it’s very easy to overstate the importance of new technologies in setting the overall direction of social change. To take an obvious example, the fact that Teotihuacanos or Tlaxcalteca employed stone tools to build and maintain their cities, while the inhabitants of Mohenjo-daro or Knossos used metal, seems to have made surprisingly little difference to those cities’ internal organization or even size. Nor does our evidence support the notion that major innovations always occur in sudden, revolutionary bursts, transforming everything in their wake. (This, as you’ll recall, was one of the main
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