Graeber / Wengrow 379: "Alfred Kroeber [...] spent decades on a research project aimed at determining if identifiable laws lie behind the rhytms and patterns of cultural growth and decay: whether systematic relations could be established between artistic fashions, economic booms and busts, periods of intellectual creativity and conservativism, and the expansion and collapse of empires"
"after many years, his ultimate conclusion was: no, there were no such laws"
see his Configurations of Cultural Growth (1944)
("Despite this, when we write about the past today we almost invariably organize our thinking as if such patterns really did exist")