David Wengrow to give the McDonald Institute Annual Lecture for 2023

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and I describe three basic forms of human freedom: to move away, to disobey, and to transform the social order. Far from being a special achievement of Western civilization, we argue, these freedoms were available to a great many societies across the span of human history, extending back into our species’ prehistoric past. Today, these same freedoms have been largely erased from the lives of most people, such that it is difficult for us now to even imagine what it might mean to live in a world based on such principles. My lecture will consider the challenge of recovering and visualising these forms of freedom in the archaeological record, as an antidote to teleological understandings of social evolution.