> Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms – what archaeologists call culture – were fundamentally integrated into technological solutions in this part of Peru in ancient times. Isolating and removing the tools from that knowledge made them less effective. Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms may have helped indigenous people perpetuate the solutions/technologies. Studying and understanding those may help people - today…
Exactly - just because they used culture, or religion, to underpin that stuff - doesn’t mean we need to. Doesn’t mean we need to use the same culture, or even the same religion, for that matter. “This is what works, and this is why it works, and this is the benefit, and this is why it’s worthwhile” can be enough, with a minimum of pretense.
“Culture is just the way things are done around here”
Peer review is culture. Work place legislation is culture.
The article argues that trying to extract technology and reapply it, without the culture, is a fools errand.
It’s trivially true: you can’t just teach some people to code and expect them release an app that can scale to millions of users. It requires culture to function and deliver.
We need to understand the culture required to deliver the technology, not just the technology itself.
I for one would be very interested to hear about how different types of labour organisation were required to deliver their water.