Two Things Tuesday: More Anarchism

From where I sit, there’s been a notable uptick in scholarship that appeals to anarchism and anarchist praxis in archaeology over the last decade. Some of this should be attributed to David Graeber and David Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) which for whatever its limitation has inspired scholars to consider how anarchist practices and concepts may help us understand how societies function in the past. I suspect that the publication of Charles Orser’s newish book Mutualist Archaeology will continue to breath life into this trend by offering an expansive survey of key texts outside the field of archaeology and some examples for how anarchist ideas can inform archaeological interpretation. Over the weekend, I read Polina Kapsali’s “Exploring alternative trajectories of social change in European prehistory. Anarchist theory and the Aegean Bronze Age” in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 83 (2026). (H/t to Dimitri Nakassis for sending this along!) The…