There seems to be a certain amount of social pressure as they compete with each other that none of them ever become. Even as there are these kind of scattered references to the king of this and the king of that, we can't find them arche ologically. Those people don't exist in ways that look like kings or individuals who are much greater than all the others around them to us. I kind of wonder if something like that's going on in part of that resistance to roman occupation was actually less about the romans and outsiders, per say. And more about this disruption to a sort of quite dynamic, but uther as, quite rigid, hierarchical system.
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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