The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Europe, too, bears witness to the vibrant and complex history of non-agricultural peoples after the Ice Age. Take the monuments called in Finnish Jätinkirkko, the ‘Giants’ Churches’ of the Bothnian Sea between Sweden and Finland: great stone ramparts, some up to 195 feet long, raised up in their tens by coastal foragers between 3000 and 2000 BC. Or the ‘Big Idol’, a seventeen-foot-tall totem pole with elaborate carvings rescued from a peat bog on the shores of Lake Shigirskoe, on the eastern slopes of the Central Urals. Dating to around 8000 BC, the Idol is the lone survivor of a long-lost tradition of large-scale wooden forager art which once produced monuments that presided over northern skies. Then come the amber-soaked burials of Karelia and southern Scandinavia, with their elaborate grave goods and corpses staged in expressive poses, echoing some forgotten etiquette of Mesolithic vintage.34 And, as we’ve seen, even the major building phases of Stonehenge, long associated with early farmers, are now dated to a time when cereal cultivation was virtually abandoned and hazelnut-gathering once again took over in the British Isles, alongside livestock-herding.