All our empirical ways to study it are themselves socially historically contingent. And so we have to start from the premise at everything we use. Well, im cookinga i won't be able to cook properly. So that's an efficient act for me. And those social practices are our efficiencies, whatever they are. I want to talk to you a bit about conservatism and resistance to innovation. Can you tell us more about this iron age cornwall a a communities that i mentioned earlier?
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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