likely did not begin simply as a solution to problems of information gathering when human society reached a certain level of complexity. New archeological evidence suggests the first systems of specialised administrative control emerged in very small communities.   There were little prehistoric settlements in the Middle East around 7400 BC - 2000 years before anything like a city: Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria’s Balikh valley in Raqqa province. A village of some 150 inhabitants was destroyed by fire, baking and preserving them. The village had storage facilities. There were granaries and warehouses and “devices” to track what was in them – including economic archives that were miniature precursors to temple archives in Uruk. They were geometric tokens made of clay to keep track of particular resources. These villages lived in largely similar houses and with division of labour to handle flocks, cereal crops, flax to weave, crafts, bread to make, stone carving and simple metalwork. This was going on in villages some 2000 years before the earliest cities. It was as if they were anticipating living in a larger community. Over the next 1000 years there is evidence that such villages became more systematized and uniform. It was a time of some innovation. But socially, there seems to have been a conscious effort to avoid differences of status within and between villages. Moreover, there is some evidence that administrative tools were designed to prevent extracting and accumulating wealth.   The authors consider small bureaucracies like the ayllu, Andean village associations. Their main function was to redistribute agricultural land as families grew larger or smaller, to ensure non grew richer – that is had more land per person. Ayllu kept track of able-bodied young men and women per household to ensure they were not short-handed at critical moments but also to make sure aged, infirm, widows or orphans were taken care of. Records were kept to make sure there was reciprocity and at the end of the year outstanding debts and credits were to be cancelled out. Each ayllu had its own khipu strings that were knotted and reknotted to track debts registered or cancelled. The reasons for these strings was similar to the village accounting in prehistoric Mesopotamia. Such a system can be used for other purposes. After the Inca the ayllus had the status of ‘conquered women’ and the khipu strings were used to track labour debts owed to the central Inca administration. The knots were fixed and non-negotiable, never unravelled and retied. This way there would be always some who failed their quota. The supply of peons, pawns and slaves was maintained.   Similar things happened in the Middle East at later times. Prophets in the Hebrew Bible record powerful protests when demands for tribute drove farmers to penury, forced them to pawn their flocks and vineyards and surrender their children into debt peonage. Merchants took advantage of crop failures or natural disasters to offer interest bearing loans – leading to the same results. Similar complaints are recorded in China and India. The establishment of bureaucratic empires produces some kind of equivalence run amok. The book pulls back from the history of money and debt. The issue here is impersonal equivalence that applies equally to money and administration. The authors claim that the most violent inequalities develop from fictions of legal equality. All had the same laws, the same rights, the same responsibilities. This can be viewed as making them inter-changeable and that means they are open to the same impersonal demands that ignore their unique situations. Yet in some of the earlier models like the ayllu, Basque village, or Neolithic village administration, if egalitarian aims produced an impossible or unreasonable result, prolonged debate would adjust the situation. The administration or bureaucracy itself need not be a problem. The addition of sovereign power and the ability to say “rules are rules” allow bureaucratic mechanisms to become monstrous. In this is revealed a fourth freedom - the freedom to have friends, that is, to make commitments and promises. Peons and slaves lack this freedom. (The three freedoms: free to leave; free to ignore orders; and free to negotiate a different social order.)   The book reviews its thoughts about the origins of the states. States are now dominant so it is tempting to project present states back, but the book prefers just calling the early societies kingdoms or empires or republics. It is often assumed that states began when key functions like military, administrative and judicial are taken up by specialists. This makes sense if one believes that an agricultural surplus freed up part of the population. Early states might have used a surplus to support bureaucrats, priests and soldiers but it also allowed for sculptors, poets and astronomers. And none of the regimes considered by the authors had full-time specialists. None had a standing army. War was for the agricultural off-season. Most government institutions were staffed by a rotating workforce whose members had lives as managers of rural estates, traders or builders and the like. Indeed, many early states can be said to be seasonal and seasonal gatherings for certain purposes go back to the ice-age.   When kingdoms appeared, they tended to concentrate activities in different times of the year scattering to attend to the urgent needs of planting, harvesting or pasturage. But they were real. They could still mobilize if need be. It could be that just as play farming turned into more serious agriculture so play kingdoms became more serious. The change in Egypt could be explained this way. But again, the cause could be the emergence of patriarchal relations and the decline of women’s power in the household.   Note that kings tend to want to be before their subjects at all time and not just seasonally. Examples of devices to insert themselves into their subjects lives are imprinting their likeness on money or creating monuments like pyramids that give a sense of overwhelming and eternal presence.   Sociologist Philip Abrams noted that contemplating the claims made, there is a gap between what elites claim their power can do and the reality. The state is not the reality behind the mask of political practice, the state is the mask that prevents seeing political practice as it is. To understand this requires understanding the senses in which the state does not exist rather than just those in which it does.   