对人类历史和不平等根源的新认识

如果普遍接受的关于文明基础的叙述都是错误的怎么办？利用开创性研究，考古学家大卫·温格罗挑战了关于人类社会进化的传统思维——从农业的发明到城市和阶级制度的形成——并解释了重新思考历史如何从根本上改变我们对不平等和现代生活的看法。

In the summer of 2014, I was in Iraqi Kurdistan with a small team of archaeologists, finishing a season of field excavations near the border town of Halabja. Our project was looking into something which has puzzled and intrigued me ever since I began studying archeology.

2014 年夏天， 我和一小队考古学家在伊拉克库尔德斯坦， 在边境城镇哈拉布贾附近完成了一个季节的野外挖掘工作。 自从我开始学习考古学以来，我们的项目一直在寻找令我困惑和感兴趣的东西。

We're taught to believe that thousands of years ago, when our ancestors first invented agriculture in that part of the world, that it set in motion a chain of consequences that would shape our modern world in a particular direction, on a particular course. By farming wheat, our ancestors supposedly developed new attachments to the land they lived on. Private property was invented. And with that, the need to defend it. Along with new opportunities for some people to accumulate surpluses, came new labor demands, tying most people to a hard regime of tending their crops while a privileged few received freedom and the leisure to do other things. To think, to experiment, to create the foundations of what we refer to as civilization.

我们被教导要相信，几千年前，当我们的祖先 在世界的那个地区首次发明农业时 ，它引发了一系列后果，这些后果将在特定方向、特定路线上塑造我们的现代世界。通过种植小麦，我们的祖先据说对他们所居住的土地产生了新的依恋。私有财产被发明了。因此，需要捍卫它。随着一些人积累剩余的新机会出现，新的劳动力需求也随之而来，将大多数人束缚在耕种庄稼的艰苦制度中，而少数特权阶层则获得了自由和闲暇去做其他事情。 去思考，去实验， 去创造我们所说的文明的基础。

Now, according to this familiar story, what happened next is that populations boomed, villages turned into towns, towns became cities, and with the emergence of cities, our species was locked on a familiar trajectory of development where spiraling populations and technological change were bound up with the kind of dreadful inequalities that we see around us today.

现在，根据这个熟悉的故事， 接下来发生的事情是人口激增， 村庄变成城镇，城镇变成城市， 随着城市的出现， 我们的物种被锁定在一个熟悉的发展轨迹上 ，人口螺旋式上升和技术变革相 结合与 我们今天在我们周围看到的那种可怕的不平等现象相提并论。

Except, as anyone can tell you, who's looked at the evidence from the Middle East, almost nothing of what I've just been saying is actually true. And the consequences I'm going to suggest are quite profound. Actually, what happened after the invention of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, is a long period of around another 4,000 years in which villages largely remained villages. And actually there's very little evidence for the emergence of rigid social classes, which is not to say that nothing happened. Over those 4,000 years, technological change actually proceeded apace. Without kings, without bureaucracies, without standing armies, these early farming populations fostered the development of mathematical knowledge, advanced metallurgy. They learned to cultivate olives, vines and date palms. They invented leavened bread, beer, and they developed textile technologies: the potter's wheel, the sail. And they spread all of these innovations far and wide,from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, up to the Black Sea, and from the Persian Gulf, all the way over to the mountains of Kurdistan, where our excavations were taking place.

除了，任何人都可以告诉你， 谁看过中东的证据， 我刚才所说的几乎没有什么是真的。 我要提出的后果 是相当深远的。 实际上，大约一万年前发明农业之后发生的事情， 是另外一个大约四千年的漫长时期，村庄基本上还是村庄。实际上，很少有证据表明僵化的社会阶层的出现，这并不是说什么都没有发生。在这 4000 年里，技术变革实际上进展迅速。没有国王，没有官僚机构，没有常备军，这些早期的农业人口促进了数学知识和 先进冶金学的发展。 他们学会了种植橄榄、葡萄藤和枣椰树。 他们发明了发酵面包、啤酒， 并开发了纺织技术： 陶轮、帆。 他们将所有这些创新广泛传播， 从东地中海沿岸， 到黑海， 从波斯湾， 一直到库尔德斯坦的山区，我们的挖掘工作就在那里进行。

I've often referred, half jokingly, to this long period of human history as the era of the first global village. Because it's not just the technological innovations that are so remarkable, but also the social innovations which enabled people to do all these thingswithout forming centers and without raising up a class of permanent leaders over everybody else.

