Structure should be earned. Start with enough organization and meta components to allow you to start working. Only the bare minimum. Add more only as needed.

Selectric III. How much, I asked? “Completely refurbished and working beautifully, $350,” Ray said, noting my choking sound at the price tag.

Ray sells four or five Selectrics a year and refurbishes another 20 or so that people bring in. “You interested in one?” he asked.

Ray, a former IBM technician who cut his teeth on these machines in the ’70s, owns Business Machines Center in Woodland Hills, where old electric typewriters go for a second chance.

the first season of “Columbo” on my VCR. In the opening of the first episode — “Murder by the Book” directed by Steven Spielberg in 1971 — Martin Milner is typing furiously on an IBM Selectric with the magic ball.

The *Bund für deutsche Schrift* was founded to preserve and promote the traditional German scripts—Fraktur for printing and Sütterlin or Kurrent for handwriting—at a time when they had largely disappeared from everyday use. During the 1980s the association commissioned a limited number of Fraktur-equipped Erika typewriters from VEB Robotron so that members could continue producing authentic Fraktur documents using modern mechanical equipment.

These machines were very heavily encased in plastic, with a fair amount of space between the body shell (mask, officially) and the machine itself.

The rounded, downward curved margin set tabs are always a giveaway for a Nakajima (although there are some Nakajimas out there that don't use this design, mostly electrics.)

Service Calls: $55 + $75/hour for labor within Greater Dayton Area. Service calls outside of Greater Dayton: $55 + $75/hour drive time + $75/hour for labor. (Currently servicing Ohio and Indiana, for other states please contact us.)​ ​ Cleaning: $75-$200+ Prices fluctuate based on the method we have to use to clean your machine. Call or come in to get an exact price.​ ​ Replacement of key legends and polishing key rings: $100   New/Replacement Parts: Ribbons $8 Metal spools $25 each Recovered platens  $90-150 Recovered feed rollers $10-50 each Felt removed and replaced $5 per piece Replacement draw bands $35 New feet $35-45 ​ Other Services: Type height adjustment $35 Ribbon height adjustment $30 Main spring tension adjustment $25

I’d be in for that. I’ve been doing it for awhile, but would love the networking and fun. I have areas I’m still learning about and know enough to probably make me dangerous at times. Add me to your list. I’m in the Central Valley.

Whacking away on a typewriter is key to shifting my mood. It's great if you have space, bar none.

“take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning.” ― Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993

As for names, John E. Hickerson and Ralph E. Page are credited as inventing both the IBM single element printing head (US2895584A) and the IBM single element printing machine (US2879876A), with James A. Weidenhammer also credited with the former and Leon E. Palmer the latter.

“I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.” ― Frank Lloyd Wright

Yes, this was one of the oldest, most unique typewriters with history in a while, last one before this was Larry McMurtry's Hermes 3000. Before those I was both Erma Bombeck and Paul Harvey's typewriter tech, both used IBM selectric's

1st hand, Because his assistant was the one who contacted me first, then I talk to Larry via phone, after working on 2 Hermes 3000's, the 3rd typewriter I delivered myself to him at his place in Tucson. After he died, all 12 of his Hermes 3000's were auctioned of for about $3000.00 ea, I was hoping he would have willed those to me . . . .

I have possibly the rarest machine on the planet. Owned by the CEO of Coca-Cola who contracted Royal to make a special slug in the 50s for business correspondence. This is one slug, shift produces the Coca, flat gives cola. To my knowledge there's not another in existence...

I also still use the BSI function on the iPhone which stands for Braille Screen input. It allows you to type in landscape if you were using a brailler. So using the 6 dot method and once you have 'got your fingers lined up and done a command to tell the phone where your fingers are on the screen you can type as if you were using a brailler and it then translates that into normal keyboard / number presses and types the appropriate letters in. So because of the fact that we use contractions in grade 2 for words, arguably it's quicker than typing normally on the on screen keyboard on the phone. I can use both though using the screen reader Voiceover. I prefer the sound of a typewriter over a brailler though. Much quieter and more pleasurable to type on honestly.

I regularly use this “Renaissance” wax to protect paintings and, above all, very fragile inscriptions. After it dries (10 minutes) and is lightly buffed, the surface becomes very slippery and is no longer susceptible to friction or fingerprints. It also helps preserve nickel plating that is beginning to deteriorate on levers or axles, for example. It’s a truly reliable product.

