Replied to The Dawn of Everything – Part 1 by Miriam Ronzoni (Crooked Timber)

I recently finished reading* The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow; I enjoyed it very much indeed. I thought I’d write a two parts review for CT, and here’s the first – I will p…

I’ve only begun reading the text for a book club being run by historian Dan Allosso who is also doing an experiment in a communally shared wiki/notebook platform Obsidian, but I’m quite curious about the Neolithic pieces relating to the inhabitants at Stonehenge. In particular, I’ve recently finished Lynne Kelly’s research in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) in which she touches on the primary orality of those peoples and the profound impact that settling into sedentary lifeways may have had on their culture. If she’s correct, then that settlement was dramatically “expensive” and more complex than we’ve been led to believe. This may have had confounding issues within their society as it grew and flourished. I would suspect that Graeber and Wengrow don’t touch on this portion of the complexity, but it may support their general thesis. I’ll try to report back as I get deeper into the topic.

Incidentally, if folks want to join this Obsidian book club on this text, it’s just starting and is comprised of a number of academics and researchers in a vein similar to CT. A quick web search should uncover the details to join.