I think his biggest fault was that his passionate political views directed his research. He wanted to demonstrate that the earliest societies could exist witho

I think his biggest fault was that his passionate political views directed his research. He wanted to demonstrate that the earliest societies could exist without hierarchy in "popular councils and citizen assemblies... and were stable features of government", as he puts it, and when you examine archeological sites with this in mind, it tends to bias your perspective and causes you to pre-select data points that support that narrative. The OP author talks about how Graeber was a genius because he was so well versed in so many diverse subjects and the histories of different cultures, but unfortunately his conclusions are not supported by the experts in those specific cultures' histories. His conclusions about Clovis Points are a great example. He draws a huge number of conclusions from a tiny set of data that most experts don't agree with - conclusions that also support his modern politics. It reminds me of the fanfare around the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which was immensely popular because it supported modern progressive politics, and put on numerous best seller lists - but actual historians later showed it not to be supported by the historical record and that its conclusions were drawn from scant and/or misinterpreted evidence. Hard science is boring and tedious. ...and if you're selecting a hundred data points from different areas to construct a narrative that also happens to agree with your activist politics... then it's fair for the community to be skeptical of your methodology and conclusions. ...and that's also why he was dismissed from his roles as professor at two separate institutions.