我经常半开玩笑地把这段人类历史的漫长时期 称为第一个地球村的时代。 因为不仅技术创新如此引人注目， 而且社会创新也使人们能够在 没有形成中心的情况下做所有这些事情 ，也无需培养出超越其他人的永久领导者阶层。

Now, oddly enough, this efflorescence of culture is not what we usually refer to as civilization. Instead, that term is usually reserved for harshly unequal societies, which came thousands of years later. Dynastic Mesopotamia. Pharaonic Egypt. Imperial Rome. Societies that were deeply stratified. So in short, I've always felt that there was basically something very weird about our concept of civilization, something that leaves us lost for words, tongue tied. When we're confronted with thousands of years of human beings, say, practicing agriculture, creating new technologies, but not lording it over each other or exploiting each other to the maximum.

现在，奇怪的是， 这种文化的蓬勃发展并不是我们通常所说的 文明。 相反，这个词通常是为几千年后出现的严重不平等的社会保留的。 美索不达米亚王朝。法老埃及。罗马帝国。层次分明的社会。所以简而言之，我一直觉得我们的文明概念基本上有一些非常奇怪的东西，让我们说不出话来，结结巴巴。当我们面对几千年的人类，比如说，从事农业，创造新技术，但没有互相统治或最大限度地互相剥削。

Why don't we have better words? Where is our lexicon for those long expanses of human history in which we weren't behaving that way?

为什么我们没有更好的词？ 我们在人类历史上没有这样表现的那些漫长的人类历史的词典在哪里？

Over the past ten years or more, I worked closely together with the late, great anthropologist David Graeber to address some of these questions. But we did it on a much larger scale because from our perspective as an archaeologist and an anthropologist,this clash between theory and data, between the standard narrative of human history and the evidence that we have before us today is not just confined to the early Middle East. It’s everything: out whole picture of human history that we’ve been telling for centuries, it’s basically wrong. I'm going to try and explain a few more of the reasons why.

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Let's go back to some of those core concepts, the stable reference points around which we've been organizing and orchestrating our understanding of world history for hundreds of years. Take, for instance, that notion that for most of its history,the human species lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers, until the advent of agriculture ushered in a new age of inequality. Or the notion that with the arrival of cities came social classes, sacred kings and rapacious oligarchs trampling everyone else underfoot. From our very first history lessons,we're taught to believe that our modern world, with all of its advantages and amenities, modern health care, space travel, all the things that are good and exciting, couldn't possibly existwithout that original concentration of humanity into larger and larger units and the relentless buildup of inequalities that came with it. Inequality, we're taught to believe, was the necessary price of civilization.

让我们回到其中的一些核心概念， 数百年来我们一直围绕着这些稳定的参考点来组织和协调我们对世界历史的理解。 例如，在历史的大部分时间里，人类都生活在狩猎采集者的狭小平等主义群体中，直到农业的出现开启了一个不平等的新时代。或者认为随着城市的到来，社会阶层、神圣的国王和贪婪的寡头将其他人践踏在脚下。从我们的第一堂历史课开始，我们就被教导要相信我们的现代世界及其所有优势和便利设施、现代医疗保健、太空旅行、 如果没有人类最初集中到越来越大的单位以及随之而来的不平等的无情累积，所有美好而令人兴奋的事情都不可能存在。 我们被教导相信不平等是文明的必要代价。

Well, if so, then what are we to make of the early Middle East?Perhaps one might say there was just a very, very, very long lag time, 4,000 years, before all these developments took place.Inequality was bound to happen, it was bound to set in. It was just a matter of time. And perhaps the rest of the story still worksfor other parts of the world.

