Hubbry Logo
David WengrowDavid WengrowMain
Open search
David Wengrow
Community hub
David Wengrow
logo
8 pages, 0 posts
0 subscribers
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
David Wengrow
David Wengrow
David Wengrow
View on Wikipedia
from Wikipedia

David Wengrow FSA (born 25 July 1972) is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.[1] He co-authored the New York Times[2] bestseller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in 2022,[3] and won the 20th Wenjin Book Prize, one of China's highest literary honours.[4] Wengrow has contributed essays on topics such as social inequality and climate change to The Guardian[5] and The New York Times.[6] In 2021 he was ranked No. 10 in ArtReview's Power 100 list of the most influential people in art.[7]

Key Information

Education

[edit]

Wengrow enrolled at the University of Oxford in 1993, obtaining a BA in archaeology and anthropology.[8] He went on to qualify for an MSt in world archaeology in 1998 and then studied for a D.Phil. under the supervision of Roger Moorey completed in 2001.[9] Andrew Sherratt was a notable influence during Wengrow's time at Oxford.[10]

Academic career

[edit]

Between 2001 and 2004 Wengrow was Henri Frankfort Fellow at the Warburg Institute and Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. He was appointed to a lectureship at the UCL Institute of Archaeology in 2004, and in 2011 he was made Professor of Comparative Archaeology (a post formerly held by Peter Ucko).[11] Wengrow has conducted archaeological excavations in Africa and the Middle East, most recently with the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraqi Kurdistan.[12] He is the author of three books and numerous academic articles on topics including the origins of writing, ancient art, Neolithic societies, and the emergence of the first states in Egypt and Mesopotamia.[13] In 2020 Wengrow completed a book on the history of inequality with the anthropologist David Graeber just three weeks before Graeber's death.[14] The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was published in the autumn of 2021.[15]

Honours

[edit]

Wengrow is a recipient of the Antiquity Prize[16] and has delivered the Rostovtzeff Lectures (New York University),[17] the Jack Goody Lectures (Max Planck Institute)[18] the Biennial Henry Myers Lecture (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain),[19] the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology (British Academy),[20] and the Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Memorial Lecture in the Humanities (University of Chicago).[21] He served as external coordinator of the Mellon Research Initiative at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts[22] and was Distinguished Visitor at the University of Auckland.[23] In 2023, Wengrow was awarded the Albertus Magnus Professorship by the University of Cologne, among the university's highest academic honours,[24] with previous recipients including such renowned scientists and researchers as Michael Tomasello, Bruno Latour, and Judith Butler.[25] He is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.[26]

Selected publications

[edit]

Books

[edit]
  • The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000–2650 BC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006.
  • What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press 2010.
  • The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2014.
  • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (co-authored with David Graeber). New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021

Short essays

[edit]

References

[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

David Wengrow

View on Grokipedia
from Grokipedia
David Wengrow FSA is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Trained at the University of Oxford, where he earned a BA, MSt, and DPhil in archaeology and anthropology, Wengrow has conducted fieldwork in Africa and the Middle East, focusing his research on the origins of writing, ancient art, Neolithic societies, and the first cities and states. He achieved international recognition as co-author, with the anthropologist David Graeber, of the 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a New York Times bestseller that marshals archaeological and historical evidence to contest linear, deterministic models of social evolution—such as the notion that agriculture inexorably produced hierarchy and inequality—while emphasizing prehistoric human experiments with diverse, scalable forms of social and economic organization. The work, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and ranked Wengrow among the most influential figures in contemporary art discourse.

Early Life and Education

Formal Education

David Wengrow pursued his undergraduate studies at the , where he earned a degree in and in 1996. He continued at for graduate work, obtaining a in World Archaeology in 1998. Wengrow completed his , a DPhil in , at the same institution, with his training emphasizing the combined fields of and available at the undergraduate level there.

