In the first part of chapter eight, “Imaginary Cities,” David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge fundamental assumptions about urban life and human social organization. Drawing on archaeological evidence from Ukrainian mega-sites and Basque ethnography, they demonstrate that early cities thrived without the authoritarian structures we assume are necessary for large-scale coordination.
Cities Begin in the Mind: Imagined Communities at Scale
The chapter opens with Nobel Prize-winning author Elias Canetti’s provocative claim that “cities begin in the mind.” Canetti’s work on crowds reveals a paradox of modern life: we spend most of our time avoiding physical contact with strangers, carefully navigating sidewalks and social spaces. Yet in crowds—at concerts, celebrations, mass gatherings—we suddenly crave proximity, finding liberation in physical closeness. This tension between individual distance and collective intimacy becomes crucial for understanding how humans create large-scale social units.
Graeber and Wengrow connect Canetti’s insights to Benedict Anderson’s influential concept of “imagined communities.” Anderson demonstrated that nations require us to feel connection with millions we’ll never meet, united through shared symbols, education systems, and synchronized experiences like reading the same newspaper. But this raises a question: if large social units are inherently imaginary, what prevents them from becoming oppressive?
Challenging Common Sense: The Dunbar’s Number Myth
Popular psychology has embraced “Dunbar’s number”—the claim that humans can maintain only 150 meaningful relationships before cognitive overload. Internet memes elaborate this into nested circles: 2 loved ones, 15 good friends, 50 friends, 150 meaningful contacts, and so on. This concept has become “common sense,” shaping how we think about organizations, from corporations to college residence halls.
But Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate that this common sense rests on flawed assumptions. Examining contemporary hunter-gatherer societies reveals that only about 10% of community members share close biological kinship—far less than in modern neighborhoods. Rather than living in isolated small bands, foragers maintained continent-spanning networks of imagined kinship. Aboriginal Australians could travel thousands of miles and find obligations and connections through shared totem systems. North American Indigenous peoples created similar vast social worlds.
The provocative conclusion: “Foragers may sometimes exist in small groups, but they do not, and probably have not ever lived, in small-scale societies.” The immediate face-to-face group was never the limit of human social imagination.
Early Cities Without Kings: The Archaeological Evidence
When archaeologists examine the earliest cities, they expect to find evidence of the apparatus we assume necessary for urban coordination: palaces, temples, administrative buildings, military installations. The reasoning seems self-evident—surely you need bureaucrats, police, and centralized authority to organize thousands of people living together?
The evidence contradicts these expectations. Early cities display “grand self-conscious statements of civic unity”—beautifully designed public spaces, harmonious infrastructure, monuments to founding heroes and deities—but without the palatial compounds and temples that would indicate concentrated authority. People from distant regions established neighborhoods in these urban centers, bringing diverse traditions and practices. Yet somehow they coordinated without the coercive apparatus we assume cities require.
This matters because most of humanity now lives in urban environments. If cities inevitably require police, bureaucrats, and hierarchical command structures to function, that’s a pessimistic assessment of human possibilities. But if early cities managed urban-scale coordination through other means, different futures become imaginable.
Ukrainian Mega-Sites: Egalitarian Urbanism at Scale
The most striking evidence comes from mega-sites in what is now Ukraine and Moldova. These settlements housed thousands of people yet lack the markers of centralized authority. Dismissed by some archaeologists as “overgrown villages” because they don’t fit conventional city models, these sites actually demonstrate sophisticated urban organization without hierarchy.
The circular layout of these settlements is telling. Where we’d expect to find a palace or administrative center, there’s simply an empty plaza. Every household appears to have functioned as an “artist collective,” producing distinctive pottery and clay figurines in individual styles rather than standardized products from centralized workshops.
Archaeological evidence reveals diverse subsistence strategies: small-scale gardening within settlements, livestock keeping, orchard cultivation, and extensive hunting and foraging. Residents consumed wheat, barley, pulses, but also apples, pears, cherries, sloes, acorns, hazelnuts, and apricots. They hunted red deer, roe deer, and wild boar. This diversity meant the settlements didn’t require massive agricultural hinterlands or ecological domination of surrounding areas.
Mathematical Principles of Egalitarian Coordination
How did these mega-sites organize thousands of people without bosses? Graeber and Wengrow turn to Basque ethnography for possible models. Basque communities in the Pyrenees developed sophisticated rotation systems based on mathematical principles rather than centralized command.
In one model, duties rotate around circular settlements: each Sunday, one household would bless two loaves at the local church, eat one and present the other to their right-hand neighbor. The next week, that neighbor would do the same. Through such rotations, responsibilities circulated through the entire community. The system included precise mathematical substitution rules if a household couldn’t fulfill its duties—second neighbors, third neighbors, left and right substitutions—all maintaining equality through calculation rather than hierarchy.
The Basque example demonstrates that egalitarianism can be achieved through different mechanisms. Some societies (like the Wendat in North America) used large communal assemblies where everyone could speak and hash out decisions. Others employed mathematical rotation systems. The principle remains constant—equality—but the methods vary.
Implications: Rethinking Human Possibilities
This evidence provides “significant proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.” We don’t automatically need mayors, governors, police forces, and bureaucratic hierarchies simply because we live in large groups. The archaeological record demonstrates that people organized cities, coordinated thousands of residents, and maintained social harmony through radically different mechanisms than the coercive apparatus we’ve naturalized.
The implications extend beyond ancient history. If early humans created egalitarian cities without authoritarian structures, claims about what’s “natural” or “inevitable” about hierarchy become less convincing. Common sense about organizational scale—that big groups require bosses—turns out to be historically contingent rather than evolutionarily determined.
Graeber and Wengrow’s conclusion echoes through their entire project: “If they can do it, they did it—we can do it too.”
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