To preserve raw steel without oxidation, you can apply a very thin layer of microcrystalline wax after thoroughly degreasing it to ensure good adhesion. This is the method used in major museums around the world. With this protection, there is no more oxidation and no grease.

One important part of those negotiations (or any negotiation), she said, is empathizing—“allowing ourselves to just sit with our children in their feelings,” without agreeing or disagreeing, applying logic, or attempting to lift their spirits. “It’s only from a place of calm that children can negotiate in any real way,” Russell noted.

children are at an age when it’s healthy to assert their agency (“All four-year-olds engage in power struggles”).

“So, moving away from the particular issue at stake to the process,” Wheeler explained.

a Harvard colleague, Deepak Malhotra, who had advised on the peace-brokering process between the Colombian government and FARC rebels: “His advice on ultimatums—take-it-or-leave-it kinds of statements—is to ignore them.

Direct bargaining—“I’ll give you this if you do that”—can be useful in a negotiation, but it’s also something to be cautious about. Wheeler told a possibly apocryphal anecdote about Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in which Kissinger watched Nixon use a treat to coax his Irish setter off a chair in the Oval Office. Kissinger supposedly told Nixon that the lesson the dog had learned was not that he should stay off the chair—but rather that if he got on the chair, he’d get a treat for getting off it. (In some tellings, the problem behavior was chewing the rug.)

One tactic he suggested is carefully structuring the choices kids are presented with.

One common feature of negotiations is that each party has the ability to walk away.

The card catalog was one of those li-brary inventions that greatly helped in-dividual libraries, but it did so at theexpense of library cooperation.

Inthe 1880s, it was considered insulting touse typewriters for private correspon-dence. It was thought, for instance, thata typewritten letter from a man was notreally personal because it would gener-ally have required a professionaloperator's help to produce.

Unlike the card catalog thathad to be consulted in one place, thebook catalog was a portable index

Other ideas,such as the electric pen, looked promis-ing, at least at first, judging from com-ments in the library press in 1877 and1879. The pen's story proves that inven-tions must not only serve a general need,they must adapt to the specific require-ments of libraries and conform withother existing technologies. Invented byThomas Alva Edison and patented in1876, the electric pen was a writing in-strument that used electromagnets and asmall storage battery. The actual pen,connected by wire to the power source,resembled a sewing needle; it producedsmall punctures in the form of letters andnumbers, and when an inked roller waspassed over the resulting stencil plate,legible copies could be made.

We maychuckle at John Cotton Dana's proposalin 1907 to use vending machines, justcoming into popular use for chewinggum and novelties, to display and circu-late books, but the concept behind themachine-that of the self-service li-brary-was and is a good idea. In hissuggestion that users insert their librarycard (or more precisely an encodedmetal strip "not larger than a Yale key")so borrower data could be recorded, wesee a distinctly modern application oftechnology to solve a library problem.

looking at these expressive dirt bands

Fifty drawers compose it. They are made of blond wood. Pull out one of the C drawers, the one labelled “Catalogs.” Here are several guide cards: one for “Catalogs,” one for “Censorship,” one for “Children’s Literature.” Before you have read or touched a single card, you have learned something important about the library-school library, and even possibly about librarianship in general: the edges of the cards following the guide cards for “Censorship” and “Children’s Literature” are dark with handling, whereas the ones following “Catalogs” are not. Thus “Censorship” and “Children’s Literature” have over the years been of more interest to library-school students than “Catalogs” has. This is a surprise—at least, it was a surprise to me. Maybe it’s one reason we’re in this pickle.

But for the time being, if some afternoon, depressed by thoughts of cardnage now in progress, you were to travel to the stacks of the library-school library, you could restore your good spirits by contemplating an unharmed, unshrunk, fully operational (though frozen) subject catalogue.

I can fantasize about one that would include an aging-and-fading component, so that the older a given database record is, the yellower (or pinker, or ocean-bluer) the screen would be at its corners, thereby offering us some of the instantaneous secondary information that cardboard offers us now.