Academic Career

University Appointments

David Wengrow's postdoctoral career began with a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church, , held from 2 September 2001 to 2 September 2004. During this period, he also briefly served as Frankfort Fellow in Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at the , part of the University of London's , from 1 June to 2 August 2002. In 2004, Wengrow joined the Institute of Archaeology at (UCL) as Lecturer in , a role he maintained until 2 2009. He was subsequently promoted to Reader in Comparative at the same institution, effective 1 2009, and held this position until 2 2011. Concurrently, from 1 2010, he has served as Honorary in UCL's Department of . From 1 September 2011 to 1 September 2014, Wengrow took a position as Andrew W. Mellon Project Coordinator at the Institute of Fine Arts, . He returned to UCL in 2014 as of Comparative at the Institute of Archaeology, a professorship he has held continuously since 1 September 2014. Wengrow has additionally undertaken visiting professorships at , the , the , and the , though specific dates for these appointments are not detailed in his institutional profile.

Archaeological Fieldwork

Wengrow has conducted archaeological fieldwork primarily in and the , with a focus on prehistoric societies and early urban developments. His excavations emphasize comparative analysis of social transformations, including transitions and the emergence of complex settlements. In the , Wengrow co-directed excavations at Gurga Chiya and Tepe Marani, two adjacent mounds in the Plain of , beginning with a pilot season from May 4 to 9, 2012. These sites, previously unexplored in modern terms, yielded of Late Ubaid-period occupation (mid-5th millennium BC), including , lithics, and structural remains that inform on early agricultural surplus and settlement patterns in the region. Subsequent seasons expanded stratigraphic investigations, revealing connections to broader Mesopotamian trajectories. Wengrow also participated in fieldwork at Tel Bet Yerah (ancient Khirbet el-Kerak) in northern , collaborating with through the Institute of Archaeology at UCL. This project targeted Late to Early layers (ca. 4500–3000 BC), uncovering urban foundations, fortifications, and that challenge linear models of in the southern Levant. In , Wengrow's fieldwork has centered on the Nile Valley and adjacent regions, contributing to understandings of cultural convergences between Egyptian and Sudanese sites during the . These efforts involved survey and excavation components tied to his research on early Egyptian , though specific site dates remain less documented in public records compared to his Middle Eastern projects.

Research Focus and Theoretical Contributions

Core Areas of Inquiry

David Wengrow's research centers on comparative archaeology, emphasizing the material and symbolic dimensions of early complex societies in the , , and . His inquiries explore the origins of , , and , often challenging conventional narratives of linear progression from to hierarchical states. Through fieldwork in and the , Wengrow examines how prehistoric and early historic communities experimented with diverse social structures, including forms of urban life that lacked centralized authority or pronounced inequality. A primary focus is the of early , spanning approximately 10,000 to 2650 BC, where Wengrow investigates social transformations from settlements to proto-dynastic polities. He analyzes the interplay of environmental factors, such as shifts, with technological and symbolic innovations, including the development of monumental and early writing systems, to understand emergent hierarchies without assuming inevitability. This work draws on from settlement patterns and artifact assemblages to argue against deterministic models of social evolution, highlighting contingent historical processes instead. In the ancient Near East, particularly Mesopotamia, Wengrow's studies address the "first cities and states," probing the Neolithic foundations of urbanism and the role of ancient art in mediating social relations. He critiques the assumption that urbanization inherently produces inequality, citing archaeological data from sites showing seasonal or playful experiments in governance, such as temporary hierarchies or egalitarian urban clusters. These inquiries extend to broader questions of materiality—how objects and images embodied power and cosmology—revealing alternatives to the standard sequence of hunter-gatherer bands evolving into agrarian despotisms. Wengrow also engages theoretical debates on human social evolution, advocating for recognition of "forgotten possibilities" in , where societies oscillated between scalable institutions and deliberate scale reduction. His integrates global case studies to dismantle Eurocentric or seasonally deterministic views, emphasizing empirical anomalies—like unfortified megasites or stateless cities—that undermine unilinear theories. This approach prioritizes archaeological evidence over ideological priors, underscoring how early humans actively shaped scalable freedoms rather than passively adapting to environmental or cognitive constraints.