The origin of a state is not an evolution from the Bronze Age, but the chance coming together of sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition – each with its own origin. Modern states are one way these elements came together but this time with a notion that the power of kings is held by “the people” (or “for the nation”), that bureaucrats exist for the benefit of the people and in which old aristocratic contests and prizes have become labelled “democracy” usually via an election. It is not inevitable. The assumption of a civilization and state that came down to us has been replaced by complex bundles of elements with very different origins that are now drifting apart.   A “coda” to the chapter looks at the term ‘civilization’. ‘Early civilization’ is taken to mean things like Pharaonic Egypt, Inca Peru, Aztec Mexico, Han China, Imperial Rome, Ancient Greece. Civilization indicates not just “city” but the qualities behind the label and so Andean ayllu and Basque villages would be included. If mutual aid, social cooperation, civic activism, hospitality and caring are included then a true history of civilization is just beginning. Yet physical evidence left behind by common forms of domestic life, ritual and hospitality shows such a deeper history of civilization as the book has shown. Women, their work, concerns and innovations are at the core of this more accurate notion of civilization. And this civilization occurred without permanent kings, bureaucrats or standing armies. Yet in examples like Egypt, Aztec Mexico and Chavin de Huantar as societies scaled up the role of women was marginalized. Are there examples where this didn’t happen?   The book turns to Bronze age Crete: Minoan Crete and the capital Knossos and main centres Phaistos, Malia an Zakros, the ‘palatial societies’ of 1700 – 1450 BC. Knossos centres on large palace complexes with industrial quarters, storage facilities and with writing on clay tablets (Linear A writing remains undeciphered). There is no clear evidence of monarchy. Extensive Bronze Age pictorial art depicts women in a positive light and with a larger size in a manner found nowhere in patriarchal societies. Goods imported by Minoan merchants starting in the proto-palatial period took on a female character suggesting women occupied the demand side for these long-distance exchanges. When compared with slightly later palaces in Greece, the Minoan ones were unfortified. Minoan art makes no reference to war. In Greece, walled citadels had arrived at Mycenae, Pylos and Tiryns in 1400 BC. Shortly after their rulers successfully invaded and took over Knossos, the new overlords held court in a great hall. A preserved example of one is at Pyros. The throne room has art, a fire, an open sky all focussed on the throne. In contrast the so called “Throne Room” in Minoan Knossos has the throne facing open space, with rows of benches. Nearby was a stepped bathing pool. This room is best interpreted as the seat of a council head with councillors on the benches. The book argues the evidence points to a system of female political rule, likely a theocracy led by a council of priestesses - a conclusion that others have avoided. Certainly, the artists in Minoa portray life very differently from those in Greece. It displays a remarkable absence of politics - in our sense of a self-perpetuating power-hungry ego. Rather “it celebrates a cosmos that both nurtures and ignores the individual, that vibrates with inseparable sexual energies and spiritual epiphanies”.   The authors conclude that ‘state formation’ can mean many things – a game of honour, chance gone wrong, unstoppable growth of a ritual to feed the dead, industrial slaughter, appropriation of female knowledge by men, or governance by a college of priestesses. But close examination limits the options and logical and historical constraints on the way power can expand its scope – the three principles: sovereignty, administration and competitive politics. But even given this, there were more interesting things going on than one might ever have guessed by sticking to any conventional definition of the state!   Chapter 11, Full Circle: On the historical foundation of the indigenous critique.   The indigenous critique, questions about money, faith, hereditary power, women’s rights, personal freedom, had a big influence on leading figures of the French enlightenment. The backlash portrayed history as material progress and cast the indigenous critics as innocent children of nature whose views could not offer a serious challenge to contemporary social thought. The idea that human societies evolved was not new. Classifying societies by subsistence was. Agriculture was viewed as a key break. Key assumptions were that larger societies became more ‘complex’, that complexity resulted in differentiation of functions and that this resulted in the reorganization of human societies into hierarchical ranks from the top down. History began with tiny hunter-gatherer bands and ended with the current collection of capitalist nation states. In between things are of interest if they enable that process. This means that historical times of relative freedom, democracy and women’s rights can be missed in a ‘dark age’. “Civilization is still reserved for societies whose defining characteristics include high-handed autocrats, imperial conquests and the use of slave labour.”   One can argue that eventually some combination of guns, germs and steel would have come along and imposed its system on everyone else. Political scientist James Scott sees the agricultural trap as stemming from grain which is durable, portable, divisible, quantifiable by bulk and so a perfect basis for taxation. Once grain is the predominant crop, a permanent kingdom could emerge. Scott notes that this ties the kingdom to fertile lowland areas leaving ‘barbarians’ outside. Grain states and barbarians were in tension for much of history. Strong grain states led to outflows of slaves and mercenaries. Strong barbarians could collect tribute or could lay grain states waste or attempt to rule them and find themselves absorbed as a new governing class. From 3000 BC to 1600 AD was a golden age for barbarians. For grain states, the freedom to ignore orders was dealt with but not the freedom to leave. Empires were short lived and Roman, Han, Ming or Inca could not prevent movements of people into and out of their control. A large fraction of the world’s population was beyond the reach of a tax collector. That is no longer the case.   