The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Such cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, and their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a ruler’s actual power (as in their ability to make anyone do anything they don’t want to do).

When people talk about ‘early civilizations’ they are mostly referring to those very same societies we’ve been describing in this chapter and their direct successors: Pharaonic Egypt, Inca Peru, Aztec Mexico, Han China, Imperial Rome, ancient Greece, or others of a certain scale and monumentality. All these were deeply stratified societies, held together mostly by authoritarian government, violence and the radical subordination of women. Sacrifice, as we’ve seen, is the shadow lurking behind this concept of civilization: the sacrifice of our three basic freedoms, and of life itself, for the sake of something always out of reach – whether that be an ideal of world order, the Mandate of Heaven or blessings from insatiable gods. Is it any wonder that in some circles the very idea of ‘civilization’ has fallen into disrepute? Something very basic has gone wrong here.

we’ve come to assume that ‘civilization’ refers, in origin, simply to the habit of living in cities. Cities, in turn, were thought to imply states. But as we’ve seen, that is not the case historically, or even etymologically.

The word ‘civilization’ derives from Latin civilis, which actually refers to those qualities of political wisdom and mutual aid that permit societies to organize themselves through voluntary coalition. In other words, it originally meant the type of qualities exhibited by Andean ayllu associations or Basque villages, rather than Inca courtiers or Shang dynasts. If mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others are the kind of things that really go to make civilizations, then this true history of civilization is only just starting to be written.

in all parts of the world small communities formed civilizations in that true sense of extended moral communities. Without permanent kings, bureaucrats or standing armies they fostered the growth of mathematical and calendrical knowledge. In some regions they pioneered metallurgy, the cultivation of olives, vines and date palms, or the invention of leavened bread and wheat beer; in others they domesticated maize and learned to extract poisons, medicines and mind-altering substances from plants. Civilizations, in this true sense, developed the major textile technologies applied to fabrics and basketry, the potter’s wheel, stone industries and beadwork, the sail and maritime navigation, and so on. A moment’s reflection shows that women, their work, their concerns and innovations are at the core of this more accurate understanding of civilization.

Pretty much all the available evidence from Minoan Crete suggests a system of female political rule – effectively a theocracy of some sort, governed by a college of priestesses.

European writers of that century was an insistence on classifying societies by means of subsistence (so that agriculture could be seen as a fundamental break in the history of human affairs); an assumption that as societies grew larger, they inevitably grew more complex; and that ‘complexity’ means not just a greater differentiation of functions, but also the reorganization of human societies into hierarchical ranks, governed from the top down.

the Mongolian adage went, ‘One can conquer a kingdom on horseback, to rule it one must dismount.’

By the late nineteenth century, it was becoming clear that the original sequence as developed by Turgot and others – hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, then finally industrial civilization – didn’t really work. Yet at the same time, the publication of Darwin’s theories meant that evolutionism became entrenched as the only possible scientific approach to history – or at least the only one likely to be given credence in universities.

So the search was on for more workable categories. In his 1877 Ancient Society, Lewis Henry Morgan proposed a series of steps from ‘savagery’ through ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’ which was widely adopted in the new field of anthropology. Meanwhile, Marxists concentrated on forms of domination, and the move out of primitive communism towards slavery, feudalism and capitalism, to be followed by socialism (then communism). All these approaches were basically unworkable, and eventually had to be thrown away as well.

What we are going to do in the remainder of this chapter, then, is examine the history of the Eastern Woodlands of North America from roughly AD 200 to 1600 in exactly this light. Our aim here is to understand the local roots of the indigenous critique of European civilization, and how those roots were entangled in a history that began at Cahokia or perhaps even considerably earlier.

Elizabeth Tooker, doyenne of Iroquoian studies,

the ‘Hopewell Interaction Sphere’, a network with its epicentre in the Scioto and Paint Creek river valleys of Ohio. Between roughly 100 BC and AD 500, communities participating in this network deposited treasures under burial mounds, often piled up in extraordinary quantities. The treasures included quartz-crystal arrowheads, mica and obsidian from the Appalachians, copper and silver from the Great Lakes, conch shells and shark teeth from Gulf of Mexico, grizzly-bear molars from the Rockies, meteoric iron, alligator teeth, barracuda jaws and more.13 Most of these materials seem to have been used for the manufacture of ritual gear and magnificent costumes – including metal-sheathed pipes and mirrors – worn by shamans, priests and a host of minor officials in a complex organizational structure, the precise nature of which is fiendishly difficult to reconstruct.