Key Arguments on Human Social Evolution

Wengrow, in collaboration with the late anthropologist , argues that conventional narratives of human social evolution—positing a unidirectional progression from small-scale egalitarian bands to hierarchical agricultural states—oversimplify prehistoric variability and ignore archaeological evidence of deliberate social experimentation. Traditional models, drawing from 19th-century evolutionary theories, assume inevitably fostered , population growth, and top-down authority, but Wengrow contends these links are not causal necessities, as evidenced by pre-agricultural monuments like in (circa 9600–7000 BCE), where large-scale cooperative projects occurred without signs of centralized elites or permanent inequality. A central claim is that early human societies exhibited "seasonal" or contextual flexibility in organization, adopting egalitarian structures during winter gatherings for monumental works while dispersing into hierarchical or playful formations in summer, as inferred from sites in Ice Age (circa 40,000–10,000 BCE) showing artistic sophistication and burial equality without hierarchical artifacts. This challenges deterministic views by demonstrating humans' capacity to "turn on and off" dominance, with from indigenous North American groups like the Wendat reinforcing that could be performative and reversible, not entrenched. Wengrow emphasizes three "fundamental" freedoms lost in later : the to abandon one's , to disobey authority figures, and to invent new social forms, which enabled such variability before large-scale agriculture around 9000 BCE in regions like the . Archaeological data from "anarchic" urban experiments, such as the Neolithic settlements of in (circa 7100–5700 BCE) or Mesopotamian cities like (circa 4000–3000 BCE), reveal dense populations with public architecture but absent palaces, kings, or slave quarters, contradicting assumptions that scale necessitates hierarchy. Similarly, in the , mound-building cultures like in (circa 1700–1100 BCE) managed vast earthworks through decentralized networks, while some foraging societies maintained inequality via ritual or seasonal chiefs, inverting expected correlations between subsistence and power. Wengrow attributes the eventual dominance of rigid hierarchies not to ecological imperatives but to cultural "myths" or self-imposed constraints that narrowed human possibilities after the around 20,000 BCE. These arguments reposition inequality as a contingent outcome rather than an evolutionary stage, urging reevaluation of why diverse social options—evident across , , and the —gave way to state monopolies on violence by the (circa 3000 BCE). Wengrow cautions against overreliance on ethnographic analogies from recent small-scale societies, advocating instead for direct engagement with material records that reveal "indigenous critique" of European progress myths, as articulated by 17th-century Huron thinkers influencing Enlightenment ideas. While acknowledging debates over interpretive biases in selective site emphasis, he maintains that cumulative evidence from global excavations undermines unilinear models, favoring a view of human history as "playful" and open-ended until constrained by later institutions.

Collaboration with David Graeber

David Wengrow first met anthropologist in 2010 at a conference in New Orleans, where Graeber expressed admiration for Wengrow's research on ancient Middle Eastern cylinder seals. Their shared sense of being academic outsiders, along with a common Jewish background and humor, fostered an immediate intellectual rapport that led to a decade-long collaboration blending and . An early product of their partnership was the 2018 essay "How to Change the Course of Human History," published in Eurozine, which critiqued the conventional narrative of an "agricultural revolution" as the driver of social inequality and instead highlighted evidence of flexible, non-deterministic transitions in prehistoric societies. In this piece, Graeber and Wengrow argued that large-scale social changes, such as the emergence of farming communities, often occurred without corresponding increases in hierarchy or state formation, drawing on archaeological data from regions like the Fertile Crescent and Ukraine's Neolithic sites. Their most substantial joint endeavor was , a 704-page book completed in 2020 and published posthumously for Graeber on October 19, 2021, by . What began as a planned short expanded over ten years into a comprehensive reevaluation of human social evolution, with the authors meticulously rewriting each other's drafts to integrate Graeber's ethnographic and theoretical insights—particularly on value systems and anarchist possibilities—with Wengrow's archaeological evidence from global sites spanning , the Americas, and . The manuscript was finalized mere weeks before Graeber's death on September 2, 2020, allowing Wengrow to oversee its publication while preserving their original vision, including the title despite publisher reservations. Central to their collaborative arguments was the rejection of unilinear models of progress, positing instead that foragers and early agrarians possessed three fundamental "freedoms": to move away from problematic situations, to disobey arbitrary , and to create new social forms through playful or seasonal experimentation. Examples included Mesopotamian urban experiments without kings, North American Indigenous polities that alternated between and equality, and European settlements showing no inevitable path to domination. This framework, grounded in cross-disciplinary evidence, aimed to demonstrate that human capacities for were broader and more inventive than Enlightenment-era myths suggested, challenging assumptions derived from thinkers like Rousseau and Hobbes.

