Alen: I think our fixation on innovation in the modern sense becomes kind of like, you know, the thing that stands out. Then it's also a process of domination,. A, yes. It creates a binery between people who are inevitive and people who are norit ain inevitiveness and creativity. These are things that are bound up with eccentric ideas of self and future into untrapreneurship.
Catherine Frieman, an associate professor of European Archaeology at the School of Archaeology, talks about her recent book, An Archaeology of Innovation: Approaching Social and Technological Change in Human Society, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Her book offers a long-term perspective on innovation that only archaeology can offer and draws on case studies from across human history, from our earliest hominin ancestors to the present. The book makes several different arguments, but one of them is that our present narrow focus on pushing the adoption of technical innovations—especially so called “disruptive innovations”—ignores the complex social, technological, and environmental systems that undergirds successful societies.
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