A typical Hopewell site is a complex, mathematically aligned mix of circles, squares and octagons – all made of mud. One of the largest, the Newark Earthworks in Licking County, Ohio, which apparently functioned as a lunar observatory, extends over two square miles and contains embankments more than sixteen feet tall. The only way to create stable structures of this sort – so stable that they still exist today – was by the use of ingenious building techniques, alternating layers of earth with carefully selected gravels and sand.15

Central Ohio was just the epicentre. Sites with earthworks based on this new, Hopewellian geometrical system can be found dotted along the upper and lower reaches of the Mississippi valley. Some are the size of small towns. They might, and often did, contain meeting houses, craft workshops and charnel houses for the processing of human remains, along with crypts for the dead. A few might have had resident caretakers, though this isn’t entirely clear. What is clear is that for most of the year these sites remained largely or completely empty. Only on specific ritual occasions did they come to life as theatres for elaborate ceremonies, densely populated for a week or two at a time, with people drawn from across the region and occasional visitors from very far away.

Rather we find just the sort of ‘play farming’ familiar from our discussions in Chapter Six, as well as shamans and engineers who spent the overwhelming majority of their time with the same five or six companions, but who periodically walked out on to the stage of an extended society that encompassed much of the North American continent. It is all so strikingly different from anything we know of later Woodlands societies that it’s difficult to reconstruct exactly what these settlement patterns meant in practice. If nothing else, however, this overall situation illustrates the profound irrelevance of a conventional evolutionist terminology, based on a progression from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’ and ‘chiefdoms’.

So what kind of societies were these? One thing we can definitely say is that they were artistically brilliant. For all their modest living arrangements, Hopewellians produced one of the most sophisticated repertories of imagery in the pre-Columbian Americas: everything from effigy pipes topped by exquisite animal carvings (used to smoke a variety of tobacco strong enough to induce trance-like states, along with other herbal concoctions); to fired earthen jars covered in elaborate designs; and small copper sheets, worn as breastplates, cut into intricate geometrical designs. Much of the imagery is evocative of shamanic ritual, vision quests and soul journeys (as we noted, there is a particular emphasis on mirrors), but also periodic festivals of the dead.

the Hopewell Interaction Sphere has no discernible centre, no single capital, and unlike Chavín it offers little evidence for the existence of permanent elites, priestly or otherwise.

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.

In fact, in many ways Hopewell and ‘Ubaid are polar cultural opposites. The unity of the ‘Ubaid interaction sphere lay in the suppression of individual differences between people and households; in contrast, the unity of Hopewell lay in the celebration of difference.

THE STORY OF CAHOKIA, WHICH LOOKS LIKE IT OUGHT TO BE THE FIRST ‘STATE’ IN AMERICA

In the centuries following the decline of the Hopewell centres, roughly from AD 400 to 800, we start to see a series of familiar developments. First, some groups begin adopting maize as a staple crop and growing it in river valleys along the Mississippi floodplain. Second, actual armed conflict becomes more frequent. In at least some places, this led to populations living for longer periods around their local earthworks. Especially in the Mississippi valley and on adjacent bluffs, a pattern emerged of small towns centred on earthen pyramids and plazas, some fortified, often surrounded by extensive stretches of no-man’s-land. A few came to resemble tiny kingdoms. Eventually this situation led to a veritable urban explosion with its epicentre at the site of Cahokia, which was soon to become the greatest city in the Americas north of Mexico. Cahokia lies in an extensive floodplain along the Mississippi known as the American Bottom.

We are not sure exactly how it happened – as an act of religious revelation, perhaps – but around AD 1050 Cahokia exploded in size, growing from a fairly modest community to a city of over six square miles, including more than 100 earthen mounds built around spacious plazas. Its original population of a few thousand was augmented by perhaps 10,000 more, coming from outside to settle in Cahokia and its satellite towns, totalling something in the order of 40,000 in the American Bottom as a whole.34

Sacred images in Cahokia itself focused not so much on the hawk and falcon symbolism that appeared everywhere else as – fittingly for an increasingly prominent centre of intensive grain production – on the figure of the Corn Mother, who also appears as the Old Woman, a goddess holding a loom.