Publications

Major Books

Wengrow's first major monograph, The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East , c. 10,000 to 2,650 BC, was published in 2006 by as part of the Cambridge World Archaeology series. The book analyzes archaeological evidence from the Nile Valley and surrounding regions to trace the transition from societies to complex polities, emphasizing processes of , craft specialization, and symbolic practices rather than from external influences. It draws on excavation data from sites like and Hierakonpolis to argue for indigenous developments in social complexity over 7,000 years. In 2010, Wengrow published What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West with , later updated in paperback in 2018. This work interrogates the origins of key civilizational traits—such as , writing, and monumental architecture—in and , critiquing Eurocentric models by highlighting experimental and non-linear trajectories in early . Wengrow integrates archaeological findings with comparative to propose that "" emerged from deliberate social choices and seasonal gatherings rather than deterministic environmental or economic pressures. The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the Prehistoric West, released in 2013 by , explores the cognitive and symbolic dimensions of early art in and the , focusing on hybrid imagery from the to periods. Wengrow argues that monstrous motifs in cave paintings and figurines reflect deliberate experiments in human-animal boundaries, informed by ethnographic analogies and neuroscientific insights into perception, challenging views of as mere representation. Wengrow's most widely recognized book, co-authored with anthropologist David Graeber, is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, published on October 19, 2021, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Penguin UK internationally. Spanning 704 pages, it synthesizes global archaeological and ethnographic data to contest unilinear theories of social evolution, positing that hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies exhibited scalable forms of hierarchy, playfulness in governance, and rejection of seasonal authority without inevitable descent into inequality. The book sold over 100,000 copies in its first year and became a New York Times bestseller, emphasizing Indigenous critiques of European thought and evidence from sites like Göbekli Tepe and Poverty Point.

Selected Articles and Essays

In "How to Change the Course of Human History (at Least, the Part That's Already Happened)," co-authored with and published in Eurozine on March 2, 2018, Wengrow and Graeber challenge the conventional narrative of an inevitable progression from to farming and , citing archaeological evidence of large-scale seasonal festivals and egalitarian urban experiments that suggest humans actively experimented with social forms rather than following deterministic paths. Wengrow's "Farewell to the 'Childhood of Man': , , and the Origins of Inequality," appearing in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in June 2015, critiques linear models of human development by proposing that early inequalities emerged through ritualized, seasonal practices in societies, such as monument-building episodes, rather than solely from sedentary or surplus accumulation. In "Viewpoint: Archaeology of Strikes and Revolution," published in Archaeology International in 2018, Wengrow, with co-authors Richard F. Peters and Stephen Quirke, analyzes material traces of collective labor resistance in and , arguing that such events represent deliberate social disruptions akin to modern strikes, challenging assumptions of passive acceptance in early states. More recently, Wengrow's essay "An Archeological Revolution Transforms Our Image of Human Freedoms," published in on July 5, 2024, synthesizes findings from global archaeology to highlight evidence of flexible social institutions, including self-organizing cities without centralized authority, emphasizing human capacity for seasonal shifts between hierarchy and equality. "Inequality at the Dawn of the Bronze Age: The Case of Başur Höyük, a 'Royal' Cemetery at the Margins of the Mesopotamian World," co-authored with Becky Hassett and Haluk Sağlamtimur and published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal in 2025, uses bioarchaeological data from a peripheral cemetery to reassess the spread of elite inequality, suggesting it involved localized adaptations rather than uniform imposition from core Mesopotamian centers.