The problem with evolutionism is that it takes societies in symbiotic relations and makes them separate stages in development. An early 20th century scheme for evolution is intended to improve on the evolution hunting, pastoralism, state. It suggested band societies, tribes, chiefdoms, states. These labels are used but this does not deal with the issue. There is a desire for a simple evolution in human history but it is impossible to predict what happens next until it has happened! One cannot even make comparisons after the Spanish since they put the Americas into one system with capitalist nation states. One might argue that for much of human history Eurasia and Africa were a single interconnected system. The major religions emerged there around 800 BC - 600 AD. But they did so in different ways and places. And Eurasia is not just one place. Much of Africa and Oceania – and northwestern Europe – were tied to great empires for much of the time. Still, it is possible to make comparisons with the Americas that took their own path before the Spanish arrived. Is a kingdom inevitable if farming wheat rice or maize becomes sufficiently widespread? It seems not. There seems to have been a move away from agriculture in the North American west before the Spanish arrived. The east had the story of Cahokia.   From ~1050 – 1350 AD in present East St Louis was a city known to history as Cahokia, capital of a budding grain state rising magnificently out of nowhere to a population of ~15,000. It ended up resoundingly rejected by a huge majority of its people. For centuries the site of the city and hundreds of miles of river valleys around lay devoid of human habitation. Successor cities spang up to the south, then crumbled. By the time Europeans arrived descendants of Cahokia’s subjects and neighbours appeared to have reorganized into polis-sized tribal republics. Whatever happened the societies encountered by the Europeans were the product of centuries of political conflict and self-conscious debate. Acknowledging this runs up against the dismissive attitude towards indigenous peoples from the evolutionary theory. The authors produce a writing about the Wendat and dreams by a Jesuit in 1603 that appears to anticipate Freud’s thinking and his psychoanalysis.   The authors move to apply this thinking to the Eastern Woodlands of North America 200 – 1600 AD to understand the local roots of the indigenous critique of European civilization and how those roots tangled with the story of Cahokia. They question how a single clan system came to apply across the whole of North America and across a range of languages.  A wolf clan member in what is now Georgia could travel and expect hospitality from wolf in what is now Arizona or Ontario. These were not kinship, but rather ritual societies with membership passed on by lineage. Each clan had a collection of names assigned to the most likely candidate when a current title holder died. Communities were a mixture of clans. Beyond hospitality, clans were active in diplomacy: arranging the protocol for diplomatic missions, compensation payments to prevent wars and incorporation of prisoners into clans. It maximized people’s capacity to move.   Elizabeth Tooker suggested clans might have come from the remnants of a trading empire, perhaps from merchants in central Mexico. The authors say it is more likely a ritual and diplomatic system came from, well, ritual and diplomacy! They point to the ‘Hopewell Interaction Sphere’ a network centred in Ohio 100 BC- 500 AD. Participating communities put extraordinary amounts of treasures under burial mounds – most seem to have been used to manufacture ritual gear and magnificent costumes worn by shamans, priests and lesser officials in the complex organizational structure. Many tombs were near gigantic earthworks that inhabitants of the Central Ohio Valley built ~ 1000 AD, but also earlier. Large earthworks like Hopewell and Poverty Point were planned and sophisticated engineering was used to have them rise high above sodden mud. And a new Hopewell geometric system was used.  Earthworks using that geometric system dotted along the upper and lower Mississippi, some the size of small towns often containing meeting houses, craft workshops and charnel houses and crypts. For most of the year they were empty, coming to life for ritual occasions. A grain state would have been a possibility given the fertility of the area, but the people preferred to live scattered in 2 or 3 family homesteads over higher ground.   The society was artistically brilliant. Much of the sophisticated imagery evokes shamanic ritual so, like Chavin de Huantar, social influence came from esoteric knowledge. Unlike Cavin, there is no evidence of a capital or elites. Interestingly, there is evidence of the clan system in that clan emblems are found buried with people. The ritual events were likely such as to ensure social differences remained largely theatrical. Indeed, the Hopewell heartland appears to break down into a Tripartite Alliance – three great clusters of sites. It’s possible that the spectacular burials came to an end at Hopewell in 400 AD because the basic structure of a clan system across North America was complete. Ties between groups were established with a shared idiom for their personal diplomacy and a common set of rules for interacting with strangers. The book turns to Cahokia noting that it ought to be the first ‘state’ in America.   From 400 – 800 AD with the decline of Hopewell, groups began adopting maize as staple crop along river valleys in the Mississippi flood plain. Armed conflict became more frequent. In some places people began living for longer periods around their local earthworks. Especially in the Mississippi valley this led to small towns centred on earther pyramids and plazas, some fortified, often separated by extensive stretches of no-man’s-land. Eventually, this led to an urban explosion centred on Cahokia, that soon became the greatest city in the America’s north of Mexico. The first largescale construction was Rattlesnake Causeway, a processional walkway rising from the surrounding waters towards the surrounding ridge-top tombs – a Path of Souls or Way of the Dead. This suggests Cahokia began as a place of pilgrimage like the Hopewell sites. There was a love of games – around 600 AD the game of chunkey emerged. In and around Cahokia a social hierarchy arose.   For an unknown reason, around 1050 AD Cahokia suddenly grew to a city of over 6 square miles with more than 100 earthen mounds around spacious plazas. The population of a few thousand added some 10,000 more inside Cahokia, bringing something like 40,000 into the area as a whole. The main part of the city had a huge packed earth pyramid standing before an enormous plaza. In a smaller plaza to the West was a line of cypress posts marking the sun’s annual course. Some of Cahokia’s pyramids were topped with palaces or temples, others with charnel houses or sweat lodges. Foreign populations - especially their influential members – were resettled in thatched houses arranged in neighbourhoods around smaller plazas and earthen pyramids. At the same time existing villages around Cahokia were disbanded. From Monk’s Mound, the elite could watch. In early years, along with games and feasts, there were mass public executions, linked to the funeral rites of nobility.   