i wanted to ask you a bit about your doctoral work, which features in the book. So i was really interested to look at this technological schuamorphism as a process and understand what people are doing when they start using metal. They're thinking about stone, and why on earth would they be copying it? And then i started looking at objects. Once you actually sit down with a kind of weirdness and the irregularity and the, frankly, unruliness of past materials, everything that you thought going into it just falls apart.
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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