Reception and Criticisms

Achievements and Positive Reception

David Wengrow's collaborative work with , The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), achieved significant commercial success as an international , translated into multiple languages and receiving widespread attention for challenging conventional narratives of social evolution. The book earned the 2025 Wenjin Book Award, one of China's most prestigious literary honors, recognizing its intellectual impact and accessibility to broad audiences. In academic circles, Wengrow has been honored with the Professorship in 2023 by the , one of the institution's highest distinctions for scholars advancing interdisciplinary inquiry into human history. He also received the Distinguished Visitor Award from the in 2019, reflecting recognition of his contributions to and global . These accolades underscore his influence in reshaping debates on the flexibility of early human societies, with praised for its erudite synthesis of archaeological evidence and anthropological insights. Scholars have lauded the work for its provocative reexamination of human freedom and seasonality in social organization, describing it as a "fascinating, radical, and playful" intervention in evolutionary history that highlights underappreciated evidence of egalitarian experiments. Reviews in outlets like Strange Matters highlight its "electrifying" quality, crediting Wengrow's archaeological expertise for grounding ambitious claims in empirical data from diverse regions, including Mesopotamian urbanism and North American indigenous polities. Invited lectures, such as the 2023 McDonald Annual Lecture, further demonstrate his role in disseminating these ideas to professional audiences.

Scholarly Criticisms and Debates

Scholars have debated Wengrow's arguments, particularly those advanced in (2021, co-authored with ), for challenging unilinear models of social evolution while allegedly relying on selective evidence and underemphasizing structural constraints. Critics contend that the book's portrayal of ancient societies as capable of seasonal "experimentation" with egalitarian and hierarchical forms overlooks ecological and demographic pressures, such as and resource scarcity, that drove transitions to and states. For instance, the work dismisses quantitative metrics like Gini coefficients for inequality without proposing falsifiable alternatives, rendering its rejection of evolutionary narratives more rhetorical than empirical. Evidentiary critiques highlight misrepresentations, such as the emphasis on Huron critic Kandiaronk's purported influence on Enlightenment thinkers via Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce de Lahontan's Dialogues with a Savage (1703), treated as near-authentic transcripts despite scholarly consensus on their fictional elements and European stylistic impositions. Similarly, the book's focus on the last 30,000–40,000 years neglects earlier African evidence of dating to 120,000–160,000 years ago, limiting its scope and ignoring sub-Saharan hunter-gatherer adaptations that informed over 300,000 years. Reviewers in Historical Materialism identify three core issues: selective evidence (e.g., speculative interpretations over primatological data on sociability), political bias against egalitarian narratives that could support contemporary Indigenous agency, and theoretical voluntarism that rejects modes of production without coherent . Theoretical debates center on the dismissal of materialist explanations, including Marxist stages of history and Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), in favor of human "playfulness" in social forms. Critics argue this aligns inadvertently with conservative views by denying a pre-inequality baseline in early societies, while misrepresenting complex foragers like the or Kwakiutl as voluntary hierarchies unbound by environmental drivers. Anthropologist James Suzman, in his assessment, faults the neglect of African foragers' localized knowledge, portraying them as unrepresentative "refugees" rather than exemplars of adaptive strategies. Factual errors, such as depicting as an affluent servant-employer in 1754 (when he was a 42-year-old impoverished rejecting ), further undermine claims of Indigenous critiques reshaping European thought. These critiques have prompted responses from Wengrow, who in a 2022 Guardian interview acknowledged openness to scrutiny while defending the synthesis of archaeological data against "big history" determinism. Debates persist on whether Wengrow's emphasis on —deliberate social inversions—illuminates variability or evades causal realism in transitions, with some scholars praising the provocation despite methodological gaps.

