Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Anthropology is the scientific study of the human experience and is concerned with human biology, behavior, language, cultures, and society in the past and present. Graeber believes using an anthropological lens allows him to tell a more complete history of debt than an economist or historian could. Economists tend to boil human behavior down to mathematical equations and historians focus too much on the empirical details (specific facts) and are not able to extrapolate. In contrast, anthropologists:

are empirical—they don’t just apply preset models—but they also have such a wealth of comparative material at their disposal they can actually speculate what village assemblies in Bronze Age Europe or credit systems in ancient China were likely to be like. And they can reexamine the evidence to see if it confirms or contradicts their assessment (395).

Anthropology is also the only discipline that recognizes that talking about the economy as its own entity is a relatively recent idea (within the last three hundred years). For most of human history, economic affairs were just one part of a person’s life.

Archaeology is one of the subfields of anthropology. It is concerned with the study of human prehistory and history through the excavation of sites and the analysis of physical remains (i.