“Studies of online catalog use and users have uncovered a pair of problems that seem to be endemic in today’s online catalog systems,” Ray Larson, a professor at Berkeley’s library school (or, as it is now called, the School of Information Management and Systems), wrote conclusively in 1991:These are: (1) a large percentage of subject searches fail to retrieve any bibliographic records; and (2) when subject searches succeed in retrieving records, they often retrieve too much material for the user to evaluate effectively.Larson cites an earlier study of his own in which he found that the average number of on-line records retrieved in his sample was 77.5, whereas the average number that users actually took a look at was 9.1. The “futility point” in on-line searches—the point at which you give up and go with what you have—is, because of screen fatigue and the lethargy of system response, much lower than in card-catalogue searches. The life of the mind suffers as a result.

Sadly, on-line catalogues are terrible at subject searches; their noise level, in the informational sense, is incredible. Card catalogues have the sense not to shuffle together alphabetically the myriad subheadings for “labor” in the medical sense and “labor” in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. sense; the on-line catalogues I’ve seen don’t. Card catalogues don’t lump subheadings for, traffic control in Alexandria, Virginia, together with ones for the lost library at Alexandria, Egypt, either. The “See also” card at the beginning of a set of subject entries in a card catalogue didn’t yank you to another part of the catalogue, and abandon you there; it just suggested that you might want to expand your search in various directions if you didn’t find enough where you stood. There is no real equivalent for this yet in on-line catalogues, nor is there an equivalent for guide cards—those that stick up above the rest, with typed headings—which constitute a sort of loose outline of knowledge built into the trays, and help you to keep your bearings. Card catalogues are “precoÖrdinated,” whereas on-line catalogues are still almost entirely “postcoÖrdinated,” which means that the burden of figuring out how the universe of subjects ought to be organized has been shifted away from the cards and onto you, the user, who must now master Boolean “AND NOT” operators and keyword trickery and crabwise movement by adjacent call numbers merely in order to block avalanches of irrelevancies.

Subject searches are obvious confessions of ignorance; author-title searches aren’t, or aren’t so straightforwardly.

In a study of some fourth, sixth, and eighth graders carried out at the Downers Grove Public Library, in Illinois, Leslie Edmonds found that sixty-five per cent of the kids’ card-catalogue searches were successful, versus only eighteen per cent of their on-line searches. No fourth graders used the on-line catalogue successfully. (They were asked to look up things like “Fire Stations,” “Insects—Poetry,” “Octopus Pie,” and “The Curse of the Blue Figurine.”)

he replied by making a point that seems to me undeniable: “I guess what we’re really doing is we’re having a short Dark Ages of scribalism as we transcribe from the original records into the electronic form. There’s going to be that same blot on the historical record in our age as there was in the Middle Ages.”

By studying Haverford’s card catalogue, Michael Stuart Freeman, Librarian of Haverford College, was able to determine when his predecessors deployed their first typewriter (it was during the summer of 1916)—a tiny fact, perhaps, but one of sufficient interest to Freeman that he published a brief paper which discussed the history of typewriters in libraries. Freeman kept several handwritten cards as samples (“I save a few, because I’m a sentimentalist,” he confided to me); but once his own passing curiosity was satisfied, he dumped the rest of his catalogue.

When we redefine libraries as means rather than as physical places—as conduits of knowledge rather than as physical buildings filled with physical books—we may think that the new, more “visionary,” more megatrendy definition embraces the old, but in fact it doesn’t: the removal of the concrete word “books” from the library’s statement of purpose is exactly the act that allows misguided administrators to work out their hostility toward printed history while the rest of us sleep.

Berkeley’s subject catalogue is already gone. Though it was more or less frozen in the nineteen-eighties, it was nonetheless very efficient for some kinds of searches: if the primary sources in your field were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you don’t want your retrievals spread among the thousands of irrelevant records that a mechanical database subject haul brings up. Any drawer of an out-of-date paper catalogue represents the equivalent of a filtered computer search, a Boolean date-limited search, of a very sophisticated sort—in fact, one drawer represents the outcome of a kind of search that most on-line catalogues can’t and won’t ever be able to perform, since it offers clues to what books were in the library during different eras. If in seventy years a historian of science (say) wants to know whether some Nobel-laureate physics professor could possibly have seen and been influenced by a certain out-of-the-way Dutch mathematical monograph from the thirties which bears important similarities to his work—whether, that is, it was part of the library’s collection during the period when the professor was developing his ideas or was acquired only after the professor’s papers were published (perhaps acquired by the library as a gift from the professor’s estate, in fact, because the professor was sent the monograph by the Dutchman himself, anxious to establish primacy)—the historian of science will have little chance of finding an answer to his question now, because the computer record will bear the (to him) meaningless date of the retrospective conversion of the card, i.e., sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, which has no relation to the time that the card was originally produced (and the book placed on the shelf), whereas the original card, even if it bore no direct date of creation, would have exhibited distinct features (typewriter style, format, cataloguing conventions) that might have enabled a cataloguecard paleographer to place it within a five-year Period.

