What Does Archaeology Tell Us About The History Of Civilization & Modern Society? — Looking Into The Golden Period Of Human Existence Without Leaders Or Democracy & Why We Could Get There Again In The Future

What if I told you that the kind of history we’ve been accustomed to studying and reading about when it comes to civilization, is only a part of the story and not the entire picture of human evolution?

We’ve read about how there were large and lavish cities ruled by kings, queens, with palaces, parliament and societal structures, which were necessary to usher in change and progress.

We’ve been acclimatized to thinking that these kind of structures and inequality, as we are grappling with currently in the world, were necessary for the advancement of humanity and technology over the years.

Our history, or at least what we’ve been taught in schools and colleges as students, regarded the invention of agriculture as the starting point in our journey to the present, of modern day society, cities and technology.

However, archaeology today is telling us a different picture.

Archeologist David Wengrow, has been excavating sites across the world, and his findings have been starkly different to what we first thought of as the necessary journey & progress of civilization.

“We’re taught to believe that thousands of years ago, when our ancestors first invented agriculture in that part of the world, that it set in motion a chain of consequences that would shape our modern world in a particular direction, on a particular course.”

“By farming wheat, our ancestors supposedly developed new attachments to the land they lived on. Private property was invented. And with that, the need to defend it. Along with new opportunities for some people to accumulate surpluses, came new labor demands, tying most people to a hard regime of tending their crops while a privileged few received freedom and the leisure to do other things.”

“To think, to experiment, to create the foundations of what we refer to as civilization.”

“Now, according to this familiar story, what happened next is that populations boomed, villages turned into towns, towns became cities, and with the emergence of cities, our species was locked on a familiar trajectory of development where spiraling populations and technological change were bound up with the kind of dreadful inequalities that we see around us today,”

Wengrow’s findings in excavating sites across the world, reveal a staggering 4000 years of human development without monarchs, or societal structures, where populations, ingenuity and technology thrived.

Let’s just call it a golden period, for the moment, and they didn’t need goldilocks conditions as I’ve explained when it comes to the big history of the universe. Sure, they needed access to water and irrigation for agriculture, but this was a largely, an unexplored period of human civilization, that is now emerging from archaeological findings.

“As anyone can tell you, who’s looked at the evidence, almost nothing of what I’ve just been saying is actually true. And the consequences I’m going to suggest are quite profound. Actually, what happened after the invention of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, is a long period of around another 4,000 years in which villages largely remained villages.”

“And actually there’s very little evidence for the emergence of rigid social classes, which is not to say that nothing happened. Over those 4,000 years, technological change actually proceeded apace. Without kings, without bureaucracies, without standing armies, these early farming populations fostered the development of mathematical knowledge, advanced metallurgy.”

“They learned to cultivate olives, vines and date palms. They invented leavened bread, beer, and they developed textile technologies: the potter’s wheel, the sail. And they spread all of these innovations far and wide, from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, up to the Black Sea, and from the Persian Gulf, all the way over to the mountains of Kurdistan, where our excavations were taking place.”

Those 4000 years, and that’s quite a large span of time, brought about grand advancements in human civilization & technology at the time, with societies working together, more concerned about the collective rather than their own selfish needs. It was a period where humanity and everything they created, thrived & progressed.

“I’ve often referred, half jokingly, to this long period of human history as the era of the first global village. Because it’s not just the technological innovations that are so remarkable, but also the social innovations which enabled people to do all these things without forming centers and without raising up a class of permanent leaders over everybody else.”

“Now, oddly enough, this efflorescence of culture is not what we usually refer to as civilization. Instead, that term is usually reserved for harshly unequal societies, which came thousands of years later. Dynastic Mesopotamia. Pharaonic Egypt. Imperial Rome. Societies that were deeply stratified.”

“So in short, I’ve always felt that there was basically something very weird about our concept of civilization, something that leaves us lost for words, tongue tied. When we’re confronted with thousands of years of human beings, say, practicing agriculture, creating new technologies, but not lording it over each other or exploiting each other to the maximum.”

