Climate Apocalypse in the News

As I sat down to work this morning with Radio 4 on in the background, I was intrigued to hear the BBC’s newsreader announcing that the riddle of the mysterious Classic Maya collapse had finally been solved.² I waited with baited breath to hear what the latest explanation would be, thinking it must be a slow news day for ancient history to have made it into the news mix. A moderate drought, she explained, was enough to cause the collapse of Maya civilisation around 1,100 years ago, which, she added, led to the Maya cities and pyramids being swallowed up by the rainforest. The announcer confided that, although solving the Maya collapse had long been a problem, archaeologists generally now preferred drought as the cause.

The whole report probably lasted no more than two or three minutes, an impressively short time in which to explain the fate of a long-lived and complex civilisation that had existed for hundreds of years, several times longer than modern nations like the United States or Australia. It was a problem that, as she rightly pointed out, had puzzled archaeologists and the curious for years. But I wondered what exactly I and other listeners were supposed to understand by ‘collapse’ and by ‘Maya civilisation’ – dramatic images of lost and abandoned cities reclaimed by nature were evoked, but would we all be imagining the same thing? I was curious too about which archaeologists she was referring to, and who had decided that ‘most’ of them preferred this conclusion. I briefly wondered whether I would no longer be obliged to complete this book about collapse ...

So, I diligently looked up the original paper that the news report was based on, just published in the journal Science.³ The paper was somewhat less definitive than the news report, but its argument was still clear enough. I found that the authors, two oceanographers, had studied the existing palaeoclimatic data, drawn from physical samples taken from three locations in northern Yucatan, Mexico. Like other researchers before them, they suggested that chemical analysis of cores taken from lake bottoms and from stalactites (‘speleothems’ – stalactites and stalagmites or cave calcites) indicated periods of reduced rainfall in Late Classic Maya times (the eighth and ninth centuries AD). This, they said, would have reduced the carrying capacity of the land, the amount of food that it could produce, which would in turn have caused the population to fall catastrophically, triggering ‘significant societal disruptions’.

Rather than a new solution, this sounded like a well-known story of collapse due to some kind of environmental change with which human society could not cope, the main difference being that the authors were claiming that a more moderate reduction in rainfall could be blamed, rather than the massive droughts suggested by others. If a modest reduction in rainfall could have this effect, it suggested that the ecology and hydrology of the Yucatan Peninsula, the home of (some of) the Maya people, were particularly sensitive to change; a plausible hypothesis. But, given the long history of research on the problem of the Classic Maya collapse, and the number of publications, scholarly and popular, as well as television documentaries and even films on the subject, was that it? Rainfall slightly reduced, Maya collapsed and disappeared?

I was still left wondering what the authors really thought the Maya collapse was, and if this moderate reduction in rainfall could be enough to explain it. The news story had suggested a point of collapse around 1,100 years ago, c. AD 900, and the disappearance of the Maya, whereas the authors of the paper actually noted, quite rightly, that ‘the disintegration of the Classic Maya Civilization was a complex process’ taking two centuries. But their account still seemed very much to imply some kind of terrible event that would have involved a lot of death and unpleasantness. Did they imagine that many Maya simply died at once, that it was ultimately a kind of Malthusian population collapse? And what were these ‘societal disruptions’? Their statement that the collapse ‘involved a catastrophic depopulation of the region’ seemed clearly enough to indicate that it was an ecological collapse they were thinking of, of the kind biologists might identify in any species or ecosystem.

I was left with an image of an empty landscape, and a population wiped out by a terrible natural disaster, yet it is difficult to square this with the idea of a complex two-century process of change, which the authors had introduced. Two centuries is a long time, time enough for significant changes in ways of life and attitudes, in political geography, and in material culture to occur. Admittedly, it can be hard to conceptualise past periods of time; as George Orwell said ‘when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together’.⁴ The stories implied some kind of ‘back to square one’ blow, from which the Maya, the few who survived, would have to start again amongst the ruins of their former glory. In this account, a fairly typical story of apocalyptic collapse involving a terrible disaster and death with a handful of survivors eking out a living in a post-apocalyptic age, the ancient Maya were helpless victims of circumstance.

The Maya are not the only ones to receive this treatment, although they are a perennial favourite – enigmatic, exotic, mysterious. In 2012, for example, The Times of India proclaimed that ‘Climate killed Harappan civilization’, a story also based on a research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS).⁵ The paper argues that a reduction in monsoon rainfall affected the complex river flows of the Indus basin, with rivers getting smaller, becoming seasonal, or even drying up completely. The agricultural basis of the Harappan urban sites was undermined. Yet there was no sudden ending, no killing stroke executed by the climate; the authors state soberly that: ‘since approximately 3,900 y ago, the total settled area and settlement sizes declined, many sites were abandoned, and a significant shift in site numbers and density towards the east is recorded’.

