The whole discipline of archaeology, and the reason for all of our methods, is geared towards finding ways to collect as many forms of data possible to understand and fully describe events in the past. All of human behavior leaves something behind, and the questions are how can we find it and how much of it can we collect? Curiously, the reason why we do these admittedly strange things is exactly why the corporate world really needs more archaeologists…

Some might say that one is the loneliest number, but more often than not it’s zero that really gets the short end of the stick. This post is dedicated to a topic that frequently gets overlooked and is often under-considered – the absence of something. Very often, it’s just as important for us to know where something isn’t happening as it is to know where something does occur. So important, in fact, that it’s crucial to understand that zero isn’t really defined as the absence of something – it is actually the presence of nothing.

One wouldn’t think that it would be overly difficult to agree on what a word means, but a remarkably large number of meanings seem to get attached to sustainable. There are nearly as many definitions of sustainable and sustainability as there are suggestions on how to achieve them. Not surprisingly, there is also a rather strong correlation between how the terms are defined and the problems or objectives they are used to discuss. Therein lies a bit of a problem – it’s difficult to arrive at any consensus on a subject if people are using the same word to mean different things. Since policy debates require consensus, this is not a trivial problem.

We have been reading through lots of articles, discussions, and forums for professionals in fields like CSR (corporate social responsibility), ESG finance (environmental, social, and governance), sustainable development, and such. It’s striking just how many ways social is defined or measured. As anthropologists, reading these discussions brings on a curious mixture of empathy, humor, and frustration. There isn’t much about those definitions of social that would be overly familiar to anthropologists or other social scientists.