Hi everyone. I want to thank everyone here for stoking the flame of discussion. For personal reasons, my reading of Dawn of Everything has been slower than planned. Had I more free time, I would have liked to generate a series of questions for chapters or sections.
So far I am enjoying reading The Dawn of Everything. I will say that the Davids can sometimes be too playful with evidence. Repeatedly they have this structure of argument:
1. Make a claim about the social intentions of an ancient Indigenous society
2. Acknowledge that there is insufficient archeological evidence for anthropologists to make claims about the social values and worldviews of an ancient Indigenous society
3. Derive the truth of #1 through a circuitous interpretation of archeological evidence
The Davids are working with the research that is available, but I wonder if the risk of this argumentative approach multiplies with each use.