The word scumorphism comes from the idea that as people develop new technologies, they are made to look like older technologies. It's an easy kind of visual this thing looks like that thing and fits nineteenth century ideas of ptyphology. Two things look alike, they must be the same type of thing. And then on top of that, we know that there similar ish in agein only a few hundred years, is upposed o thousands of years apart. So there might be a relationship between them. I don't deny there is a relationship. When you start making daggers, all of a sudden there's something going on, but it's not one to one
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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