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
A collection of blog-posts about the role of history, material culture, and archaeology as a part of anthropology. The overview page Archaeology: Domesticaton, Agriculture, Civilization outlines some of the writing accomplished as an attempt at providing an independent web textbook. The sections on Jared Diamond–Agriculture: Jared Diamond’s Worst Mistake and Jared Diamond: Against History–are two of the most popular landing pages on the site.
My perspective on archaeology and Jared Diamond borrows 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 on stone tools and earliest signs of cooking are reminders of a truth from Robert N. Proctor: There’s no glory in “second oldest.”