Indigenous Allies & Politics of Empire
The indigenous allies in Matthew Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest point to contingent histories, not the inevitability of guns, germs & steel.
Archaeology
This page is a collection of blog-posts about the role of history, material culture, and archaeology as a part of anthropology. My most recent attempts to do archaeology in a classroom are:
- The 2021 lectures beginning with Archaeological Methods and based on Anthropology: What Does it Mean to Be Human?
- The 2020 lectures beginning with Stone Tools and based on Through the Lens of Anthropology
The overview page Domesticaton, Agriculture, Civilization outlined some of the writing accomplished as a 2011 attempt at providing an independent web textbook. The sections on Jared Diamond–Agriculture: Jared Diamond’s Worst Mistake and Jared Diamond: Against History–are still two of the most popular landing pages on Living Anthropologically.
My perspective on archaeology and Jared Diamond borrowed from Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire.
Geography, States, Empires
Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History attempts to answer Yali’s Question – Why Europe? It’s time to rediscover the history of Eric Wolf.
DNA Battles
Research on earliest Americans reveals multiple migrations and complexity. But Nicholas Wade botches the coverage–and the anthropology.
Earliest Signs & Origin Stories
Pronouncements of firsts and earliest signs are reminders of a truth from Robert N. Proctor: There’s no glory in “second oldest.”