The Dawn of Everything
Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow set out to demolish the familiar story of human history, the tidy arc from foraging bands to agriculture to kings to modern states, and replace it with something far stranger and more interesting. Drawing on decades of new archaeological evidence from the Americas, the Eurasian steppes, and the ancient Near East, they argue that our ancestors experimented across millennia with a dazzling variety of political forms, including seasonal monarchies, large cities without kings, and societies that consciously rejected hierarchy after seeing what it cost. The question is not when inequality began, they contend, but how we got stuck here. Published in 2021, just before Graeber's death, the book is a sweeping, argumentative, often funny reconsideration of what it has meant to be human.
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Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow argue that the standard story of human prehistory, hunter gatherers to farmers to states, ignores thousands of years of evidence and other ways of being together.
The Dawn of Everything is David Graeber and David Wengrow's 2021 challenge to standard accounts of human prehistory. They argue that early humans were politically experimental and that the Sapiens-style narrative of inevitable hierarchy is wrong.
The Dawn of Everything draws on extensive recent archaeology and anthropology research. The synthesis is contested by some specialists, but the core argument has been widely engaged in academic and popular debate.
The Dawn of Everything was written by David Graeber, published in 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The Dawn of Everything is 704 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Dawn of Everything takes most readers 11 to 15 hours to finish.
The Dawn of Everything is a standalone novel by David Graeber, not part of a series.
The Dawn of Everything is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
