The main critique of the book that I've seen is that they use history that's quite ambiguous to tell a polemic story that supports Graeber's anarchist views.
For instance, they take the upheavals at Teotihuacan as evidence that there was some kind of anarchist-ish revolution going on, when most scholarship believes that it's more likely an oligarchic system (with less emphasis on the monarch) who destroyed (from my memory) the temple/cult/district of the Feathered Serpent - a sub-group of their oligarchy.
This is interesting, but is pretty consistent with how other Mesoamerican ruling classes selected their rulers (Aztecs, etc.) ie there was often an oligarchy who picked them, not the populous as a whole via an anarchist / direct democratic method.
For Wengrow, I assume him working with the far-more-famous Graeber probably led to him to have some flexible interpretations of history, and I bet Graeber was pretty convincing + had a high power differential (implicitly) which could lead this to happen somewhat unknowingly.
For instance, they take the upheavals at Teotihuacan as evidence that there was some kind of anarchist-ish revolution going on, when most scholarship believes that it's more likely an oligarchic system (with less emphasis on the monarch) who destroyed (from my memory) the temple/cult/district of the Feathered Serpent - a sub-group of their oligarchy.
This is interesting, but is pretty consistent with how other Mesoamerican ruling classes selected their rulers (Aztecs, etc.) ie there was often an oligarchy who picked them, not the populous as a whole via an anarchist / direct democratic method.
For Wengrow, I assume him working with the far-more-famous Graeber probably led to him to have some flexible interpretations of history, and I bet Graeber was pretty convincing + had a high power differential (implicitly) which could lead this to happen somewhat unknowingly.