David Wengrow has been awarded the J.I. Staley Prize on behalf of himself and David Graeber for their book, the New York Times bestseller, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and winner of the Wenjin Book Award for 2025.
This prestigious prize for ‘outstanding research’ and ‘innovative works that go beyond traditional frontiers and dominant schools of thought in anthropology and add new dimensions to our understanding of the human species’ is awarded by the School of Advanced Research at the plenary of the American Anthropological Association, being held in New Orleans, this year.
Established in 1907, the School for Advanced Research (SAR), based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, provides the time, space, and inspiration for innovative, creative work at the intersection of the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
The J.I. Staley Prize is decided by a committee of senior academics, following a competitive selection process, and is awarded to a ground-breaking book that has been in print for a number of years, so as to assess its wider scholarly impact.
According to David:
I am extremely honoured to receive this award for outstanding scholarship from the School of Advanced Research, in recognition of my work with David Graeber. Our book is an attempt to revive a dialogue between archaeology and anthropology, which has been dormant since the 1960s, and an invitation to think differently about the course of human history: an experiment, in which we hope many others will join us."
“The Staley Prize honors work that redefines how we understand humanity. The Dawn of Everything dares to question foundational narratives about progress, hierarchy, and civilization, and in doing so, invites a broader and more inclusive conversation about who we are and how we might live together."
Morris W. Foster, President of SAR
David is joint co-ordinator of the Archaeology and Anthropology undergraduate degree programme (with UCL Anthropology). He has authored other volumes including The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, c. 10,000 – 2650 BC (Cambridge UP); What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West (Oxford UP); The Origins of the Monsters: Image & Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Princeton UP), as well as academic articles on topics such as the origins of writing, ancient art, Neolithic societies, and the emergence of the first cities and states. David has also been invited to give the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of Utah in March 2026.
Image: Prof David Wengrow, UCL Institute of Archaeology (Image credit: Tom Jamieson)
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