The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

The city wall was razed flat, and … the original functional divisions destroyed, resulting in a lack of spatial regulation. Commoners’ residential areas now covered almost the entire site, even reaching beyond the boundaries of the middle-period large city wall. The size of the city became even larger, reaching a total area of 300 hectares. In addition, the ritual area in the south was abandoned. The former palace area now included a poor-quality rammed-earth foundation of about 2,000 square metres, surrounded by trash pits used by relatively low-status people. Stone tool workshops occupied what had been the lower-level elite residential area. The city clearly had lost its status as a capital, and was in a state of anarchy.111 What’s more, there are clues that this was a conscious process of transformation, most likely involving a significant degree of violence. Commoner graves burst in on the elite cemetery, and in the palace district a mass burial, with signs of torture and grotesque violations of the corpses, appears to be evidence for what the excavator describes as an ‘act of political retribution’.112 Now, it is considered bad form to question an excavator’s first-hand judgement about a site, but we cannot resist a couple of observations. First, the ostensible ‘state of anarchy’ (elsewhere described as ‘collapse and chaos’)113 lasted for a considerable period of time, between two and three centuries. Second, the overall size of Taosi during the latter period actually...