IAN MORRIS

Classics Department, Stanford University

Abstract

In the 1960s, some archaeologists rejoiced that a new level of theoretical sophistication marked the field’s loss of innocence. However, they might equally well have worried that it marked the beginning of the field’s loss of confidence. Since then, academic archaeologists have increasingly retreated from continuous narratives connecting the distant past to our own age. We have failed to take full advantage of our discipline's unique ability to explain long-term history. In this talk I describe my own attempt to show how the interaction of geography, technology, and organization across the last 10,000 years makes sense of one major recent event, the British decision in 2016 to leave the European Union.