Back To The Garden

Steven Johnson · 2 Mar 2026 · adjacentpossible.substack.com ↗

3 korrents from this piece

Steven Johnson did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Archaeological interpretations of human history are biased toward artifacts made of durable materials that survived, not what mattered most to the people who made them.

Their wordsarcheologists naturally build their interpretations of human history out of artifacts that survive the passage of deep time.
Our reading
The Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age framework names historical eras after the inorganic materials that happened to survive, not what those societies actually valued.

Their wordsThat now ubiquitous timeline names eras after the inorganic materials that happened to survive in the dirt.
Our reading
A society structured to resist being catalogued and taxed by a central authority is for the same reason resistant to being reconstructed by archaeologists.

Their wordsAnd what makes a society illegible to the tax collector also makes it illegible to the traditional archaeologist.