Tankersley et al. (2022) recently published a brief paper in Nature Scientific Reports, arguing that the Hopewell culture of the first half of the first millennium CE in the North American Midwest was ended, or at least severely helped along toward its demise, by a comet fragment airburst event. The paper is getting quite a…
On the origin of doom scrolling
Biella Coleman recently asked whether the phrase “doom scrolling” existed before COVID. Certainly, doom scrolling itself has been a popular past-time since scrolling has existed, and doom page turning was around much before that. Perhaps there was even a form of doom scrolling (or more properly, unscrolling) before pages were introduced as a technology, but…
Trump, the fall of the Roman Republic, and the place of analogy in historical thought
Historian Niall Fergusson, this week, complains about the latest round of journalistic analogies, increasingly frequent since the 2016 election, he points out, between the current state of the US and the late Roman Republic. “The only thing to be said in favor of this analogy”, he says, “is that it beats ‘We are the Weimar…
Another in a continuing series of cheerful summer holiday posts: Archaeology, complexity and Armageddon part 2
Summer vacation, it turns out, is an opportunity for me to reflect on how close we are to global catastrophe. Over the past few of years, as some of my exasperated friends and colleagues will testify, I’ve taken to asking myself and others, on a regular basis, whether we are in 1936 or in 1939.…
Archaeology, anarchy, hierarchy, and the growth of inequality
An interesting polemic on the growth of social inequality has developed in the past couple of weeks between Davids Graeber and Wengrow on the one hand, and Peter Turchin on the other. Graeber and Wengrow critique what they claim is the standard Rousseauian account of the evolution of inequality, from a state of primeval communism…
ArcheoThoughts 