Chip Colwell is an archaeologist and the editor-in-chief of SAPIENS, a digital magazine about anthropological thinking and discoveries. He served as the senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for 12 years and remains a Denver resident. He is the author and editor of 13 books including “Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture,” which received six major book awards. His most recent is “So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything.”
SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate?
Colwell: Some years ago, I was visiting my sister in Seattle when she asked a simple question: Why do we have so much stuff?
As an archaeologist and museum curator (I was then at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science) who had spent his life studying the things humans have made for thousands of years, I felt I should have a ready answer. But I didn’t.
That set me on a long and winding journey to discover humanity’s three million year story about how our species ended up with so much stuff.
SunLit: Place this excerpt in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole? Why did you select it?
Colwell: In the book I propose that humanity has taken three giant leaps in our relationship with stuff. First, more than three million years ago our most ancient ancestors discovered that they could make tools from the natural world. Second, by 50,000 years ago, our ancestors invented meaning — turning paint into art, stones into gods, metal into money. Third, in the last 500 years, global capitalism has driven a succession of industrial revolutions and then an ideology of abundance.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.
This last step has allowed much of humanity to become hoarders. But hoarding has deep evolutionary roots and a long human history. This section shares a story from our own backyard, about a hoard of stone tools found in Boulder and dating to the last Ice Age. This section points to how hoarding has a purpose, even if in our modern world those purposes have been distorted.
SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Colwell: For more than 12 years, I was an anthropology curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and helped oversee a collection of more than 100,000 objects from countless cultures. Up until my sister asked me about the big story of stuff, I tended to look at these objects rather narrowly, as single moments in time. As I began work on this book, I began to listen to the entire collection as a symphony of human creativity played since the dawn of our kind.
Unlike my previous books, I needed to tell a vast story of all of us.
SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?
Colwell: To tell this story, I traveled the world. I visited Ethiopia and touched the 3.4-million-year-old bones that bear the marks of the world’s first stone tools. I visited a cave in Italy where some of the earliest known art was found. I visited Hong Kong where I watched a Daoist priestess channel the gods. Also, while writing at DMNS, I went downstairs and looked at the collections, and toured a local landfill.
In short, I learned so much! For this book, I truly didn’t have the answers when I started researching and writing. I discovered the story along the way.
SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?
Colwell: Before the book found a press, I met with an editor in the U.K. He said he loved the book concept. Only, he worried that it was too short. He thought it should be closer to 1,000 pages.
I wasn’t going to write a 1,000-page book, but I appreciated his point. I needed to find ways to both tell a really big story crossing continents and millennia and also a story that would be digestible and delightful.
SunLit: What’s the most important thing – a theme, lesson, emotion or realization — that readers should take from this book?
Colwell: Humanity can’t live without stuff. But we can live with far less stuff.
SunLit: Walk us through your writing process: Where and how do you write?
Colwell: Shortly after I received the book contract, I left DMNS and became the full time editor-in-chief of SAPIENS magazine. This has been an amazing opportunity, but an opportunity with little time for focused writing.
“So Much Stuff”
Where to find it:
- Prospector: Search the combined catalogs of 23 Colorado libraries
- Libby: E-books and audio books
- NewPages Guide: List of Colorado independent bookstores
- Bookshop.org: Searchable database of bookstores nationwide
SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.
For more than a year, I dedicated every other weekend to writing: I’d start on Friday after work and basically not stop until Sunday night.
SunLit: What single thing in your possession means the most to you?
Colwell: When I ask people this question, they often struggle to come up with a quick answer. One reason, I believe, is that so much of what we own today is mass produced and replaceable. In the book, I talk about how we arrived at this moment of “throwaway culture,” in which we live with things that mean less and less. I conclude with some ideas of what we can do about it.
SunLit: Tell us about your next project.
Colwell: I’m now working on a very different project.
For the last few years, I’ve been co-writing a novel with a Cheyenne elder and educator about the Native American boarding school experience. I came to this project after publishing an academic book on the subject and realized that a novel, strangely, could get closer to the truth of this tragic history than non-fiction.
A few more quick questions
SunLit: Which do you enjoy more as you work on a book – writing or editing?
Colwell: Writing. It’s through writing that I discover what I think about a subject.
SunLit: What’s the first piece of writing – at any age – that you remember being proud of?
Colwell: “The Nightmare of Ed Capo.” It was a riveting page-turner about a 19th-century, cape-wearing artist whose greatest fear was being buried alive, who then promptly dies, and then is buried alive. I was probably 10 or so.
Apparently, few could grasp its complexities. I was horrorstruck when another book I wrote, “The Cockroach and the Neck Kisser,” a silly and shallow tale, won a school prize instead.
SunLit: What three writers, from any era, would you invite over for a great discussion about literature and writing?
Colwell: Colson Whitehead. Marilynne Robinson. Haruki Murakami.
SunLit: Do you have a favorite quote about writing?
Colwell: “Books don’t write themselves.” That’s what I tell myself when my energy starts to flag when writing.
SunLit: What does the current collection of books on your home shelves tell visitors about you?
Colwell: Not much! It’s a hodge podge because I have no coherent strategy for which books in 3D I purchase, which I read digitally, which I borrow from the library, and then which I keep or give away.
SunLit: Soundtrack or silence? What’s the audio background that helps you write?
Colwell: Silence. My thoughts are loud enough.
SunLit: What music do you listen to for sheer enjoyment?
Colwell: Al Green.
SunLit: What event, and at what age, convinced you that you wanted to be a writer?
Colwell: Being the student of great teachers. Starting in high school, a life in anthropology started to come into focus.
SunLit: Greatest writing fear?
Colwell: Becoming too exhausted to find the strength to write a book again.
SunLit: Greatest writing satisfaction?
Colwell: Being surprised by my own occasional eloquence.