Empirical and Methodological Challenges

Critics of Wengrow's archaeological interpretations, especially in The Dawn of Everything (2021) co-authored with David Graeber, contend that the authors selectively emphasize atypical cases of social experimentation—such as purportedly egalitarian early cities like Çatalhöyük (ca. 7100–6000 BCE) or seasonal hierarchies among 19th-century Native American groups like the Cheyenne—while downplaying pervasive indicators of emerging inequality, including differential grave goods, monumental architecture signaling elite control, and defensive structures across Neolithic Eurasia and the Americas. For example, Upper Palaeolithic burials from Sungir (ca. 30,000 BCE) with lavish grave offerings and evidence of social pathologies are portrayed as anomalies challenging linear evolution, yet archaeologists like Brian Hayden classify them within transegalitarian societies exploiting rich resources, fitting updated models of competitive feasting and status differentiation rather than refuting broader trends toward hierarchy. This approach risks constructing a narrative of perpetual human freedom by sidelining quantitative syntheses, such as those from over 300 Eurasian sites showing Gini coefficients for wealth inequality rising from near-zero in hunter-gatherer contexts to 0.35–0.65 in early agricultural polities by 3000 BCE. Methodologically, Wengrow and Graeber's framework has drawn fire for its aversion to falsifiable hypotheses and statistical rigor, opting instead for rhetorical critiques of "evolutionist" paradigms without proposing testable alternatives or engaging structures that underpin in ethnographic and archaeological data. Ian Morris highlights the near-total absence of metrics like those in Kohler and Smith's analysis of 10,000 years of inequality, arguing that impressionistic appeals to "playful" or voluntary social forms—e.g., interpreting Mesopotamian monuments (ca. 3500 BCE) as experimental rather than authoritative—conflate outliers with norms, yielding a voluntarist view detached from material constraints like subsistence pressures and demographic scaling. Reviews in further note speculative overreach, such as extrapolating Enlightenment ideas from unverified 17th-century Jesuit accounts of Wendat critic Kandiaronk, while ignoring structural factors like mode-of-production transitions evident in palatial economies from (ca. 4000–3100 BCE). These critiques underscore a tension between the book's ambition to reframe human history through agency and the demands of archaeological , where sparse perishable invites interpretive latitude but requires cross-validation against bioarchaeological and paleoenvironmental proxies.

Honours and Awards

Academic Distinctions

David Wengrow has held the position of Professor of Comparative at the Institute of Archaeology, (UCL), since September 2014. Earlier in his career at UCL, he served as Reader in Comparative from September 2009 to September 2011 and as Lecturer in from September 2004 to September 2009. These roles reflect his progression within one of the world's leading centers for archaeological research, where his work emphasizes comparative analysis of early , , and symbolic systems across , , and the . Prior to his permanent appointment at UCL, Wengrow was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, , from 2001 to 2004. He also held the Frankfort Fellowship in Near Eastern Art and at the , , during June to August 2002, supporting specialized research in ancient Mesopotamian material culture. Wengrow is an elected Fellow of the (FSA), a distinction recognizing scholarly contributions to the study of and . Wengrow has undertaken several prestigious visiting positions, including professorships at , , , and . In 2019, he received the Distinguished Visitor Award from , facilitating collaborative research on Pacific and global archaeological comparisons. A highlight came in 2023 when he was appointed the Professor at , one of that institution's most esteemed honors, typically awarded to scholars advancing interdisciplinary historical and scientific inquiry. His academic standing is further evidenced by invitations to deliver named lectures, such as the Henry Myers Lecture for the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2014, which addressed foundational debates in social evolution. Wengrow has also been selected for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the in March 2026, a series honoring thinkers whose work illuminates ethical and civilizational questions through empirical and theoretical rigor.

