“Exploring Scholarly and Best-Selling Accounts of Social Collapse and Colonial Encounters,”

[groovedaddy]

A Question of Blame When Societies Fall - NY Times - by GEORGE JOHNSON
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A group of archaeologists, cultural anthropologists and historians converged in the fall for a seminar, “Choices and Fates of Human Societies.”

What the scientists held in common was a suspicion that in writing his two best-selling sagas of civilization — the other is “Guns, Germs and Steel” — Dr. Diamond washed over the details that make cultures unique to assemble a grand unified theory of history.

“A big-picture man,” one participant called him. For anthropologists, who spend their lives reveling in minutiae — the specifics and contradictions of human culture — the words are not necessarily a compliment.

“Everybody knows that the beauty of Diamond is that it’s simple,” said Patricia A. McAnany, an archaeologist at Boston University who organized the meeting with her colleague Norman Yoffee of the University of Michigan. “It’s accessible intellectually without having to really turn the wattage up too much.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html?th&emc=th

[BridgeTheGap]

1. Interesting stuff - are we (the U.S.) in the decline phase? n/t