David Wengrow

David Wengrow (born 25 July 1972) is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

Wengrow enrolled at the University of Oxford in 1993, obtaining a BA in archaeology and anthropology. He went on to qualify for an MSt in world archaeology in 1998 and then studied for a D.Phil. under the supervision of Roger Moorey completed in 2001. Andrew Sherratt was a notable influence during Wengrow's time at Oxford.

Between 2001 and 2004 Wengrow was Henri Frankfort Fellow at the Warburg Institute and Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford; he was appointed to a lectureship at the UCL Institute of Archaeology in 2004, and in 2011 was made Professor of Comparative Archaeology (a title formerly held by Peter Ucko). Wengrow has conducted archaeological excavations in Africa and the Middle East, most recently with the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraqi Kurdistan and is currently working on a historical study of social inequality with LSE anthropologist David Graeber.

Wengrow is a recipient of the Antiquity Prize and has delivered the Rostovtzeff Lectures (New York University), the Jack Goody Lectures (Max Planck Institute) and the Biennial Henry Myers Lecture (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain). He served as external coordinator of the Mellon Research Initiative at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and was Distinguished Visitor at the University of Auckland.

Books

• Wengrow, D. (2006). The Archaeology of Early Egypt. Social Transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000-2650 BC. Cambridge World Archaeology Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wengrow, D. (2010). What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
• Wengrow, D. (2014). The Origins of Monsters. Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Short essays

• Wengrow, D. (2018) ‘A history of true civilisation is not one of monuments’. Aeon.[1]
• Graeber, D. and D. Wengrow (2018). ‘How to change the course of human history (at least the part that’s already happened)’. Eurozine. [2]
• Wengrow, D. (2019) ‘Rethinking cities from the ground up’. The British Academy [3]