The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

It’s informative, at this point, to compare and contrast the Hopewell Interaction Sphere with a phenomenon we discussed in the previous chapter: the ‘Ubaid village societies of Mesopotamia in the fifth millennium BC. The comparison might seem a stretch, but both can be conceived as culture areas on the grandest possible scale, the first in their respective hemispheres to encompass the entire span of a great river system – the Mississippi and the Euphrates respectively – from headwaters to delta, including all the surrounding plains and coastlands.25 The establishment of regular cultural interaction on such a scale, across sharply contrasting landscapes and environmental niches, often marks an important turning point in history. In the case of the ‘Ubaid it created a certain self-conscious form of standardization, a social egalitarianism, that laid foundations for the world’s first cities.26 What happened in the case of Hopewell seems rather different.