Whatever happened in Cahokia, it appears to have left extremely unpleasant memories. Along with much of its bird-man mythology, the place was erased from any later oral traditions. After AD 1400 the entire fertile expanse of the American Bottom (which at the city’s height had contained perhaps as many as 40,000 people), along with the territory from Cahokia up to the Ohio River, became what’s referred to in the literature as the Vacant or Empty Quarter: a haunted wilderness of overgrown pyramids and housing blocks crumbling back into swamp, occasionally traversed by hunters but devoid of permanent human settlement.44

In 1540, a member of Hernando De Soto’s expedition described the mico of Coosa and his core territory (a place now known, oddly enough, as Little Egypt) in the following terms: The cacique came out to welcome him in a carrying chair borne on the shoulders of his principal men, seated on a cushion, and covered with a robe of marten skins of the form and size of a woman’s shawl. He wore a crown of feathers on his head; and around him were many Indians playing and singing. The land was very populous and had many large towns and planted fields which reached from one town to the other. It was a charming and fertile land, with good cultivated fields stretching along the rivers.51 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, petty kingdoms of this sort appear to have been the dominant political form in much of the Southeast. Their rulers were treated with reverence and received tribute, but their rule was brittle and unstable.

Today historians seem inclined to see these developments as in large part a reaction to the shock of war, slavery, conquest and disease introduced by European settlers. However, they appear to have been the logical culmination of processes that had been going on for centuries before that.52

Yet we also find stories, such as that of the Aní-Kutánî, about the existence long ago of a theocratic society governed by a hereditary caste of male priests and how they so systematically abused their power, particularly in their abuse of women, that the people rose up and massacred the lot of them.56

What Jesuits reported in the Northeast seems to apply here too: ‘They believe that there is nothing so suitable as Tobacco to appease the passions; that is why they never attend a council without a pipe or calumet in their mouths. The smoke, they say, gives them intelligence, and enables them to see clearly through the most intricate matters.’58

as we have seen, indigenous North American ideas – from the advocacy of individual liberties to scepticism of revealed religion – certainly had an impact on the European Enlightenment, even though, like pipe-smoking, such ideas underwent many transformations in the process.

This last point is critical, because – as outlined earlier – we are used to imagining that the very notion of a people self-consciously creating their own institutional arrangements is largely a product of the Enlightenment. Obviously, the idea that nations could be effectively created by great lawmakers such as Solon of Athens, Lycurgus in Sparta or Zoroaster in Persia, and that their national character was in some sense a product of that institutional structure, was a familiar one in antiquity. But we are generally taught to think of the French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu as the first to build an explicit and systematic body of theory based on the principle of institutional reform with his book The Spirit of the Laws (1748). By doing so, it’s widely believed, he effectively created modern politics. The Founding Fathers of the United States, all avid readers of Montesquieu, were consciously trying to put his theories into practice when they attempted to create a constitution that would preserve the spirit of individual liberty, and spoke of the results as a ‘government of laws and not of men’. As it turns out, precisely this sort of thinking was commonplace in North America well before European settlers appeared on the scene. It might not be a coincidence, in fact, that in 1725 a French explorer named Bourgmont brought an Osage and Missouria delegation across the Atlantic to Paris, around the time Lahontan’s works were at the heig...

the chapters in The Spirit of the Laws which speculate on the modes of savage government seem an almost exact reproduction of what Montesquieu would likely have heard from them, albeit framed by an artificial distinction between those who do or don’t cultivate the land.67

It is an anthropological commonplace that if you want to get a sense of a society’s ultimate values it is best to look at what they consider to be the worst sort of behaviour; and that the best way to get a sense of what they consider to be the worst possible behaviour is by examining ideas about witches. For the Haudenosaunee, the giving of orders is represented as being almost as serious an outrage as the eating of human flesh.69

Population numbers increased fairly quickly for two or three centuries after the widespread adoption of maize, squash and beans, but by the fifteenth century they had levelled off. The Jesuits later reported how Iroquoian women were careful to space their births, setting optimal population to the fish and game capacities of the region, not its potential agricultural productivity. In this way the cultural emphasis on male hunting actually reinforced the power and autonomy of Iroquoian women, who maintained their own councils and officials and whose power in local affairs at least was clearly greater than that of their men.79

The sixteenth century saw a sharp increase in Mississippian influences in Ontario, including various cult objects and ceremonial regalia, and even large numbers of chunkey stones of the same style that also appear at Fort Ancient. Archaeologists refer to all this as ‘Mississippianization’, and it is accompanied by strong evidence for a renewed burst of trade at least as far as Delaware culminating in, among other things, the arrival of enormous quantities of shells and shell beads derived from the mid-Atlantic seaboard from around 1610 onwards, to be piled up in Attiwandaronk tombs.