“Why don’t we have better words? Where is our lexicon for those long expanses of human history in which we weren’t behaving that way?”

The findings Wengrow and his team have excavated, tell us a completely different picture of human history to what we’ve grown up to reading about and studying.

So what exactly happened in that period of 4000 years? The story is profound.

“What modern archeology tells us, for example, is that there were already cities on the lower reaches of the Yellow River over 1,000 years before the rise of the Shang. And on the other side of the Pacific, in Peru’s Rio Supe, we already see huge agglomerations of people with monumental architecture 4,000 years before the Inca.”

“In South Asia, 4,500 years ago, the first cities appeared at places like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in the Indus Valley. But these huge settlements present no evidence of kings or queens. No royal monuments, no aggrandizing art. And what’s more, we know that much of the population lived in high-quality housing with excellent sanitation.”

“North of the Black Sea, in the modern country of Ukraine, archaeologists have found evidence of even more ancient cities going back 6,000 years. And again, these huge settlements present no evidence of authoritarian rule. No temples, no palaces, not even any evidence of central storage facilities or top-down bureaucracy.”

“Actually what we see in those cases are these great concentric rings of houses arranged rather like the inside of a tree trunk around neighborhood assembly halls. And it stayed that way for about 800 years.”

Wengrow challenges the concepts and need for the way societal structures that developed after that period evolved and as to whether they were a necessary price to pay for the advancement of civilization.

“Let’s go back to some of those core concepts, the stable reference points around which we’ve been organizing and orchestrating our understanding of world history for hundreds of years.”

“Take, for instance, that notion that for most of its history, the human species lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers, until the advent of agriculture ushered in a new age of inequality. Or the notion that with the arrival of cities came social classes, sacred kings and rapacious oligarchs trampling everyone else underfoot.”

“From our very first history lessons, we’re taught to believe that our modern world, with all of its advantages and amenities, modern health care, space travel, all the things that are good and exciting, couldn’t possibly exist without that original concentration of humanity into larger and larger units and the relentless buildup of inequalities that came with it.”

“Inequality, we’re taught to believe, was the necessary price of civilization.” — David Wengrow

In his TED Talk, David Wengrow argues that what humanity achieved in those 4000 years before the very semblance or instance of modern society, is something that is very relevant and that it must be studied and discussed, and debated and repackaged in history books to coming generations, when they study human history.

Furthermore, he suggests that maybe, the structures of society which prevailed in those 4000 years could be the way ahead for us as a civiliaztion, as we progress into the future.

“Now what do all these details amount to? What does it all mean? Well, at the very least, I’d suggest it’s really a bit far-fetched these days to cling to this notion that the invention of agriculture meant a departure from some egalitarian Eden.”

“Or to cling to the idea that small-scale societies are especially likely to be egalitarian, while large-scale ones must necessarily have kings, presidents and top-down structures of management. And there are also some contemporary implications.”

“Take, for example, the commonplace notion that participatory democracy is somehow natural in a small community. Or perhaps an activist group, but couldn’t possibly have a scale up for anything like a city, a nation or even a region.”

“Well, actually, the evidence of human history, if we’re prepared to look at it, suggests the opposite. If cities and regional confederacies, held together mostly by consensus and cooperation existed thousands of years ago, who’s to stop us creating them again today with technologies that allow us to overcome the friction of distance and numbers?”

“Perhaps it’s not too late to begin learning from all this new evidence of the human past, even to begin imagining what other kinds of civilization we might create if we can just stop telling ourselves that this particular world is the only one possible.”

Maybe an egalitarian society is plausible to consider and who knows, could contrive to happen somewhere along the broad horizon of humanity as we propel ourselves in to the future, which of course, seem farfetched to consider given the current societal structure of the world.

However, history has shown us, if we’re prepared to dig deep enough, that this could be possible again, and that humanity can thrive, working together and co-operating without the boundaries & divides we’ve created in the years since.