好吧，如果是这样，那么我们要如何看待早期的中东？ 也许有人会说， 在所有这些发展发生之前，只有一个非常、非常、非常长的滞后时间，即4000 年。 不平等必然会发生，必然会发生。这只是时间问题。也许故事的其余部分仍然适用于世界其他地区。

Well, let's think a bit about what we can actually say today about the origin of cities. Surely, you might think, with the appearance of cities came the appearance of social classes. Think about ancient Egypt with its pyramid temples. Or Shang China with its lavish tombs. The classic Maya with their warlike rulers. Or the Inca empire with its mummified kings and queens. But actually, the picture these days is not so clear. What modern archeology tells us, for example, is that there were already cities on the lower reaches of the Yellow River over 1,000 years before the rise of the Shang. And on the other side of the Pacific, in Peru’s Rio Supe, we already see huge agglomerations of people with monumental architecture 4,000 years before the Inca. In South Asia, 4,500 years ago, the first cities appeared at places like Mohenjo-daro and Gorakhpur in the Indus Valley. But these huge settlements present no evidence of kings or queens. No royal monuments, no aggrandizing art. And what's more, we know that much of the population lived in high-quality housing with excellent sanitation. North of the Black Sea, in the modern country of Ukraine, archaeologists have found evidence of even more ancient cities going back 6,000 years. And again, these huge settlements present no evidence of authoritarian rule. No temples, no palaces, not even any evidence of central storage facilities or top-down bureaucracy. Actually what we see in those cases are these great concentric rings of houses arranged rather like the inside of a tree trunk around neighborhood assembly halls. And it stayed that way for about 800 years.

好吧，让我们想一想我们今天实际上可以说 的关于城市起源的内容。 当然，你可能会想，随着城市 的出现，社会阶层也出现了。想想古埃及的金字塔神庙。 或者拥有奢华陵墓的商代中国。 经典的玛雅人及其好战的统治者。 或者印加帝国及其木乃伊国王和王后。但实际上，这些天的情况并不那么清晰。 例如，现代考古学告诉我们的 是，在商代兴起之前 ，黄河下游 已经有1000多年的城市了。在太平洋的另一边， 在秘鲁的 Rio Supe， 在印加文明之前 4,000 年， 我们已经看到了大量拥有不朽建筑的人群。在 4500 年前的南亚， 第一批城市出现在印度河流域的摩亨佐达罗 和戈拉克布尔等地。 但这些巨大的定居点没有国王或王后的证据。 没有皇家纪念碑，没有夸大其词的艺术。 更重要的是，我们知道大部分人口 居住在卫生条件良好的优质住房中。 在黑海以北 的现代国家乌克兰，考古学家发现了 可以追溯到 6000 年前的更多古老城市的证据。 再一次，这些巨大的定居点没有提供专制统治的证据。 没有寺庙，没有宫殿， 甚至没有任何中央储藏设施 或自上而下的官僚机构的证据。实际上，我们在这些案例中看到的是这些巨大的同心圆房屋，它们的排列方式就像 邻里大会堂周围的树干内部一样。 并且这种状态持续了大约 800 年。

So what this means is that long before the birth of democracy in ancient Greece, there were already well-organized cities on several of the world's continents which present no evidence for ruling dynasties. And some of them also seem to have managed perfectly well without priests, mandarins and warrior politicians.Of course, some early cities did go on to become the capitals of kingdoms and empires. But it's important to note that others went in completely the opposite direction.

所以这意味着，早在古希腊民主诞生之前， 世界上几个大陆上就已经存在组织良好的城市 ，没有任何统治王朝的证据。他们中的一些人在没有牧师、官吏和政治家的情况下似乎也表现得很好。当然，一些早期的城市确实继续成为王国和帝国的首都。但重要的是要注意，其他人则完全相反。

To take one well-documented example, around the year 250 AD,the city of Teotihuacan, in the valley of Mexico, with a population of around 100,000 people, turned its back on pyramid temples and human sacrifices and reconstituted itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas housing most of the city's population. When archaeologists first investigated these buildings, they assumed they were palaces. Then they realized that just about everyone in the city was living in a palace with spacious patios and subfloor drainages, gorgeous murals on the walls.

