Guest Lecture by David Wengrow

Apr 2, 2025

An Archaeological Perspective on Human Freedoms

The history of human societies has often been conceptualized as a story about the “Origins of Inequality,” linking the loss of basic freedoms to agriculture, settled life, and cities narratives closely tied to the “Origins of Architecture.” This lecture proposes an alternative framing of world history: 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.