David Wengrow | |
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Born | 25 July 1972 |
Occupation |
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Nationality | British |
Education | University of Oxford (BA, MSt, DPhil) |
Subject | Archaeology |
David Wengrow (born 25 July 1972) is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. [1] He co-authored the international bestseller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity which was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in 2022. [2] Wengrow has contributed essays on topics such as social inequality and climate change to The Guardian [3] and The New York Times . [4] In 2021 he was ranked No. 10 in ArtReview's Power 100 list of the most influential people in art. [5]
Wengrow enrolled at the University of Oxford in 1993, obtaining a BA in archaeology and anthropology. [6] He went on to qualify for an MSt in world archaeology in 1998 and then studied for a D.Phil. under the supervision of Roger Moorey completed in 2001. [7] Andrew Sherratt was a notable influence during Wengrow's time at Oxford. [8]
Between 2001 and 2004 Wengrow was Henri Frankfort Fellow at the Warburg Institute and Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. He was appointed to a lectureship at the UCL Institute of Archaeology in 2004, and in 2011 he was made Professor of Comparative Archaeology (a post formerly held by Peter Ucko). [9] Wengrow has conducted archaeological excavations in Africa and the Middle East, most recently with the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraqi Kurdistan. [10] He is the author of three books and numerous academic articles on topics including the origins of writing, ancient art, Neolithic societies, and the emergence of the first states in Egypt and Mesopotamia. [11] In 2020 Wengrow completed a book on the history of inequality with the anthropologist David Graeber just three weeks before Graeber's death. [12] The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was published in the autumn of 2021. [13]
Wengrow is a recipient of the Antiquity Prize [14] and has delivered the Rostovtzeff Lectures (New York University), [15] the Jack Goody Lectures (Max Planck Institute) [16] the Biennial Henry Myers Lecture (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain), [17] the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology (British Academy), [18] and the Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Memorial Lecture in the Humanities (University of Chicago). [19] He served as external coordinator of the Mellon Research Initiative at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts [20] and was Distinguished Visitor at the University of Auckland. [21] In 2023, Wengrow was awarded the Albertus Magnus Professorship by the University of Cologne, among the university's highest academic honours, [22] with previous recipients including such renowned scientists and researchers as Michael Tomasello, Bruno Latour, and Judith Butler [23]
Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She led excavations of Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, from 1952 to 1958, and has been called one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. She was Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1973, having undertaken her own studies at Somerville College, Oxford.
Vere Gordon Childe was an Australian archaeologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of Edinburgh and then the Institute of Archaeology, London. He wrote twenty-six books during his career. Initially an early proponent of culture-historical archaeology, he later became the first exponent of Marxist archaeology in the Western world.
Chris Tilley is a British archaeologist known for his contributions to postprocessualist archaeological theory. He is currently a Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at University College London.
Anthony Thomas Grafton is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize. From January 2011 to January 2012, he served as the President of the American Historical Association. From 2006 to 2020, Grafton was co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
David Rolfe Graeber was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
Peter Roger Stuart Moorey, was a British archaeologist, historian, and academic, specialising in Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. He was Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum of the University of Oxford, and also served as Vicegerent of Wolfson College, Oxford.
David Russell Harris, FSA, FBA was a British geographer, anthropologist, archaeologist and academic, well known for his detailed work on the origins of agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals. He was a director of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, and retained a position as Professor Emeritus of the Human Environment at the Institute.
Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff, or Rostovtsev, was a Russian historian whose career straddled the 19th and 20th centuries and who produced important works on ancient Roman and Greek history. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Andrew George Sherratt was an English archaeologist, one of the most influential of his generation. He was best known for his theory of the secondary products revolution.
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) is a center for advanced scholarly research and graduate education at New York University. ISAW's mission is to cultivate comparative, connective investigations of the ancient world from the western Mediterranean to China. Areas of specialty among ISAW's faculty include the Greco-Roman world, the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Central Asia and the Silk Road, East Asian art and archaeology, Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, ancient science, and digital humanities.
Kenneth Rainsbury Dark is a British archaeologist who works on the 1st millennium AD in Europe and the Roman and Byzantine Middle East, on the archaeology of religion, archaeological theory and methods, and on the relationship between the study of the past and contemporary global political, cultural and economic issues.
The UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences is one of the 11 constituent faculties of University College London (UCL). The current Executive Dean of the Faculty is Professor Jennifer Hudson, having been appointed from September 2022.
Ruth Mace FBA is a British anthropologist, biologist, and academic. She specialises in the evolutionary ecology of human demography and life history, and phylogenetic approaches to culture and language evolution. Since 2004, she has been Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London.
Cyril Daryll Forde FRAI was a British anthropologist and Africanist.
Susan Sherratt is Reader in Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the archaeology of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages of the Aegean, Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean, especially trade and interaction within and beyond these regions.
Sara Champion was a British archaeologist with an interest in the European Iron Age and the role and visibility of women working in archaeology. She was editor of PAST, the newsletter of The Prehistoric Society from 1997 until her death in 2000. The Prehistoric Society hosts an annual Sara Champion Memorial Lecture.
Shadreck Chirikure is a professor at the University of Cape Town, and holds a British Academy Global Professorship within the School of Archaeology at Oxford. He is a leading archaeologist, studying pyrotechnology and southern Africa.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist and activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow. It was first published in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2021 by Allen Lane.
David Graeber was an American anthropologist and social theorist. Unless otherwise noted, all works are authored solely by David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is a British social anthropologist and writer specialising in South Asia. She is Professor of Anthropology at London School of Economics and author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas. a finalist for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Shah has written for newspapers and magazines in the UK, US and India, including the New Statesman, Foreign Policy, New York Review of Books, The Times of India and Hindustan Times. Shah has also made a radio documentary on ‘India’s Red Belt’ for BBC Radio 4 Crossing Continents, reported for BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent, and co-curated a major photographic exhibition ‘Behind the Indian Boom’.