I'm reading "Against the Grain" at the moment. It's good, but James Scott (the author) is also clearly a little out of his academic comfort zone in it - Scott i

I'm reading "Against the Grain" at the moment. It's good, but James Scott (the author) is also clearly a little out of his academic comfort zone in it - Scott is a political scientist & anthropologist, not an archaeologist. He also tends to repeat himself a lot. Scott has also written "Seeing Like A State", a great book about, in its own words, "how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed" - in particular, grand schemes by powerful central governments which forced pre-existing social and ecological arrangements into a form more understandable to central management, but in the process lost some essential flexibility. Also related, an older piece in the same vein as "Against the Grain" is Jared Diamond's short essay "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race": http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html (Jared Diamond is also not an archaeologist, however. I'm curious what archaeologists have to think about this line of reasoning in general.)