Cursing the Candle: Models, Methods, and Morality

Palgrave studies in ancient economies · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

Efficient Sulfide and Methane Removal in Anaerobic Secondary Effluent Using a Pilot-Scale Membrane-Aerated Biofilm Reactor

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

Scale, Information-Processing, and Complementarities in Old-World Axial Age Societies

Journal of Social Computing · 2022-06-01

Recent cross-disciplinary work on quantifying historical dynamics has made major contributions to scholarship. However, efforts to specify relationships between scale and information-processing always run a risk of shoehorning messy realities into overly rigid categories. In the case of the first-millennium BCE “Axial Age” in the Old World, networks of collective computing were structured more by cultural systems than by polities, and to understand the relationships between political scale and collective computational abilities, scholars need categories flexible enough to clarify the complementarities between political and cultural systems.

Against Method

American Journal of Archaeology · 2022 · 3 citations

• History
• Art history
• Classics

Absent Archimedes – what?

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews · 2022-10-02

Reviel Netz offers a radically contingent counterfactual history in which the absence of Archimedes would have prevented early modern Europe's scientific revolution and perhaps the nineteenth-century industrial revolution too. I argue that we need to be more explicit about methods in counterfactual arguments. Techniques developed by economic historians and political scientists seem to point toward a more constrained range of possibilities, and also favor assigning more importance to external material forces. Absent Archimedes, I suggest, we would live in a different world from this one, but not very different.

Evolutionary history

Evolutionary Psychology · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

Few academic historians take an evolutionary perspective on the past, but this outcome was not inevitable. Leading eighteenth-century intellectuals often took evolutionary perspectives, but particularists largely discredited them in and after the 1780s. By the time Spencer and Darwin revived evolutionism in the 1850s, distinctive historical questions and methods were very well-established. Public intellectuals regularly called for Darwinian history, but almost no academics saw much to gain in it. Most twentieth-century social scientists became generalizers but not evolutionists, while most historians not only refused to engage in generalization of any kind but also criticized divisions of labor in which evolutionists would test theories against data generated by historians. Possibilities remain open for a properly evolutionary history, in which scholars trained as historians but asking evolutionary questions would work alongside those trained as evolutionists but analyzing historical data, but currently, this field's prospects depend too much on individual personalities and even luck.

An Introduction to Seshat

Journal of Cognitive Historiography · 2020 · 26 citations

• Social Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science

This article introduces the Seshat: Global History Databank, its potential, and its methodology. Seshat is a databank containing vast amounts of quantitative data buttressed by qualitative nuance for a large sample of historical and archaeological polities. The sample is global in scope and covers the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. Seshat allows scholars to capture dynamic processes and to test theories about the co-evolution (or not) of social scale and complexity, agriculture, warfare, religion, and any number of such Big Questions. Seshat is rapidly becoming a massive resource for innovative cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary research. Seshat is part of a growing trend to use comparative historical data on a large scale and contributes as such to a growing consilience between the humanities and social sciences. Seshat is underpinned by a robust and transparent workflow to ensure the ever growing dataset is of high quality.

Oral History Conversation with Ryan Sisson

Digital USD (University of San Diego) · 2018-01-01

Oral history interview with Ryan Sisson.

ARCHAEOLOGY AND ARCHAIC GREEK HISTORY

2018-05-15 · 94 citations