While something of the clan system remained, the old system was transformed into an opposition between nobles and commoners. Society was matrilineal so the mico or ruler was succeeded by the eldest nephew. Nobles could only marry commoners so with time this produced a pool of nobles-turned-commoners to supply warriors and administrators. Genealogies were preserved. A priesthood maintained the temples that contained images of royal ancestors. Titles for achievement at war provided a step into the nobility – symbolised by bird-man imagery.  This imagery was marked in some 50 smaller kingdoms that appeared along the Mississippi. Sacred images of Cahokia focussed on the figure of the Corn Mother who appeared also as an old woman, a goddess, holding a loom. From 11th to 12th century, sites with links to Cahokia appeared from Virginia to Minnesota, often in conflict with neighbours. Trade routes spanned the continent.   Cahokia did not control this expansion so it was most likely a ritual alliance that could be backed up by force. Two centuries after its rapid expansion, things got violent quickly. A long process of war, destruction and depopulation took place in Cahokia and other smaller towns beginning with people fleeing into the hinterlands, then leaving the area. The place vanished from oral traditions. After 1400 AD the American Bottom became a haunted wilderness. Here, as with the Maya, administration focussed on otherworldly things like ritual calendars and orchestration of sacred space – although they affected city planning and monitoring the maize cycle. Perhaps in both cases control of violence and esoteric knowledge became entangled in competition between rival elites. Yet the end of the Mississippi world led to change in indigenous politics by the time of the European invasion.   By 1715 the dismantling of petty kingdoms was almost complete across the entire region of former Mississippi influence and people were settled back in the valley in small towns of a few hundred people with egalitarian clan structures and communal council houses. The southeast came to be divided into tribal republics. The low birth rates made mobility easier, made it easier to shift back into subsistence and hunting, and allowed women to take on stronger political roles. Government of the ‘five civilized tribes’ was by communal council wherein all had an equal say and with a process of consensus finding. In art, their symbol was a looped square. This is the point at which there were discussions with the Jesuits about freedom and not being a slave, theories about dreams or just daily living. And if any of these seem familiar it could be the result of the ideas being mixed into the enlightenment movement in Europe.   The authors turn to the Osage and self-constitution. They note that in the Americas there is a link between esoteric and bureaucratic knowledge – exotic like the Chavin and their hallucinogens, and bureaucratic like the Inca and their accounting. In the Americas the kind of exotic skills that produced the great construction projects like Poverty Point or Hopewell have frequently been related to systems of domination that subsequently emerged. Hopewell produced a kind of reformation in the access to the sacred which, like the reformation in Europe, had an effect on every other aspect of social life. The building of monuments ended and instead tobacco was smoked in effigy pipes, theocracy became oligarchy. The Osage illustrate this.   The Osage descended from Mississippi Fort Ancient people. They allied with the French on account of their strategic Missouri river location and were documented in the early 20th century by La Flesche a native speaker of a closely similar language. Osage moved among three locations, their permanent circular villages for up to 2000, their summer camps and their camps for mid-winter bison hunts.  The villages had to include 24 different clans and a particular arrangement of clans into sky people, earth people, water people. In the lodges for ritual, representatives of the same clans were arranged as sky and earth. The seating arrangements came from the work of elders to resolve a series of constitutional crises. Initiation required time and wealth. Those at the top level were called Nohozhinga and were the ultimate political authority. Osage spent 1 hr after sunrise in prayer, but the Nohozhinga had daily discussions of philosophy and its relevance to day-to day issues. Important discussions were recorded. Assemblies could be called to ratify decisions, but the Nohozhinga were essentially the government in a form of theocracy that made no distinction between officials (they included soldiers and protectors of the land), priests and philosophers.   There is a mythic history that contains two particular points. The narrative involves neutralizing arbitrary power and distributing it widely. The second is that the Osage social order was made by them in a series of legal and intellectual breakthroughs. Note that this is the people creating their own constitution – a notion that is generally taught as coming from the Frenchman Montesquieu in his book The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Interestingly, an Osage and Missouria indigenous delegation visited Paris in his time period.   The book comes full circle in turning to the Iroquoia and the political philosophies that influenced Kandiaronk in his youth.  America disproves the evolutionary notion that once ‘state formation’ has happened, there is no getting out of it. The bitterness left by the vanished Cahokia shows that. But the legacy of the freedoms to move, to disobey and to rearrange social ties are taken for granted by anyone conditioned into obedience. The societies the Europeans encountered and ideals of thinkers like Kandiaronk were products of a political history that for 3 centuries had been anti-authoritarian and opposed to all that Cahokia might have represented and so opposed to those same qualities in the French.   