What Are Innovations?

Innovations are new and useful things. For this reason older research often explained their diffusion in terms of a functionality paradigm: techniques were developed to meet challenges and solve problems arising from interaction with the environment.

Innovations can nonetheless emerge from widely different needs, like the desire for social boundaries, to save costs in the production of things, or as a side effect of new religions. An innovation is a creative new arrangement of a selection of known characteristics that is accepted if it fits into a society. In contrast to invention, innovation is not an event but a social process by which a human group gradually or suddenly undertakes something “new” and integrates it into everyday life.

Innovations are not exclusively human characteristics but are also firmly rooted in animal culture. Humans, however, accept innovations much faster than other animals do. Over the millennia this had led to humans developing widely different cultures. Artifacts, in particular, can be gathered through archeology, whereas innovations on other levels often have to be identified and classified to begin with.

Innovations influence the societies in which they are used, and consequently help to achieve long-term social and technological changes. In turn, societies that have changed in this way allow the emergence of other innovations.

Because the emergence of such innovations can depreciate existing conditions, however, innovations do not lead to an overnight improvement in living standards but often, in fact, to the exact opposite.

Innovations are diffused or rejected because they are relevant for a society. This occurs, for example, when people regarded as being worthy of imitation adopt an innovation, or when not using it is seen as a departure from social norms and leads to social sanctions. In any case, the acceptance of an innovation is a risk because new things are often perceived as a threat. For this reason, to begin with, innovations are mainly propagated by marginal social groups that are more likely to take the risk of losing their status.

If an innovation is convincing, the diffusion begins – the adaptation process by which the innovation is used by an increasingly larger group. Pre-modern societies also invested a fair amount of time in making changes to their artifacts, customs, and practices. Aside from evident improvement of tools, this can be inspired by a variety of reasons. Old things are abandoned and new ones are introduced in a constant process of change.

It is only very recently that archeology has focused more intensely on the necessity for specific technical and social framework conditions, and it has become clear that their existence is decisive for the diffusion and acceptance of innovations in archeology. The purpose of an archeology of innovations cannot be to apply concepts to found material that have been developed using other data, but to examine these finds with the help of archeological sources, and to develop an archeological form of innovation research. Despite all their specific deficits, archeological and historical sources offer good preconditions for investigating the interplay of technology and society over long time periods. Through their temporal depth they can trace the individual elements that compose a technique, and offer a glimpse into protracted formations of techniques, as well as different societies’ readiness to innovate, and the consequences. Understanding the development and the introduction and diffusion of techniques, and the resulting social processes in prehistoric and ancient times, is undoubtedly only just beginning, and still remains to be established as a research field with close point of interconnections with the history of technology in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times.

According to older conceptual models, such as diffusionism, all technological innovations were developed in the centers of high culture and then dispersed into the peripheries and to Europe. The C14 method first made it possible to view the relationship between high culture and non-literate regions without presuppositions.

Like in more recent times, in prehistory and Antiquity the development of new techniques seems not to have occurred continuously but in bursts of innovation. After the fundamental innovations that led to the emergence of the farming economy and lifestyle (the “Neolithic Revolution”), in the fifth millennium the mining of ores, their preparation, and the casting of finished products achieved a further revolutionary innovation that laid the basis for the continued development toward modern industry. The fourth millennium is marked by the extensive spread of other key technologies, the wheel and the wagon, the plow, the development of copper alloys, the use of lead and silver, the first manufacture of copper daggers and swords, the domestication of the first equids, arsenic copper alloys, and sheep for wool. This bundle of innovations is linked to the first new forms of representation of the burial of individuals under large mounds and the depiction of warriors on life-size pictorial steles. By contrast, important technical innovations in this period like writing, the scale, or the potter’s wheel, remain regional or are limited to the field of urban high cultures.

Technical innovations evidently spread very quickly in prehistory and Antiquity – perhaps within a century in the early periods.

For example, the oldest evidence of the casting of metal objects at the beginning of the fifth millennium BCE or the alloying of copper with other metals between southeastern Europe and Persia after the middle of the fifth millennium BCE are astonishingly synchronous. The wagon was diffused around 3500 BCE between Mesopotamia and the North Sea. In both cases we cannot specify today where the innovations were created.

The spread of technical knowledge probably happened in dynamic networks through which the innovations could broaden out, and which did not necessarily have a center. Nevertheless, technical modifications also found their way back to the place of origin of the innovation. The spreading of objects that had to be adapted to existing local conditions, repaired, or even replaced, was accompanied by the spreading of knowledge. Technical knowledge was not recorded in a book or stored in a digital cloud. In non-literary societies the direct transmission of knowledge was under constant threat from disturbances like sicknesses or wars. On the other hand, in many places stable networks guaranteed some degree of preservation and further development of knowledge. This does not rule out the repeated loss of existing knowledge through major crises and collapsing systems or networks.

