It’s been at least 40 episodes now, counting Part-B followups, in our series where I explore, as often mentioned, innovation, progress and achievement in this paradigm where I look upon both material and institutional innovations as “technology”, hence the technocentric, inspired by the original sense of the Ancient Greek tekhne, meaning skill, art. This time, I’m going to do something a bit different from these previous episodes. Let’s go.
Over the course of these episodes, spanning the earliest examples of human innovation, right up to the cusp of the Modern Era (the late Middle Ages if you prefer), we have explored a wide range of artefactual and institutional developments, starting with the simple handaxe and taming fire to plant and animal domestication, notably the horse, to the wheel, bronze, their impressive integration by the Proto-Indo-Europeans, writing, the development of institutions such as the state and the market on its basis, urbanization and in the first stage, its almost complete and utter collapse, and then renewal, iron, a great many intellectual developments including mathematics, the zero, law, language, universities and paper.
Now let’s play Jenga tower and start unpicking some of these and still see what stands!
Article written by Ash Stuart
Images, voice narration and some footnotes generated by AI
Further Reading & Reference
* Mann, Charles C. (2005). 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Knopf. ISBN 978-1-4000-3205-1.
* Mann, Charles C. (2009). Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491. Atheneum Books for Young Readers. ISBN 978-0-5453-0727-7.
* Townsend, Camilla. (2019). Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-1906-7756-2.
* Moseley, Michael E. (2001). The Incas and Their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru (Revised Edition). Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-5002-8277-8.
* Marcus, Joyce and Williams, Patrick Ryan (Eds.). (2006). Andean Civilization: A Tribute to Michael E. Moseley. UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. ISBN 978-1-9317-4553-6.