The Jigonsaseh, however, had chosen not to attend Denonville’s meeting. The arrest of the entire Grand Council left her the highest-ranking League official. Since in such an emergency there was no time to raise new chiefs, she and the remaining clan mothers themselves raised an army. Many of those recruited, it is reported, were themselves Seneca women. As it turned out, the Jigonsaseh was a far superior military tactician to Denonville. After routing the invading French troops near Victor, New York, 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.85

Many held Rousseau personally responsible for the guillotine. By contrast, few nowadays read the ‘traditionalists’ of the nineteenth century, but they’re actually important since it is they, not the Enlightenment philosophes, who are really responsible for modern social theory.

It’s long been recognized that almost all the great issues of modern social science – tradition, solidarity, authority, status, alienation, the sacred – were first raised in the works of men like the theocratic Vicomte de Bonald, the monarchist Comte de Maistre, or the Whig politician and philosopher Edmund Burke as examples of the kind of stubborn social realities which they felt that Enlightenment thinkers, and Rousseau in particular, had refused to take seriously, with (they insisted) disastrous results.

Nowadays, for instance, those on the right are more likely to see themselves as defenders of Enlightenment values, and those on the left its most ardent critics.

one reason why most ‘big histories’ place such a strong focus on technology. Dividing up the human past according to the primary material from which tools and weapons were made (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) or else describing it as a series of revolutionary breakthroughs (Agricultural Revolution, Urban Revolution, Industrial Revolution), they then assume that the technologies themselves largely determine the shape that human societies will take for centuries to come – or at least until the next abrupt and unexpected breakthrough comes along to change everything again.

One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book – indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us – was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation – even, in some ways, as an encyclopaedia of social possibilities.

Systematic studies of the Palaeolithic record offer little evidence of warfare in this specific sense.8 Moreover, since war was always something of a game, it’s not entirely surprising that it has manifested itself in sometimes more theatrical and sometimes more deadly variations.

Sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics are magnifications of elementary types of domination, grounded respectively in the use of violence, knowledge and charisma.

Ancient political systems – especially those, such as the Olmec or Chavín de Huántar, that elude definition in terms of ‘chiefdoms’ and ‘states’ – can often be understood better in terms of how they developed one axis of social power to an extraordinary degree (e.g. charismatic political contests and spectacles in the Olmec case, or control of esoteric knowledge in Chavín). These are what we termed ‘first-order regimes’. Where two axes of power were developed and formalized into a single system of domination we can begin to talk of ‘second-order regimes’. The architects of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, for example, armed the principle of sovereignty with a bureaucracy and managed to extend it across a large territory.

By contrast, the rulers of ancient Mesopotamian city-states made no direct claims to sovereignty, which for them resided properly in heaven. When they engaged in wars over land or irrigation systems, it was only as secondary agents of the gods. Instead they combine...

Jesuits found the details shocking and fascinating. What they observed, sometimes at first hand, was a slow, public and highly theatrical use of violence. True, they conceded, the Wendat torture of captives was no more cruel than the kind directed against enemies of the state back home in France. What seems to have really appalled them, however, was not so much the whipping, boiling, branding, cutting-up – even in some cases cooking and eating – of the enemy, so much as the fact that almost everyone in a Wendat village or town took part, even women and children. The suffering might go on for days, with the victim periodically resuscitated only to endure further ordeals, and it was very much a communal affair.11 The violence seems all the more extraordinary once we recall how these same Wendat societies refused to spank children, directly punish thieves or murderers, or take any measure against their own members that smacked of arbitrary authority. In virtually all other areas of social life they were renowned for solving their problems through calm and reasoned debate.

Perhaps the most stubborn misconception we’ve been tackling has to do with scale. It does seem to be received wisdom in many quarters, academic and otherwise, that structures of domination are the inevitable result of populations scaling up by orders of magnitude; that is, that a necessary correspondence exists between social and spatial hierarchies. Time and again we found ourselves confronted with writing which simply assumes that the larger and more densely populated the social group, the more ‘complex’ the system needed to keep it organized. Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy. Hierarchy, in turn, is used as a euphemism for chains of command (the ‘origins of the state’), which mean that as soon as large numbers of people decided to live in one place or join a common project, they must necessarily abandon the second freedom – to refuse orders – and replace it with legal mechanisms for, say, beating or locking up those who don’t do as they’re told.

All this brings into focus another question. Does this newly established nexus between external violence and internal care – between the most impersonal and the most intimate of human relations – mark the point where everything begins to get confused? Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck? If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?

if stateless societies do regularly organize themselves in such a way that chiefs have no coercive power, then how did top-down forms of organization ever come into the world to begin with? You’ll recall how both Lowie and Clastres were driven to the same conclusion: that they must have been the product of religious revelation. Steiner provided an alternative route. Perhaps, he suggested, it all goes back to charity.