Page 25 - ModernParadiseFLIPBOOKcomplete

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This debate doesn’t just affect prehistory. As we’ll see, even as written historical
sources start to significantly supplement archaeological finds, there is doubt. Is it
right to talk about the Angles and Saxons “invading” the offshore islands en masse,
supplanting the existing population, as the few written sources tend to imply? Or did
only relatively small numbers come and intermingle with the Britons, as much of the
archaeology suggests? Maybe forming a new elite whose culture and language were
then adopted by the indigenous Britons? Archaeology, historical sources, DNA,
language and even place-name evidence gives us evidence which is not only partial,

but often contradictory. The making of the English remains a process shrouded in
uncertainty.

The Dawn of Everything
These debates are the basis of a controversial new book, The Dawn of Everything: A
New History of Humanity (2021) co-authored by David Graeber, an American
anthropologist and professor at Yale then LSE, and David Wengrow, a British

archaeologist and professor at UCL. David Graeber sadly passed away in 2020 during
the pandemic, from necrotic pancreatisis and David Wengrow completed the book. It
offers a radical new narrative of prehistory and became a best-seller.

Multi-disciplinary approaches – such as archaeology plus anthropology - can be a
good way to generate new insights. But David Graeber brings something else not
usual in a book about prehistory: as well as being a respected academic, he was also
well-known as a left-wing political activist. As reviewers couldn’t resist saying, this is

the book by the archaeologist and the anarchist.

The accepted narrative concerns complexity. It goes like this. Complexity is believed
to have originated with the Neolithic Revolution, the dawn of agriculture. Before this,
foragers lived in small, simple bands. Life and society were simple, focussed on
hunting and gathering. As farming supplanted foraging, things changed radically.

People gave up hunting and gathering and their nomadic way of life was replaced by
a more settled way of life in villages with fields and fixed territorial boundaries. This
created more food, and populations rose. Farming also however caused conflicts over
land and territory. Leaders emerged who organised and protected the people, and
also asserted their control of the food surplus. Society started to become
hierarchical. Essentially, humanity was now on the path to civilisation and social
complexity. Villages became towns, then cities. Leaders became kings and emperors.
Hierarchies diversified as people specialised into farm workers and farm owners,
labourers and craftspeople, soldiers and priests, scribes and bureaucrats. Before you

knew it, we were in Assyria, Babylon, Greece and Rome. Complexity had arrived, all