East St Louis is far from Montreal, the Iroquoian people of Montreal were not directly under Mississippian rule and the views of people like Lahontan were not literally the views that overthrew the Mississippian civilization. However, oral traditions, historical accounts and the ethnographic record indicate that those who framed the ‘indigenous critique’ of European civilization saw their social orders as self-conscious creations as a barrier against what Cahokia might have represented and what they later found so objectionable in the French.   The oral tradition is limited but there is some account given of the shifting coalitions and traditions of the 16th and early 17th century. Many had largely disappeared when oral traditions were taken in the 19th century.  However, there are versions of the foundation of the League of Five Nations, an epic called Gayanashagowa – an epic that, despite some magical elements, represents political institutions as self-conscious human creations. The text clearly involves a social problem and a solution. There is a breakdown of relationships plunging the country into chaos and revenge. There is the heroic Peacemaker who collects allies who gather the nations one-by one into agreeing to create a formal structure for heading off disputes and creating peace. The first is Jigonsaseh, a woman famous for standing outside quarrels. The most powerful, Adodarhoh, is last to be won over. Thence a system of titles, nested councils, consensus finding, condolences rituals, and the prominent role of female elders in policy development. In the end the laws are ‘spoken into’ belts of wampum that form the constitution, the record given to Adodarhoh, and the hero disappears. The founding of the Osage social order is a related story in which Adodarhoh is clearly a ruler, with power to command – and clearly giving orders was a serious outrage to the surviving nation in the 19th century, the Haudenosaunee.   An interesting aside is that although orders were resented in the society, it was considered the obligation of others to fulfill a fellow community member’s dream – even if it meant appropriating a neighbour’s possession. Dreams were treated as commands either by one’s own soul or by some greater spirit.   The authors turn to the history of the League of the Five Nations. No doubt it evolved with patching of elements. It is known that Iroquoian society known in the 17th century began to take shape in the heyday of Cahokia. Around 1100 AD maize was cultivated in Ontario in Attiwandaronk territory, Over the next 3 centuries the three sisters of corn beans and squash grew in importance but always alongside hunting fishing and foraging. The key period was 1230 – 1375 AD when people moved from their settlements into palisaded towns that could be quite sizeable and that were occupied year-round. In them longhouses became the main type of accommodation.   From the 12th to the 14th century neither Wendats or Haudenosenee had much contact with the Mississippians. However, that was not so for the Attiwandaronk so that by 1300 AD much of Ontario was under Mississippian influence and indeed the Attiwandaronk monopolized trade to the south and on to Chesapeake Bay and beyond. Subsequently, this large tribe was effectively destroyed by plagues and famines in the 17th century. Jesuit evidence indicates that their constitution was fundamentally different from that of its neighbours. It is also known that in 1627 the Attiwandaronk were dominated by a warlord named Tsouharissen who tired to capitalize on his success as a warrior into centralized power. It is not clear how he related to Jigonsaseh, a woman exemplifying the principles of reconciliation. Nor is it clear how this squared with a matrilinear society. However, in 1650 AD after the Attiwandaronk nation no longer existed and the Jagonsaseh, Mother of Nations, now incorporated into the Wolf clan of the Seneca, remained in her fortress overlooking the Niagara gorge.   In 1687 when Louis IV sent a seasoned military commander, the Marquis de Denonville, as governor to deal with the threat the Five Nations posed to French settlement. Denonville invited the League council to negotiate peace terms, but then summarily arrested the ~200 delegates and shipped them to France to be galley slaves. He then invaded Five Nations territory. The Jagonsaseh had not attended the supposed negotitation and the arrest of the others left her the highest-ranking League official. She raised an army. She routed the invading French and her forces were at the point of entering Montreal when the French government sued for peace, agreeing to dismantle Fort Niagara and return the surviving galley slaves. A dozen or so of the original 200 returned! It seems the Jagonsaseh demobilised her army and returned to the process of selecting new officials to reconstitute the Great Council.   So, the history of living through these conflicting ideological possibilities lay behind the indigenous critique of European society. This context makes clear the particular emphasis on individual liberty. North Americans skirted the evolutionary trap that leads from agriculture to some all-powerful state or empire. By doing so, they developed political sensibilities that were to influence enlightenment thinkers and through them, thinkers of today.   Chapter 12, Conclusion: The Dawn of Everything.   The book began calling for better questions. The origins of inequality called forth a myth – some variation on the fall from grace that leaved humans tinkering in their squalid condition. A rosier narrative is that Western civilization makes everyone happier, wealthier and more secure – but that fails to explain why Western powers have had to spend the last 500 years using guns to force people to adopt it. It also doesn’t explain why many seek to leave it. Today’s social theory was built by conservative thinkers concerned by how passion for liberty, equality and fraternity ended up producing terror so, for example, Edmund Burke dealt with social realities that they felt Enlightenment thinkers had overlooked. Today, the right defends Enlightenment values and the left is critical. But all agree that ‘the Enlightenment’ was a break in human history – introducing a possibility not seen before. Pre-enlightenment, there were ‘traditional societies’ with community, status, authority and the sacred where people acted through custom. Generally, ‘non-modern’ people were simple minded and living in a dream world. Since historical events are unpredictable, anthropologists studied a way of life presumed to be timeless and unchanging.  There follows a critique of Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade who saw these as ‘traditional societies’ who see everything as cast by the past and ‘historical societies’ where things are going somewhere like a Last Days, Judgment and events have significance in the future.   