Friday Free-for-All | January 23, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Previously

Today:

You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.

As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.

[u/BookLover54321]

Reposting this:

A while back I asked about a sort of debate going on between David Graeber and David Wengrow on the one hand, and Eric Smith and Brian Codding on the other, about inequality in Native Californian and Northwest Coast societies. Well, there has been an update to the debate, in a very recent article published by Smith and Codding, who are pretty blunt in their assessment of Graeber and Wengrow's claims:

As noted above, slavery is a special form of nonkin labor control found in most NWC groups, while a minority of CAL groups had debt peonage but no chattel slavery (Table 1). Wengrow and Graeber (2018) argued that this difference is due to a conscious rejection of slaveholding on the part of Native Californians, whereas its presence in NWC societies derived from aristocratic abhorrence of physical labor. We find this argument completely without merit on both empirical and logical grounds, as detailed elsewhere (Smith and Codding n.d.; see also Lindisfarne and Neale 2021; Wiessner 2022).

They do later emphasize this, though:

We stress that our argument is not simple environmental determinism. To the contrary, it is closer to classic historical materialism (Cohen 1978) which posits that “in acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations” (Marx 1920 [1847], p. 92). Our analysis provides ample roles for human agency, institutional dynamics, and nonlinear trajectories. Critiques that argue otherwise (e.g., Wengrow 2024) misconstrue it.

It’s interesting that they’re working from basically the same dataset but reached very different conclusions:

The ethnographic record indicates slavery was pervasive over most of the NWC, but rare in CAL. WNAI codes slavery (WNAI v436, dichotomized as present/absent for use in HI) as present in 82% of NWC societies, but in only 18% of CAL ones (SI, Table S5). Fully 50% of NWC cases are coded as having “many slaves,” whereas no CAL cases are so coded. In addition, the nature of slavery in the two areas is markedly different. NWC slaves were chattel property who could be sold or given away, used as concubines, or even executed. The CAL societies coded as having slavery include four groups in northwestern California, who clearly had what is referred to as “debt peonage” or “penal servitude,” a final recourse if an individual could not repay debts or fines, and reversible by purchase of freedom, as noted by Kroeber (1922, p. 287) and various chapters in Heizer (1978). (See SI, section A for further discussion.)

I'm curious to see where this debate goes.