There have been a few embarrassments along the way, naturally: “Madonna” was globally altered by O.C.L.C. to “Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint” as part of an authority-control routine—a change that, before it was corrected, caused problems for libraries interested in cataloguing the recent work of Ms. Ciccone.

I have no doubt that Dale Flecker believed what he was saying when he told me that “the machine catalogue is in almost no cases worse and in most cases better than the card catalogue was.”

“The card catalogue,” as Tom Delsey, of the National Library of Canada, wrote in 1989, “exhibited a relatively high tolerance for deviation from literal and logical norms. . . . Typographical errors or inconsistencies in headings could be silently corrected in the process of filing the card; added entries that did not match exactly the corresponding main entry on the card to which they were related could nevertheless be placed in their proper sequence in the file.”

The whine of power erasers was heard through the land. (In librarianship, “eraser lung” was the seventies equivalent of carpal-tunnel syndrome.

And the brilliance of Kilgour’s enterprise was that if the cataloguer did not find a record, she could undertake to describe the book herself, and contribute her work to the system as a “master record” for that book, for the good of all members. She wrote a sort of poem, following a set of rules more rigorous than a villanelle’s; she sent it off to people in Ohio who published it for her; and then she got paid a few dollars—in the form of a cataloguing credit against fixture O.C.L.C. charges. The more fresh “copy” a cataloguing department offered O.C.L.C., the cheaper its use of O.C.L.C. was, and thus there was plenty of incentive for all libraries, engaged in the creation of a kind of virtual community long before there were such things as the Internet, to pump up the burgeoning database. What began mainly as a handy, unilateral way of delivering the Library of Congress MARC files to member libraries turned into a highly democratic, omnidirectional collaboration among hundreds of thousands of once isolated documentalists: currently, there are close to thirty million records in the database, only a quarter of which originally came from the Library of Congress, the majority being the work of seven thousand member libraries.

A shelf list is a card catalogue arranged in call-number order, cataloguers use it to help them shelve like books with like.

This same pre-computer-age study, published by M.I.T., determined that the average number of cards in a drawer was eight hundred and twenty-six, that the typical book represented by a card was 276.6 pages long, and that the growth rate of Rice’s library holdings closely tracked that of the United States gross national product.

Charles Ammi Cutter (1837-1903), the author of what is in Mr. Ranz’s opinion the finest library catalogue ever made. Cutter’s masterpiece is the five-volume catalogue of the Boston Atheneum, published between 1874 and 1882. “I’m not sure he wasn’t the greatest cataloguer that lived,” Mr. Ranz told me. The work is three thousand four hundred and two pages long, and is elaborately and commonsensically cross-referenced; it cost the Athenaeum almost a hundred thousand dollars to produce. It is still of interest and utility to historians—as is the card catalogue for the Athenaeum, which Cutter also developed.

Jim Ranz, retired Dean of the Libraries of the University of Kansas, from whose immortal monograph “The Printed Book Catalogue in American Libraries: 1723-1900” (1964)

In 1848, Antonio Panizzi, Keeper of Printed Books for the British Museum, had a similar notion:By an alphabetical catalogue it is understood that the titles be entered in it under some “headings” alphabetically arranged. Now, inasmuch as in a large. library no one can know beforehand the j uxtaposition of these headings, and it would beimpossible to arrange them in the requisite order, if they cannot be easily shifted, each title is therefore written on separate “slips” of paper . . . which are frequently changed from one place to another as required. It is selfevident that if these “slips . . . be not uniform, both in size or substance, their arrangement will cause mechanical difficulties which take time and trouble to overcome.

but they left their own beloved manuscript unclassified and undescribed, and thus it never attained the status of a holding, which it so obviously deserved, and was instead tacitly understood to be merely a “finding aid,” a piece of furniture, wholly vulnerable to passing predators, subject to janitorial, rather than curatorial, juris diction—even though this catalogue was, in truth, the one holding that people who entered the building would be likely to have in common, to know how to use from childhood, even to love.

