Theories of technological change have been in archaeology for 200 years. They are often seen as dehumanized, but there is a kind of social technology that's emerging from the world of french theory. And so you still have conversations with people where they talk about or less sophisticated people, or more or less developed cultures. It's very much in the popular imaginationand all that is out of that nineteenth century, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology,. social theory, mass that birst a bunch of our disciplines.
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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