David Wengrow

the whole story we summarized in the last chapter – our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique

Mass society exists in the mind before it becomes physical reality

These black earths (Russian: chernozem) are legendary for their fertility; for the empires of later antiquity, they made the lands between the Southern Bug and Dniepr Rivers a breadbasket (which is why Greek city-states established colonies in the region and enslaved or made serfs of the local populations to begin with: ancient Athens was largely fed by Black Sea grain).

The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 BC, that is, for something in the order of eight centuries, which is considerably longer than most subsequent urban traditions

French term corvée. This refers to obligatory labour on civic projects exacted from free citizens on a seasonal basis, and it has always been assumed to be a form of tax extracted by powerful rulers: taxes paid not in goods, but in services.

Play farming’ of this sort, in the Amazon as elsewhere, has had its recent advantages for indigenous peoples. Elaborate and unpredictable subsistence routines are an excellent deterrent against the colonial State: an ecology of freedom in the literal sense. It is difficult to tax and monitor a group that refuses to stay in one location, obtaining its livelihood without making long-term commitments to fixed resources, or growing much of its food invisibly underground (as with tubers and other root vegetables).47 While this may be so, the deeper history of the American tropics shows that similarly loose and flexible patterns of food production sustained civilizational growth on a continent-wide scale, long before Europeans arrived.

Farming, as we can now see, often started out as an economy of deprivation: you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done, which is why it tended to happen first in areas where wild resources were thinnest on the ground.

Since the first farmers made more rubbish, and often built houses of baked mud, they are also more visible to archaeologists.

although we should keep an open mind; after all, who could have predicted on logistical grounds that a motley crew of Spaniards would bring down a Mesoamerican empire of many millions?

states make their first appearance in history to protect the power of an emerging ruling class. As soon as one has a group of people living routinely off the labour of another, the argument ran, they will necessarily create an apparatus of rule, officially to protect their property rights, in reality to preserve their advantage