David Wengrow gives TAG43 Plenary Lecture

David's Plenary Lecture for TAG43 was entitled “The Nebelivka Hypothesis” (or, Cities against the State). 

Building on his previous work with David Graeber, David Wengrow discussed a new collaboration with Forensic Architecture, suggesting an alignment between these two projects, which both seek to query the authority of state narratives by extracting counter-archives of information: respectively from the archaeological record, and from crime scenes.

To explore this alignment, David considered the case of 6000-year-old settlements identified by archaeologists on the Bug-Dnieper interfluve, in modern Ukraine, which have been used to question the definition of “urbanisation” and the position of the modern state as a telos of human political development.

The conference theme for TAG43 was Revolutions. Linking to the ideas of Vere Gordon Childe, who worked at the University of Edinburgh, the conference organisers wished to encourage reflection on the multiple dimensions that the term 'revolutions' can encompass - including revolutions in the past; revolutions in our understanding, perceptions, and contemporary experiences of the past; revolutions in our conceptual and methodological approaches to the past; and revolutions in our professional practices, as well as aspects such ethics, inclusivity, and decolonisation.

David was also invited to give the Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in November.

Read more

• TAG43 website
• Novara Media Interview
• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity