David Wengrow

British anthropologist and co-author (with David Graeber) of The Dawn of Everything — a radical re-reading of the archaeological and anthropological record to challenge standard narratives of social evolution.

The Graeber-Wengrow revisionism: using archaeological evidence, Wengrow (the empirical specialist) and Graeber (the political theorist) argue that early human societies were far more politically experimental than previously assumed — some were complex but egalitarian, some oscillated seasonally between hierarchical and egalitarian structures, and the 'inevitable march from band to tribe to chiefdom to state' is an ideological construction, not an empirical fact. The book's political implication: hierarchy is not inevitable, and humans have always had more political imagination than the standard narrative allows.