Technological rejection in regions of early gold innovation revealed by geospatial analysis

In research on early invention and innovation, technological “firsts” receive enormous attention, but technological “lasts”—instances of abandonment and rejection—are arguably more informative about human technological behavior. Yet, cases of technological discontinuance are largely ignored in studies of early innovation, as the lack of robust datasets makes identification and analysis difficult. A large-scale geospatial analysis of more than 4500 gold objects from the Caucasus, an early center of gold innovation, shows a precipitous decline at 1500 BC in precisely the places with the earliest global evidence of gold mining (c. 3000 BC). Testing various causal models reveals that social factors, rather than resource limitations or demographic disruption, were the primary causes of this rejection. These results indicate that prior models of technological rejection and loss have underestimated the range of conditions in which they can occur, and provide empirical support for theories of innovation that reject notions about the linearity of technological progress.