Their card catalogue was nowhere mentioned in their card catalogue.

Together, over the years, they achieved what one of their early masters, Charles Ammi Cutter, called a “syndetic” structure—that is, a system of referential links—of remarkable coherency and resolution.

Would it be stretching things too much, you suddenly wonder, to call your Rolodex a form of autobiography—a manuscript that you have been writing these fifteen years, tinkering with, revising? Perhaps it is the only manuscript you will ever write.

are in many cases stripped of whole classes of specific historical information (e.g., the original price of the book, its acquisition date, its original cataloguing date, its accession number, the original cataloguer’s own initials, the record of any copies that have been withdrawn, and whether it was a gift or a purchase)

And on-line catalogues, despite their neolithic screen displays and excruciatingly slow retrieval rates, offer many amenities. They do not grow mold, as the card catalogue of the Engineering Library of the University of Toronto once did, following water damage. And they are harder to vandalize. Radical students destroyed roughly a hundred thousand cards from the catalogue at the University of Illinois in the sixties. Berkeley’s library staff was told to keep watch over the university’s card catalogues during the antiwar turmoil there. Someone reportedly poured ink on the Henry Cabot Lodge cards at Stanford. The huge frozen card catalogue of the Library of Congress currently suffers from alarming levels of public trauma: like the movie trope in which the pri vate eye tears a page from a phone book at a public phone rather than bothering to copy down an address and a phone number, library visitors—the heedless, the crazy—have, especially since the late eighties, been increasingly capable of tearing out the card referring to a book they want. Indeed, one of the reasons that the New York Public Library had to close its public catalogue was that the public was destroying it. The Hetty Green cards disappeared. Someone calling himself “Cosmos” was periodically making off with all the cards for “Mein Kampf.” Cards for two Dante manuscripts were stolen: not the manuscripts, the cards for the manuscripts. Card catalogues constitute vandalizable entities because they are expressive of needful social trust and communal achievement, as are other common targets, such as subway cars, railroad bridges, mailboxes, and traffic signs. To the extent that a duster of computer terminals linked to an online catalogue protects a room full of older card cabinets by marginalizing them, they are performing a great service.

Even at the beginning of this century, a writer for the Boston Evening Transcript could playfully fret about the unwieldiness of card catalogues:As these cabinets of drawers increase in number until it seems as if the old joke about the catalogues of the Boston Public Library and Harvard University meeting on Harvard Bridge might become literally true, the mental distress and physical exhaustion suffered by those consulting one of them becomes too important to be disregarded.

collection that is growing, as some currently are, at a rate of five hundred items a day.

N-LINE catalogues are wonderful things in principle—things of efficacy, and even, occasionally (as in the case of O.C.L.C.’s Online Union Catalog), of grandeur. As a result of the publicly financed expansion of higher education in the sixties, and the boom in academic publishing that followed it, the holdings of the typical university library have doubled over the last twenty years. Without on-line catalogues, and the circulation and acquisition modules of software with which on-line catalogues are linked, libraries would simply not have been able to process all the books and journals that were arriving on their loading docks. By the early seventies, there was an ominous arrearage of uncatalogued material waiting on herds of rolling carts near the overtaxed cataloguing departments of most large libraries. Cataloguing had reached a state of crisis similar to the one that forced the financial markets to close early during some of the high-volume weeks of 1969, when Wall Street’s paper-based methods of order processing couldn’t keep up with each day’s orders to buy and sell stock. Computerized stock-execution saved Wall Street (and made program trading and Brack Monday possible, too), and computerized cataloguing procedures saved libraries.

”Library hand” was a special kind of backward-slanting penmanship meant specifically for card catalogues, and taught in library school through the nineteen-twenties.

An image of the front of every card for Widener thus now exists on microfiche, available to users in a room off the lobby. (Any information on the backs of the cards—and many notes do carry over—was not photographed.)