Literary and Public Recognition

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-authored with David Graeber and published in 2021, garnered substantial literary acclaim as an international bestseller that featured on multiple books-of-the-year lists. The work was shortlisted for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, recognizing its contributions to political discourse. In 2025, it received the Wenjin Book Award from China's National Library, one of the nation's highest literary honors, highlighting its global impact on discussions of human history. Wengrow's public profile has been elevated through prominent speaking engagements that disseminate his archaeological insights to broader audiences. In 2022, he delivered a TED Talk titled "A new understanding of and the roots of inequality," challenging conventional narratives on social evolution and amassing widespread viewership. He presented at the Fronteiras do Pensamento forum in in 2023, engaging international publics on intellectual frontiers. Further, Wengrow delivered the McDonald Annual Lecture in 2023 on archaeology's potential contributions to freedom, and the SAGE Lecture at the , that year. In 2025, he was selected to deliver the 2026 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the , underscoring ongoing public intellectual recognition.

References

  1. https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/140-david-wengrow
  2. https://www.sal.org.uk/fellows/prof-david-wengrow/
  3. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything/
  4. https://vijmag.bg/en/article/david-wengrow-really-human-story-ends
  5. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1555780/1/Wengrow%2520et%2520al.%25202016.pdf
  6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311477917_Gurga_Chiya_and_Tepe_Marani_new_excavations_in_the_Shahrizor_plain_Iraqi_Kurdistan
  7. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4957802
  8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276191394_Exploring_connections_a_new_fieldwork_collaboration_at_Tel_Bet_Yerah_Khirbet_el-Kerak
  9. https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ai/article/id/857/print/
  10. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/cultural-convergence-in-the-neolithic-of-the-nile-valley-a-prehistoric-perspective-on-egypts-place-in-africa/198005B5D23B644951E17B3F0803AF74
  11. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1425754/1/WengrowetalAntiquitySubmission3.pdf
  12. https://www.ted.com/speakers/david_wengrow
  13. https://uni-koeln.de/en/university/news/news/news-detail/the-archaeologist-david-wengrow-is-the-2023-albertus-magnus-professor
  14. https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/david-wengrow-we-need-dismantle-myths-surrounding-origins-our-social-order
  15. https://aeon.co/essays/an-archeological-revolution-transforms-our-image-of-human-freedoms
  16. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/12/david-wengrow-graeber-dawn-of-history-interview
  17. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018833043/david-wengrow-rewriting-the-history-of-humanity
  18. https://www.wired.com/story/david-wengrow-dawn-of-everything/
  19. https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/
  20. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/dawn-of-everything-excerpt/
  21. https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/140-david-wengrow/publications
  22. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/what-makes-civilization-9780199699421
  23. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/the-species-above-constraints-a-review-of-the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity-by-david-graeber-and-david-wengrow/
  24. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9655.12247
  25. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/apr/ucl-archaeologist-wins-one-chinas-highest-literature-awards
  26. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-historical-sciences/news/2025/apr/david-wengrow-wins-one-chinas-most-prestigious-literature-awards
  27. https://iah.unc.edu/event/unc-anthropology-colloquium-series-david-wengrow/
  28. https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ai/article/id/2086/
  29. https://strangematters.coop/dawn-of-everything-graeber-wengrow-review/
  30. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-radical-promise-of-human-history/
  31. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osqj2E1sd48
  32. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720603
  33. https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity
  34. https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/12/17/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong/
  35. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/everything-goes-three-problems-with-the-dawn-of-everything-a-review-of-the-dawn-of-everything-by-david-graeber-and-david-wengrow/
  36. https://libcom.org/article/wrong-about-almost-everything-review-dawn-everything-david-graeber-david-wengrow
  37. https://www.chartwellspeakers.com/speaker/david-wengrow/
  38. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/jun/comparative-archaeology-expert-recognised-prestigious-honour-and-lecture-series
  39. https://therai.org.uk/events/myers-lecture-david-wengrow/
  40. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/news-events/news-events/news/the-orwell-prizes-2022-the-finalists/
  41. https://www.ted.com/talks/david_wengrow_a_new_understanding_of_human_history_and_the_roots_of_inequality
  42. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-historical-sciences/news/2023/jun/david-wengrow-gives-sage-lecture-2023
  43. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-historical-sciences/news/2025/oct/david-wengrow-give-tanner-lectures-human-values-2026
Add your contribution
Related Hubs
User Avatar
No comments yet.