Is innovation all we think it is? In this study, Saro Wallace challenges prevalent assumptions about innovation within post-colonial, post-industrial academic, and popular frameworks. She shows how they are often predicated on recent western culture and its dominant economic frameworks, and how they draw heavily on ecological and evolutionary models in the biological sciences. Using the ancient past to examine and recast innovation in long-term perspective, she reveals innovation's ultimate social determination, historicity, and non-innateness in human groups. Wallace offers core case studies from the ancient Mediterranean and west Asia and covers the origins of metals, ceramics, textiles and cultural landscapes starting 14000 years ago and ending in the first millennium BC. She demonstrates that her compelling, wide-ranging model also applies to historical and recent  cases, suggesting that innovation is neither an engineerable phenomenon in society, nor is it inherent, organic, or inevitable.