Wengrow — “They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological…”

Source: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity — David Graeber & David Wengrow

Book page: graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything

From: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity — Quotes

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They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia.
― David Graeber, [The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity]