Neighbours Vol. 5: Origin Stories. An Archaeological Perspective on Human Freedoms, David Wengrow / HITAM, TPOD, THEMA
Event details
| Date | 02.04.2025 |
| Hour | 18:30 › 20:30 |
| Speaker |
David Wengrow is Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology. David trained in archaeology and anthropology at the University of Oxford, where he obtained his doctorate (DPhil) and was Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church. Since joining UCL, David has also held visiting professorships at New York University, the University of Auckland, and the universities of Freiburg and Cologne. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Africa and the Middle East, and is the author of books 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 contributed op-eds on climate change and inequality to The Guardian, and The New York Times, and was ranked #10 in Art Review’s (2021) ‘Most influential people in the contemporary art world.’ He is co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Penguin), a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing |
| Location |
CO-1
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
Origin Stories: An Archaeological Perspective on Human Freedoms
David Wengrow, Professor of Comparative Archaeology, University College London
The history of human societies has often been conceptualised as a story about the “Origins of Inequality,” and the loss of basic human freedoms as a result of innovations such as agriculture, settled life, and the rise of cities. Such stories are therefore closely bound up with other stories concerning the “Origins of Architecture.” In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and I proposed an alternative framing of world history, based on three essential forms of human freedom: to move away, to disobey, and to transform the social order. Far from being a special achievement of Western civilization, these freedoms were available to a great many societies across the span of human history, including some urban and other large-scale social formations. Today, such freedoms have been largely erased from the lives of most people, such that it is difficult to even imagine a history of humanity based on those 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 and the “Origins of Architecture.”
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- HITAM, TPOD, THEMA
Contact
- Xavier Nueno - javier.nueno@epfl.ch