It is true that they seldom have formal training in the intricacies of the cataloguer’s art: they are not necessarily up on the elaborate Anglo-American cataloguing rules, nor are they current concerning the periodic “Rrs, or Rule Interpretations, issued by the Library of Congress, which—like hermeneutical dispatches from the I.R.S. or the Financial Accounting Standards perplexing cases in classification as they emerge. Most operators have had no library-school courses in the Dewey Decimal system (still thriving, by the way, and very big in Europe), or the “Sears List of Subject Headings,” or Cutter numbers, or the abbreviational niceties of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (I.S.B.D.) format—but they do apparently pick up a great deal as they go.

The RETROCON business is good right now. When I visited O.C.L.C. in September, there were three shifts of sixty operators each, plowing through RETROCONs for about forty different libraries, including, besides Harvard, the Los Angeles Public Library, a consortium of French libraries, Hughes Aircraft, Brown, Queen’s University of Belfast, Northwestern, the library at Kew Gardens, the Cincinnati Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, and Waseda University in Japan.

As an added publicity flourish during the Great Discard the Maryland Health Sciences Library published a commemorative chapbook called “101 Uses for a Dead Catalogue Card.”

The New York Public Library, ahead of the game, renovated the entire ten-million-card catalogue of its Research Libraries between 1977 and 1980, microfilmed it, and threw it out.

as universities and public libraries have completed the “retrospective conversions” of their catalogues to computer databases (frequently with the help of federal Title II-C money, as part of the “Strengthening Research Library Resources” program)

syndetic adjective syn·​det·​ic sin-ˈde-tik How to pronounce syndetic (audio) : connective, connecting syndetic pronoun also : marked by a conjunctive syndetic relative clause

Tip: of the 3 things WD-40 is actually useful for on a typewriter, one is cleaning and giving a nice sheen to crinkle paint safely. Apply lightly on a clean rag. The other two are cleaning white-out off plastic card guide without fogging the plastic, and removing the calcified masking tape often found on SCM portables.

So what makes a technically newer brand of typewriter more valuable than an older one?

She wishes more “homegrown” Americans would pursue the craft like her father did, but given that students no longer take high school home economics classes or learn to sew at home as they did in previous generations, their baseline skill levels are not what they used to be, she said.

“People need to see you work,” he said, his red-framed glasses sliding down to the bridge of his nose as he focused intensely on hemming a pair of beige pants. “That’s the key in this business.”

We do make our own history, but not in ways of our own choosing.

Timothy Kohler and Michael Smith’s edited volume Ten Thousand Years of Inequality (2018), calculating Gini coefficients for multiple ancient societies, perhaps appeared too late for Graeber and Wengrow to take it into account, but the broad patterns that are emerging seem to owe little to prehistoric peoples’ will to imagine different possibilities.

How would we know whether the cases that Graeber and Wengrow explore are sufficient to falsify the evolutionists’ claims?

One of the great problems in the social sciences is that theories regularly develop in ways that make it difficult to test them empirically;34

Graeber and Wengrow have no method.

The anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend’s book Against Method (alas, also a classic) is most famous for its offhand comment that “anything goes,” but its larger argument could—perhaps did—provide a playbook for Dawn.

In principle, sociocultural evolutionists should therefore be just as interested in the scaling down of societies as in their scaling up.

When monkeys or other animals multiply, however, they continue to live in troops of roughly the same size. There are no simian cities. We humans are unique in our ability to scale up our permanent settlements. So far as we know, there were no year-round, sedentary communities with even 1,000 residents before Çatalhöyük, around 7000 BCE; none above 10,000 residents before Uruk, Susa, Tell Hamoukar, and Tell Brak in the Near East and Majdanetske, Taljanki, Dobrovodi, and Nebelivka in Ukraine, all roughly around 3500 BCE; none above 100,000 before Nineveh, around 700 BCE; none above one million before Rome, around 50 BCE; and none above 10 million before New York, London, and other early 20th-century supercities.21 Although we have continued to evolve biologically since 7000 BCE, we are still more or less the same animals as we were then. What has evolved out of all recognition is our institutions, giving us the organizational tools for cooperation on much larger scales; and evolutionary anthropologists have consistently concluded that, through most of history, top-down hierarchy has been what made this possible.22