The authors complain that social sciences largely studies the ways humans are not free and so has problems with humans shaping their own destiny. A result is that the human past is seen as technologies – stone, brass, iron ages. True there is a role, but the fact that Teotihuacanos used stone to build their city and Knossos used metal seems to have made little difference to the internal organization or size. Nor does the evidence support a notion that a major innovation occurs in a sudden revolutionary burst. What seems to have happened was a steady collective body of humble but significant discoveries accumulated over centuries. The discovery of making bread rise continues to enrich the lives of billions of people. Often principles were long known before they were applied systematically. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and the growth cycles of what would become a staple crop for thousands was maintained by ritual play farming. Ceramics were invented before the Neolithic to make figurines and animal models. Only later did they become cooking and storage vessels.  Mining was first used for pigments; later came metals for industrial use. Mesoamerican society never used wheeled transport, but they made toys with wheels and axles for children. The Greeks came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only used it to make the temple doors seemingly open of their own accord. Chinese scientists employed gunpowder in fireworks. Ritual play was a laboratory and repository of knowledge and techniques. In terms of interesting questions to ask: is there a positive correlation between women’s freedom and the degree of innovation in a society?   The authors were surprised to find that time and again in human history the zone of ritual play was the site of social experimentation. British anthropologist, A.M. Hocart, proposed mid twentieth century that monarchy and institutions of government derived from rituals for channeling powers of life from the cosmos into human society. He even suggested that the first kings must have been dead kings. Considered an odd ball in his life, contemporary archaeological research has shown evidence in the Upper Palaeolithic period of grand burials staged for individuals who seem to have attracted spectacular riches and honours in death.  Other institutions like private property, policing and powers of command first appear as a concept in sacred contexts. Indeed, to say that for most of human history the ritual year served as a compendium of social possibilities – as it did in the European Middle Ages is - hardly strong enough. Festivals are already an extraordinary departure from the everyday order.  But from Palaeolithic times, people lived in such a different social order for extended periods of time – moving back and forth between one and then the other.   If something went wrong in human history perhaps it began when people lost the freedom to imagine and enact different forms of social existence. Even the few anthropologists who argue humans could imagine other social possibilities conclude that for 95% of our history the same humans recoiled in horror from all possible social worlds but one: the small-scale society of equals. Perhaps the framing of the problem might be: it was possible for their ancestors to turn their backs on Cahokia and to reorganize into free republics, but when the French tried to rid themselves of their own ancient hierarchies the result was the horrors of the French revolution. Slogans aside, social liberty is: 1) The freedom to move away or relocate from surroundings; 2) The freedom to ignore or disobey commands of others; and 3) the freedom to shape new social realities or shift back and forth between different ones.   The first two freedoms are a kind of scaffolding for the third. As long as the first 2 freedoms existed in North American societies when the Europeans arrived, the only kings possible were play kings. The same for any other hierarchy of offices. A police force that operated to 3 months of the year whose membership rotated annually was something of a play police. Yet for the present era, the 3 freedoms have receded. General history authors like Harari conclude humanity is stuck – there is no escape from the cages we have made for ourselves. This book explores this.   Human societies have divided into culture areas and that has led to them stimulating each other so as to exaggerate differences – as in the California peaceable foragers and aristocratic neighbours to the North with inter-group warfare and competitive feasting. Post ice-age hunter gatherers in coastal or woodland regions enjoyed a Golden Age with experimentation and creativity. It was among such Mesolithic societies that distinct culture areas appear and also permanent ranks, interpersonal violence and even warfare. Indeed, warfare was often a way by which forms of play became more permanent – for example the Natchez kingdom might have theatrical affairs, the ruler whose order would be obeyed for a mile, but if someone was arbitrarily killed – the person remained dead, the play could not just end and the play king ceased to be a play king.   While human beings have always being capable of physically attacking one another, there’s no reason to assume war has always existed. War is not just organized violence, but a kind of contest between two clearly demarcated sides. This is not hard wired. It’s invariably necessary to employ combinations of ritual, drugs and psychological techniques to convince people to kill and injure each other in systematic yet indiscriminate ways. On the one hand even in Homeric war the game aspect can dominate resulting in much taunting, individual competitions and few deaths. On the other hand, there were examples of massacres of Neolithic village dwellers in central Europe just after the last Ice Age. Evidence of war is uneven. Periods of intense inter-group violence alternate with periods of peace – often lasting centuries. War did not become a constant after the adoption of farming indeed for long periods it seemed war had been abolished.   The book turns to another question. Was there a relationship between war and community freedoms leading to ranking then largescale systems of domination – like those of the Shang, Maya or Inca? The authors remind that a state is a combination of sovereignty, bureaucracy and competitive politics – each with separate origins. They are types of domination grounded respectively in the use of violence, knowledge, and charisma. Ancient societies can often be seen as having one axis of social power highly developed – Olmec charismatic political contests; Chavin control of esoteric knowledge. These are 1st order regimes. When two axes of power fused into a single system of domination the result is a 2nd order regime – Egypt’s Old Kingdom with sovereignty fused with a bureaucracy. The Maya used administrative activity to monitor cosmic affairs and drew earthly power from a fusion of sovereignty with inter-dynastic politics.   