举一个有据可查的例子， 大约在公元 250 年， 墨西哥山谷的特奥蒂瓦坎市（Teotihuacan） 拥有约 10 万人口， 它背弃了金字塔神庙和人类祭祀 ，将自己重组 为一个庞大的收藏品。舒适的别墅居住着这座城市的大部分人口。 当考古学家第一次调查这些建筑物时，他们认为它们是宫殿。 然后他们意识到，几乎城里的每个人都 住在一座有宽敞天井 和底层排水系统的宫殿里，墙上挂着 华丽的壁画。

But we shouldn't get carried away. None of the societies that I've been describing was perfectly egalitarian. But then we might also remember that fifth-century Athens, which we look to as the birthplace of democracy, was also a militaristic society founded on chattel slavery, where women were completely excluded from politics. So maybe by comparison, somewhere like Teotihuacan was not doing so badly at keeping the genie of inequality in its bottle.

但我们不应该得意忘形。 我所描述的社会中没有一个 是完全平等的。 但随后我们可能还记得，我们视为民主发源地的五世纪雅典 也是一个建立在动产奴隶制基础上的军国主义社会，女性被完全排除在政治之外。所以也许相比之下，像特奥蒂瓦坎这样的地方在将不平等的精灵留在瓶子里方面并没有做得那么糟糕。

But maybe we can just forget about all that, we can look away.Perhaps all of these things I'm talking about are basically outliers.Maybe we can still keep our familiar story of civilization intact.And after all, if cities without rulers were really such a common thing in human history, why didn't Cortéz and Pizarro and all the other conquistadors find any when they began their invasion of the Americas? Why did they find only Moctezuma and Atahualpalording it over their empires?

但也许我们可以忘记这一切，我们可以把目光移开。 也许我所说的所有这些事情基本上都是异常值。 也许我们仍然可以保持我们熟悉的文明故事完整无缺。 毕竟， 如果没有统治者的城市在人类历史上真的很普遍， 为什么科尔特斯和皮萨罗以及所有其他征服者 在他们开始入侵美洲时没有发现任何东西？ 为什么他们发现只有 Moctezuma 和 Atahualpa 统治着他们的帝国？

Except that's not true either. Actually, the city where Hernan Cortéz found his military allies, the ones who enabled his successful assault on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, was exactly one such city without rulers: an indigenous republic by the name of Tlaxcala, governed by an urban parliament, which had some pretty interesting initiation rituals for would-be politicians. They'd be periodically whipped and subject to public abuse by their constituents to sort of break down their egos and remind them who's really in charge. It's a little bit different from what we expect of our politicians today. And archaeologists, by the way, have also worked at this place Tlaxcala, excavating the remains of the pre-conquest city, and what they found there is really remarkable. Again, the most impressive architecture is not temples and palaces. It's just the well-appointed residences of ordinary citizens arrayed along these grand terraces overlooking district plazas.

但这也不是真的。 实际上，埃尔南·科尔特斯找到他的军事盟友的城市，也正是 那些帮助他成功袭击 阿兹特克首都特诺奇蒂特兰的城市， 正是这样一个没有统治者的城市： 一个名为特拉斯卡拉的土著共和国， 由一个城市议会管理 ，为潜在的政治家举办了一些非常有趣的入会仪式 。 他们会定期 受到选民的鞭打和公开辱骂， 以打破他们的自尊心并提醒他们谁才是真正的负责人。 这与我们今天对政治家的期望有点不同。 顺便说一句，考古学家也在特拉斯卡拉这个地方工作过， 挖掘征服前城市的遗迹， 他们在那里发现的东西真的很了不起。 同样，最令人印象深刻的建筑不是寺庙和宫殿。 它只是排列在这些俯瞰地区广场的宏伟露台上的普通市民的设备齐全的住宅。

