When i was a ph g student, when i thought i was nearly done, my supervisor sat me down and said, look, i've read it all and it's fine, but you need to go back and weave that thread inexplicitly from the start. And i came away with this just real interest in innovation because as i started reading, i realized that all the literature was entirely premised on the last 200 yearsas if everything that had happened since the industrial revolution, or maybe even since the first world war, was just how people had always antracted and done stuff. It cond have sat and percolated for years, obviously.
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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