This is an extremely fascinating book, from which I learned a lot, but which at times also annoyed me immensely by the overload of detail and by the questionable methodology. The subject Flannery and Marcus focus on, the origin of inequality in human history, is of course particularly interesting. Both authors are renowned archaeologists and the archaeological material is extensively covered, especially on the earliest agricultural societies in the Middle East, in Central and South America. China is not one of them and that is a striking gap. But Flannery and Marcus also use ethnographic findings at least as much: in each chapter they go into great detail about the social relationships within tribes/groups of hunter-gatherers, as described by anthropologists in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, shortly after their discovery. That in itself is very interesting (although again a bit too detailed for my taste), but I mainly see a methodological problem. For starters, those earliest anthropological descriptions are very unscientific, and Flannery and Marcus adopt these accounts without being critical. But above all, it seems highly questionable to me to just use that ethnographic information to interpret the archaeological material about civilizations from thousands of years earlier. And that's what Flannery and Marcus systematically do. I'm not going to dispute that their approach sometimes yields interesting perspectives, but their methodology seems to me to be very dubious to present a sound historical-scientific story. Perhaps I am doing injustice to this book, as the content it provides is immensely rich and varied. But I do note that it has had little or no academic follow-up. More on this in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3872362807. ( )

It took me months to slog through this book. Really, it was filled with a lot of great information, and I can see why they may have erred on the side of exhaustiveness in supporting their arguments, but the book I actually wanted was a more condensed version of this. To some extent I'm glad that I finished this as there were ideas that fascinated me, paradigms that shifted things in my brain, and I certainly was exposed to a lot of the pre-history of human civilization. That said, there was a lot I missed, didn't fully understand, or forgot immediately because really -- this book is aimed at readers with a stronger anthropology/archaeology background.

Will definitely keep around as reference. Would love to read something that expands on one of the ideas here -- that most (if not all) civilizations started with a dominance hierarchy based on alphas -- in the spirit world -- ruling over betas -- early human ancestors that were more powerful and created the society -- and then the living humans, who could pray to betas to intercede on their behalf with the alphas.

It's too bad I got so bogged, because some of the patterns were really interesting. There was just too much here for me to not spend a lot of time in the reeds. ( )

It could have been very interesting and isn't.

The authors, academics both, appear to be having a debate with other academics with out detailing for the reader what the arguments on the other side are. ( )

See LRB 11APR2013