But archaeology […] often acts as a parallel narrative to history: if you start digging with a textbook in your hand, you are soon going to get confu… - Richard Miles

When I was going through graduate school at Cambridge it appeared that humanities scholarship, stung by a decade of unsympathetic Thatcherite rule, had withdrawn into its own world. Academic terminology, partly fuelled by a mania for post-modernist dogma, had become evermore complex and impenetrable to anyone outside of the rarified circle of academe.

Civilisation as a term suggests human agency. […] It is the way in which people have articulated how and why they wanted to live in communities. It's about how we imagine the perfect community. […] I think the most ambitious thing humans have ever done is deciding to live together with people whom they didn't know in cities. It's really difficult to build a community, to learn to celebrate difference and to live harmoniously together, and we fail all the time.

Civilisation as a term suggests human agency. Things don't come together organically.