Most of the long, arduous development of innovations is still hidden from the eyes of historians and archaeologists.

It is only at the stage of the finished product that the innovation really comes to light, apparently diffused suddenly on a mass scale. Many prehistoric inventions laid the foundations for the development of the agrarian societies of Eurasia until the Industrial Revolution.

The Neolithic Revolution in the Fertile Crescent fundamentally changed the previous hunters’ lifestyle. Instead of relocating their place of residence every year, humans became sedentary and lived in large villages. The domestication of the four Neolithic farm animals, the goat, the sheep, the pig, and the cow, between the tenth and eighth millennium BCE was a slow and arduous process with many setbacks. It took more than a thousand years until all four animals could be kept together. Finally, and relatively late, pottery was introduced. The changing methods of production were accompanied by an ideological revolution that changed images and symbols, and perhaps myths as well. A bundle of innovations emerged that could be transmitted with the expansion of farmers into all the areas that were still used by gatherers and hunters. Within a few centuries farmers had colonized Anatolia and Europe as far as the Central German Uplands, and had supplanted the indigenous hunting societies – sometimes with conflicts that were undoubtedly violent.

The second wave of expansion of innovation by Neolithic farmers – the linear pottery culture – between Lake Balaton and Wetterau can be traced by the characteristically decorated pottery and the standardized long houses. This network offered the new settlers a strategy for coping with local crises, but also facilitated exchange of rare products, such as spondylus shell jewelry, and certainly of marriage partners. Technical innovations could easily be diffused within such widespread networks.

In the fifth millennium the possibility of creating more efficient tools and weapons arose with the mastery of the metallurgy chain, from ore mining and its preparation and smelting to the casting of metal objects. Ultimately, without this, the first states in the later part of the fourth millennium BCE would scarcely have developed in that form. A decisive aspect of metal played a role here: its almost unlimited recycling capacity. A broken axe could be melted down and recast as an axe again.

No other material possessed this capacity for re-use. The new material, metal, practically never ran out. Societies since the Upper Paleolithic period in search of good flint stones had already learned how to mine ores in simple pinges.

During the Neolithic Age the ensuing knowledge was developed further to bore stable shafts. This created the preconditions for mining based on flint and, later, metal as well.

The development of metallurgy could also refer back to experiences from other areas. Technical specialists had already mastered the control of high temperatures in pottery kilns for around a thousand years. The transformation of clay into vessels by different procedures was another material transformation. The addition of other ores to copper was probably inspired by the tempering of pottery, which improved the vessel’s characteristics during firing and in use.

The domestication of the horse in the fourth millennium BCE radically changed the possibilities of moving across a region – not only for individuals but also for larger human groups, and finally hosts and armies. The speed of travel was reliant on the horse for millennia. It was not until the railroad, and then the automobile, that the horse became superfluous.

The wooden wagon was developed around the middle of the fourth millennium, if not before. It was drawn by cattle to begin with. The ponderous vehicle, which was used for transporting loads, extended the radius of field farming. It also facilitated the transport of household goods, which was an enormous advantage for the development of the mobile lifestyle in the steppe. The oldest wagon wheels already reveal different technical solutions, such as the axle. It shows that local communities were capable of further development, and perhaps of developing techniques in parallel.

The technologies were a structural hallmark of societies. Their development was problem-oriented and goal-driven. From the beginning they played a role in the economy, and this role could also expand and deepen in combination with other techniques. The wheel was not only confined to the wagon but turned horizontally as a pottery wheel, supplied the mill with water since Roman times, or was used for drainage in mining.

Glass is another material created by the transformation of material. In the Bronze Age only the people in power had access to glass, and it was used primarily for decorative beads – in Egypt and the ancient Orient precious glass vessels were also produced. The invention of the glassblower’s pipe in Palestine revolutionized glass manufacture and enabled broader social layers to own glass objects.

In the 18th century, craftsmanship, especially metallurgy, was already regarded as an early form of science. In fact, the precise observation of processes not only led to routines for recipes and manufacture but also to scientific rules. The formulation of the lever principle, for example, could have been inspired by the scale with unequal arms. Steelyards (weight measuring devices) are one of the many ancient innovations which will be examined more closely in the Atlasl.

DAI | Anke Reuter