Contemplative Inquiry

Extract from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (1), exploring the notion of ‘concrete science’. The idea comes from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who is quoted as saying that “there are two distinct modes of scientific thought … two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and imagination: the other at a remove from it”. ‘Concrete science’ is the first. The specific focus, in this part of the book, is on the development of Early Neolithic societies in lowland parts of the Fertile Crescent, especially along the valleys of the Jordan and Euphrates rivers.

Graeber and Wengrow write: “It’s important to recall that most of humanity’s greatest scientific discoveries – the invention of farming, pottery, weaving, metallurgy, systems of maritime navigation, monumental architecture, the classification and indeed domestication of plants and animals. and so on” come out of ‘concrete science’. But what does such a science actually look like, in the archaeological record? “The answer lies precisely in its ‘concreteness’. Invention in one domain finds echoes and analogies across a whole range of others, which might otherwise seem completely unrelated”.

“We can see this clearly in early Neolithic cereal cultivation. Recall that flood-retreat farming required people to establish durable settlements in mud-based environments, like swamps and lake margins. Doing so meant becoming intimate with the properties of soils and clays, carefully observing their fertility under different conditions, but also experimenting with them as tectonic materials, or even as vehicles of abstract thought. As well as supporting new forms of cultivation, soil and clay – mixed with wheat and chaff – became basic materials of construction: essential in building the first permanent houses; used to make ovens, furniture and insulation – almost everything, in fact, except pottery, a later invention in this part of the world.

“But clay was also used, in the same times and places, to (literally) model relationships of utterly different kinds, between men and women, people and animals. People started using its plastic qualities to figure out mental problems, making small geometric tokens that many see as direct precursors to later systems of mathematical notation. Archaeologists find these tiny numerical devices in direct association with figurines of herd animals and full-bodied women: the kind of miniatures that stimulate so much speculation about Neolithic spirituality, and which find later echoes in myths about the demiurgic, life-giving properties of clay. As we’ll soon see, earth and clay even come to redefine relationships between the living and the dead.

“Seen this way, the ‘origins of farming’ start to look less like and economic transition and more like a media revolution, which was also a social revolution, encompassing everything from horticulture to architecture, mathematics to thermodynamics, and from religion to the remodelling of gender roles. And while we can’t know who exactly was doing what in this brave new world, it’s abundantly clear that women’s work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What’s more, it was all carried out in ways that made radical inequality an extremely unlikely outcome”.

(1) David Graeber and David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Penguin Books, 2022 (First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane in 2021)

NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. As an activist, he also helped to make Occupy Wall Street (2011) an era-defining moment. He died on 2 September 2020. David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at University College London. He conducts fieldwork in Africa and the Middle East and is the author of What Makes Civilisation? Following David Graeber’s death shortly after the text of The Dawn of Everything was completed, David Wengrow has overseen its publication.