If there are any commonalities between the early states like Shang China, they all showed spectacular violence at the height of the system – whether as an extension of royal sovereignty or at the behest of divinities. They all also modelled centres of power – court or palace – on a patriarchal household. And the same group of features can be found in later kingdoms or empires - Han, Aztec, Roman. Why? Answering is difficult because all the language developed involves explanation or justification. The authors claim their basic freedoms and list of forms of domination aim for more neutrality.   Existing debates that typically begin with Roman Law are problematic. Natural freedom under Roman Law is based on the power of the individual - male head of household – to dispose of property as he sees fit. Property is not a right – rights are negotiated and involve mutual obligations. Property is power. Property is not understandings between people about who gets to use or look after things. It is a relationship between a person and an object characterized by absolute power.   A West Indian sociologist suggested that Roman Law property - and hence freedom – trace back to slave law. The authors recall that those sober magistrates who developed the law lived their private lives in households where they enjoyed near total authority over wives, children and slaves. The slaves were often captive foreigners conquered in battle who had forfeited rights of any kind. What is important is how in Roman jurisprudence the logic of war – interchangeable enemies, enemies killed or sold as commodities – and its potential for arbitrary violence was inserted into the most intimate sphere of social relations – the relations of care that made domestic life possible. The nexus of care and violence has been important in a range of other contexts in Amazonia and ancient Egypt.   Our word ‘family’ has a root in famulus meaning ‘house slave’ via familia meaning everyone under authority of the paterfamilias. Domus or household has given domestic and domesticated. Dominium was the emperor’s power and also the citizen’s power over private property.   Warfare, massacres and captives predate kingdoms or empires. Were captured enemy killed, incorporated or left in between?  The Wendat in the time of Kandiaronk were very warlike and rivalries were fought in the Eastern Woodlands before the Europeans arrived and supplied them all with muskets, launching the ‘Beaver Wars’. The Jesuits were appalled by what they saw, but noted the reasons for war were different. Wendat wars were about mourning – to soften the grief of relatives of a person killed. A war party would strike against traditional enemies, bring back a few scalps and a few prisoners. Women and children would be adopted. The fate of men depended on mourners. He could be given a name and after a few years trial become a member. The alternative was excruciating death by torture. The appalling violence was a public spectacle and seems extraordinary given that the Wendat did not spank children, punish thieves or murderers. This ran contrary to their usual problem solving by reason and debate. Moreover, Iroquoia was one of the regions where violence flared up in specific historical periods then largely disappeared. What was the meaning of the theatres of violence? A difference from Europe of the same period was that the French would submit their own people to public torture and execution. The Amerindian sought to take over the strength and courage of the alien and so required the community to become a single body unified by its capacity for violence. In France, the people were unified as potential victims of the king’s violence. For the Wendat, violence was excluded from the realm of family and the household – the opposite of the Roman familia. Under the French Ancien Regime things were like imperial Rome – household and kingdom shared the model for subordination. The superior party was expected to inflict stern chastisement when he considered it appropriate - violence with impunity. Moreover, this was tied in with feelings of love and affection! Bourbon monarch, Egyptian pharaoh, Roman emperor, Aztec tlatoani or Sapa Inca was not just a structure for domination, but also one of care. European spectacles endorsed a system in which the brutalizing of wives by husbands was a form of love. Wendat torture at the same time made clear that no form of chastisement should take place inside the community or a household. The confusion between care and dominion, the authors suggest, relates to how we lost our ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another. This is important for understanding how our society of today got stuck.   The authors claim to have limited their challenges to other scholarly views, sticking to major misconceptions one of which relates to scale so that structures of domination are inevitable when populations are scaled up by orders of magnitude. A densely populated social group needs a ‘more complex’ system to keep it organized and ‘complex’ implies hierarchy which in turn implies chains of command so that the people must lose their 2nd freedom – to refuse a command. None of these assumptions are theoretically essential and history tends not to bear them out. An expert on Iron Age Europe points out that complex systems don’t have to be organized top-down. Indeed exceptions are starting to outnumber the rules! It was once assumed that urban life marked a point at which everyone surrendered basic freedoms and faced rule of faceless administrators, stern priests, paternalist kings or warrior-politicians so as to prevent chaos. Such views have no sound basis in human psychology and they don’t fit archeological evidence that cities began in many parts of the world as grand scale civic experiments that lacked administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. Calling them ‘egalitarian’ is not enough because there is such a variety of experiments that arose from the earlier far-flung networks of societies. While the earlier units were smaller, especially at certain times in the year, they were organized in loose coalitions or confederacies. We think of civilization as originating in cities but maybe we should think of cities as one of the great regional confederacies compressed into a smaller space.   