Monuments Without AgricultureIt used to be a truism among archaeologists that farmers build monuments, mobilizing huge amounts of labor, but foragers do not. This, we now know, is overstated. The most famous exception is Göbekli Tepe, an extraordinary cluster of sunken chambers with massive, carved stone pillars near the Turko-Syrian border. Construction began here by 9500 BCE, just as experiments with domestication were beginning not far to the south, but all the evidence suggests that the builders were hunters and gatherers.16 Stonehenge, the most famous prehistoric monument of all, was built between roughly 3000 and 2600 BCE by herders rather than farmers,17 but as early as 8000 BCE, foragers had set up a series of monumental posts (perhaps totem poles) at the site. At Locqmariaquer in Brittany, fishermen dragged a 20-meter-tall, 350-ton stone stele for 5 kilometers around 4500 BCE and then erected it over a communal tomb. In coastal Peru, other fishermen started building mounds at Aspero, Caral, and Sechin Bajo before 3700 BCE. Foragers in Louisiana heaped up giant earthworks at Watson Brake around 3400 BCE and even bigger ones, using a standardized unit of measurement, at Poverty Point around 1600 BCE.18

Farming swept the British Isles around 4000 BCE, but climate change and population decline seem to have driven a shift toward herding after 3500 BCE (Bevan et al. 2017; Colledge et al. 2019).

Across the last 20 years, evolutionists have adopted more sophisticated frameworks (such as niche construction theory) to accommodate the new findings, and Stephen Shennan’s superb book First Farmers of Europe provides a thorough and convincing evolutionary account of the origins and expansion of agriculture.15

Since the 2000s, archaeologists and paleobotanists have moved away from three older theories about the origins of agriculture—first, that population growth after the end of the Ice Age (around 9650 BCE) drove experiments with gardening and herding that led to the domestication of plants and animals in the Near East; second, that domestication happened in a few core regions of the Near East and then spread steadily outward; and third, that farming inexorably drove processes of sedentism, rising labor inputs, and increasing inequality. Instead, most experts now suggest that the relationship between population and domestication was complicated and variable; that experiments with cultivating plants went on in multiple locations, particularly wetlands; that domesticated plants caught on extremely slowly, needing 3,000 years (ca. 9500–6500 BCE) to go from under 20% of assemblages to over 80%; that the drift toward domesticated resources was regularly reversed; that rather than causing sedentism, domestication was often its consequence; that sedentism and experiments with plant cultivation began as early as 21,000 BCE, at the coldest point in the last Ice Age; and that there is little sign of institutionalized inequality in the Near East before about 5500 BCE.14

Here, too, they see “play kings,” making an analogy with the precolonial Nuer of South Sudan, who sometimes interpreted people “who in our own society would likely be classified as anything from highly eccentric or defiantly queer to neurodivergent or mentally ill” as “being touched by God.” In moments of crisis, they explain, “a person who might otherwise have spent his life as something analogous to the village idiot would suddenly be found to have remarkable powers of foresight and persuasion.”

Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle’s widely read book The Evolution of Human Societies, which uses the Great Basin Shoshone of a century ago as one of its key case studies. Like the Cheyenne, the Shoshone spent most of the year in unranked, family-sized groups, but some of them periodically granted “rabbit bosses” and “antelope shamans” far-reaching powers to coordinate large-scale hunting and trapping.

in northern Syria “the cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC” (234). They cite the arguments of Willcox et al. (2008) about rye at Abu Hureyra, but these have been seriously undermined by Colledge and Conolly (2010), further supported by Weide et al. (2021).

The literature is enormous; I draw particularly on Boyd and Richerson 2005 and Messoudi 2011, and Trigger’s (1998) account of the field’s intellectual history.

In what follows, I take evolutionists to be scholars who see some conceptual continuity between human history and biological evolution, who consider sociocultural evolution to be governed by identifiable mechanisms functioning somewhat like natural selection, who see these mechanisms as involving adaptation to the environment, who believe that the mechanisms operate on all societies regardless of time and space, and—usually, but not always—who recognize stages of social and cultural evolution, from egalitarian foraging bands through hierarchical agricultural empires and pastoral tribes, to modern fossil-fuel-based nation-states.

whether Graeber and Wengrow commit so many howlers that their central thesis is invalidated.

I have been reviewing books for the AJA for 30 years, but this is the first one I can honestly say was fun to read.

Where Harari and Diamond offered evolutionist accounts of history,3 Graeber and Wengrow are explicitly anti-evolutionist. Dawn deserves admiration for being the most extended and detailed rebuttal to evolutionism this century—and it provokes exasperation for precisely the same reason.

For archaeologists, Dawn has been the biggest publishing event of the decade.