And it's not just the history of cities that modern archaeological science is turning on its head. We also know now that the history of human societies before the coming of agriculture is just nothing like what we once imagined. Far from this idea of people living all the time in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, actually, what we see these days is evidence for a really wild variety of social experimentation before the coming of farming. In Africa, 50,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers were already creating huge networks, social networks, covering large parts of the continent.In Ice Age Europe, 25,000 years ago, we see evidence of individuals singled out for special grand burials, their bodies suffused with ornamentation, weapons and even what looked like regalia. We see public buildings constructed on the bones and tusks of woolly mammoth. And around 11,000 years ago,back in the Middle East, where I started, hunter-gatherers constructed enormous stone temples at a place called Göbekli Tepe in eastern Turkey. In North America, long before the coming of maize farming, indigenous populations created the massive earthworks of poverty point in Louisiana, capable of hosting hunter gatherer publics in their thousands. And then Japan, again, long before the arrival of rice farming, the storehouses of Sannai Maruyama could already hold great surpluses of wild plant foods.

现代考古学正在颠覆 的不仅仅是城市的历史。我们现在也知道 ，农业出现之前的人类社会历史和 我们曾经想象的完全不一样。 事实上，我们现在所看到的远不是人们一直生活 在小群狩猎采集者中的想法，而是 在农业出现之前进行了非常广泛的社会实验的证据。在50,000 年前的非洲，狩猎采集者已经建立了庞大的网络、社交网络，覆盖了非洲大陆的大部分地区。在 25,000 年前的欧洲冰河时代， 我们看到有证据表明有人被挑选出来进行特殊的盛大葬礼， 他们的尸体上布满了装饰物、 武器，甚至看起来像王权的东西。 我们看到公共建筑建在猛犸象的骨头和象牙上。 大约 11,000 年前， 在我开始的中东， 狩猎采集者 在土耳其东部的一个叫做哥贝克力石阵的地方建造了巨大的石庙。 在北美， 早在玉米种植出现之前，土著居民就 在路易斯安那州的贫困点建造了大规模的土方工程， 能够容纳成千上万的狩猎采集者公众。然后日本，再次，早在水稻种植到来之前， 三内丸山的仓库已经可以储存大量剩余 的野生植物食品。

Now what do all these details amount to? What does it all mean?Well, at the very least, I'd suggest it's really a bit far-fetched these days to cling to this notion that the invention of agriculture meant a departure from some egalitarian Eden. Or to cling to the idea that small-scale societies are especially likely to be egalitarian, while large-scale ones must necessarily have kings,presidents and top-down structures of management. And there are also some contemporary implications. Take, for example, the commonplace notion that participatory democracy is somehow natural in a small community. Or perhaps an activist group, but couldn't possibly have a scale up for anything like a city, a nation or even a region.

现在所有这些细节意味着什么？ 这是什么意思呢？ 好吧，至少，我认为现在坚持 农业的发明意味着背离某种平等主义的伊甸园的观念确实有点牵强。 或者坚持认为小规模社会特别可能是平等主义的，而大规模社会必须有国王、总统和自上而下的管理结构。还有一些当代意义。以一个普遍的观念为例，即参与式民主在小社区中是自然而然的。或者也许是一个激进组织， 但不可能扩大到像城市、 国家甚至地区这样的地方。

Well, actually, the evidence of human history, if we're prepared to look at it, suggests the opposite. If cities and regional confederacies, held together mostly by consensus and cooperation existed thousands of years ago, who's to stop us creating them again today with technologies that allow us to overcome the friction of distance and numbers? Perhaps it's not too late to begin learning from all this new evidence of the human past, even to begin imagining what other kinds of civilization we might create if we can just stop telling ourselves that this particular world is the only one possible.

嗯，实际上，人类历史的证据， 如果我们准备好审视它，就会 发现相反的情况。 如果几千年前主要通过共识和合作建立起来的城市和地区联盟存在，那么 今天谁来阻止我们用能够克服距离和数量摩擦的技术再次创造它们？也许现在开始从人类过去的所有这些新证据中学习还为时不晚，甚至开始想象如果我们不再告诉自己这个特定的世界是唯一可能的世界，我们可能会创造出什么样的文明。