True, monarchy or warrior aristocracies could also take hold in a city, often did and with dramatic effect. But the mere existence of large human settlements was no direct cause of that. Causes of structures of domination lie elsewhere. Indeed ‘heroic societies’ of the Anatolian highlands formed outside the first Mesopotamian cities, trading with them. Elsewhere, some urban populations went partway to monarchy then turned back – like Teotihuacan in the valley of Mexico, where citizens turned from Pyramid building to social housing for residents. Yet others began with neighbourhood councils and popular assemblies and ended up ruled by warlike dynasts – as in Mesopotamia after the Uruk period. Here is the link between caring and violence.   Sumerian temples organized around nurturing and feeding the gods – statues – which were surrounded by a welfare industry. Widows, orphans and runaways would take refuge there. At Uruk the Temple overlooked the great courtyard of the city’s assembly. Charismatic warrior-kings inserted themselves in this space. Long before the kings, the temples provided employment as well as welfare. These first factories were charity factories. However, over time women and children became degraded and temple institutions became something of a Victorian poorhouse.   The authors focus on the role of the nexus of external violence/internal care. Did this mark the point where flexible negotiable relations became fixed - how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality with relations based on violence and domination normalized within it? Franz Steiner did relevant work on what he calls ‘pre-servile institutions’ – what happens in different cultural and historical situations to people who become unmoored: expelled by clans; castaways; criminals; runaways; refugees – people at first welcomed as almost sacred then gradually degraded and exploited. This is essentially about what happens with the loss of the first basic freedom – to move away or relocate – paves the way for the loss of the second – the freedom to disobey. Why when expectations of hospitality, asylum, civility and shelter erode does this catalyse situations where some people can exert arbitrary power over others?   Steiner studied many cases. And he came up with a possible answer to another question. When stateless societies organize themselves so that chiefs have no coercive power how did top-down organizations ever arrive.  Some had suggested religious revelation might enable the transition. Steiner thought it arose from charity. For in Amazonia orphans, widows, mad, disabled or deformed were allowed to take refuge in the chief’s residence and became a retinue. Younger males often took on the role of police-like enforcers. And the chief could reach for the father’s power of arbitrary command over his dependents and his property and the reach of that power would depend on whether his wards could run away and find refuge elsewhere. The potential for power was important. Certainly, giving refuge did change basic domestic arrangements – especially when captured women were incorporated. The authors point out that some of this logic applies to all documented royal courts from China to the Andes. And Steiner’s observations are relevant to debates about the origins of patriarchy.   The authors tell of frustration looking for literature when they were examining the recent archeological evidence and suggest this included a reluctance to synthesize but also the limited language to describe situations such as ‘cities lacking top-down structures of governance’. Is that egalitarian? To say ‘yes’ in wrong – because it is rare to find no aspect of structural inequality in any aspect of its inhabitants’ lives including household and religious arrangement. Yet it would be foolish to lump all non-egalitarian cities together leaving only a few small foraging bands as egalitarian. So, the authors dropped polar ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ without explicit evidence that ideologies of social equality were present on the ground. They give weight to 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage rather than just the 5,000 years in which it did. They treat the rejection of urban life and the absence of slavery as significant just as the emergence of these phenomena, confessing that they would never have guessed that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places and that very possibly the same was true of war.   Social scientists tend to write of the past as if everything that happened could have been predicted. Yet we all know that when we try to predict the future, we usually get it wrong. It’s tempting to think that the current state of the world is an inevitable outcome of the last 10,000 years of history. Maybe someday someone will look back and think land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction is a really significant breakthrough. Taking that approach now, maybe we could look at alternative possibilities - roads not taken like Minoan Crete or Hopewell. Maybe that would make our plight more tragic – we could have been living with very different conceptions of human society. Genocide and prison camps never had to happen. But it also says that the possibilities for human intervention remain greater than we usually think.   The book began with the Greek idea of Kairos, an occasional moment when a society’s frames of reference shift. There is a transformation of principles and symbols. Lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred. And real change is possible. It is a time when events like a political revolution are prone to happen. Societies around today’s world appear to be swirling towards such a moment, especially those calling themselves Western. In the scientific study of our own past, we have exposed that the mythical substructure of social science and its unassailable axioms are evaporating. The purpose of all this knowledge is surely to rediscover that third basic freedom – the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality.   Myths are important. They are the way human societies give structure and meaning to the experience living. Now the larger mythic structures of the past no longer work. For a while, little will change. Libraries and databases, universities and school curricula are designed for the old structures and the old questions. New truth doesn’t replace the old, but the proponents of the old eventually die off. The authors are optimists. They hope change will be faster than that. And they believe they are beginning that change by relegating many axioms of the history of humans to the realm of ancient myths.     TOP   Click:

Copyright 2022 All Rights Reserved