Another similar story, entitled ‘Climate change: The great civilization destroyer’ appeared in the New Scientist in 2012, this time about the Mycenaean Greeks of the Late Bronze Age, c. 1200 BC.⁶ This article, again based on a research paper, wanted to add the Mycenaean collapse to the list of peoples, societies, and civilisations supposedly brought to an end by climate change.⁷

These stories, and others like them, seem to represent the public image of collapse in the early twenty-first century and the cutting edge of archaeological and historical research. They tie in with our concerns over current climate change, and also with the vivid images we have of drought and famine. What these stories remind me of, and presumably others, are the graphic images of the victims of the tragic droughts and famines in Ethiopia in the 1980s. These came to international attention through the harrowing television reports shown around the world, which many in developed countries, seeing such things for the first time, found so shocking. Those images, and more recent ones that still appear regularly on television, seemed to show people stricken and emaciated, in abject poverty, with no food, water, or hope, people for whom circumstances were intolerable and for whom normal functioning society had ceased, people who would, without international aid, die where they sat, starving and thirsty. Would the Classic Maya, Harappan, and Mycenaean collapses have looked like this?

Stories and Collapse

Probably not. The problem with collapse in the news and in many popular articles is that the stories they tell are grossly oversimplified, offering a caricature of history, a mythic version of historical change for our sound bite society; they are infotainment at its best. As we have seen already, one issue is the way that scientific research is transformed into news. In the first place, certain kinds of scientific research are more likely to get published in high-profile journals, and thus to catch the attention of news services. Journals such as Nature, Science and PNAS choose to publish novel and especially interdisciplinary research, research that has definitive results and conclusions – hard science style. Thus stories about new climate change linked to the fate of ancient societies are much more likely to reach a wide audience than a more circumspect paper in an archaeological journal.

Then the headline language used to describe collapse in popular sources (in the press as well as in documentary films) frequently serves to obscure the complex historical processes that were at work, turning them into cataclysmic events, and presents the peoples, states, or societies (and peoples) in question as static two-dimensional entities that could be wiped out in a blip. Too often, such reports, and the science papers on which they are based, fail to really consider what they are saying. What do we mean by collapse and what do we mean when we talk about the Classic Maya, the Harappans, or the Mycenaean Greeks, their cultures, their societies, and their civilisations? If we frame the questions simplistically, we are likely to get simplistic and unsatisfactory answers.

Despite their lack of substance, these stories have a great and understandable appeal, and it is worth thinking about this a little. What such stories really represent is a kind of quest romance, a kind of story as ancient and appealing as the oldest stories we know, which historian Ronald Hutton explains is ‘one of the most popular and effective modes of expression for historical or archaeological research’.⁸ Researchers are heroes on a quest, who undergo a journey in which they apply their knowledge and skills, and eventually, and triumphantly, solve a seemingly insoluble historical conundrum.

Collapse stories appeal to our narrative desires in other ways too. They can be seen as both tragedy and parable. Tragedy originated as a specific kind of theatrical performance in ancient Greece, and tragic stories dealt with big and serious themes; plays were not simply ‘art’, but actively mirrored the politics and society of contemporary life and functioned ‘as a powerful medium for the communication of ideas’.⁹ They had a standardised plot in which the hero’s journey is followed, his actions leading to a climax and then finally to a resolution, often the death of the hero.¹⁰ Read ‘ancient civilisation’ for ‘hero’ and we have a story of rise, zenith, and fall – stories of collapse which are blamed on human degradation of the environment seem to fit this pattern.

In tragedy, the hero usually makes a mistake, which leads to his fate; sometimes these errors are brought about by outside factors, such as divine intervention, but at other times there is some fatal character flaw. So in collapse we can see external factors blamed or errors made by the society that collapsed. Just as in tragedy, where the mechane allowed gods to enter the stage through the air, revealing the act of violence that resolved the play, collapse is often ‘explained’ by deus ex machina.¹¹ Just as tragedy was a social art, witnessed and consumed by ancient audiences, our stories of collapse are spectacles, shared and consumed by modern audiences.

Aristotle thought tragedy served an emotional or psychological purpose. He suggested that ‘through pity and fear’ there would be catharsis, an emotional purging in the audience.¹² Nietzsche, thinking of tragedy, wrote of ‘that lust which also involves the joy of destruction’.¹³ Others have suggested that tragedy provokes Schadenfreude, that in fact audiences enjoy the horrors of tragedy and the sufferings of its fictional hero, a kind of enjoyment which, however morally questionable it may be, seems real and commonplace.¹⁴ Does our witnessing of apocalyptic collapse, whether in print, on television, or on film, somehow fulfil us emotionally? Do we enjoy the spectacle and revel in stories of the destruction of others?

Perhaps. Nowadays this may be most evident in popular blockbuster films that project views of apocalyptic collapse with causes that reflect contemporary concerns. In recent decades, we have been treated to global disaster threatened by colliding comets in the 1998 film Armageddon, where disaster was narrowly averted through technology and guts, and also by the film Deep Impact where the ending was much more bleak, with millions perishing. In 2004 there was The Day After Tomorrow, a film which depicted a sudden climate change and the onset of a new ice age almost overnight. In 2009, 2012 focussed on global disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis, which killed millions, caused by the heating of the Earth’s core by solar flares – a select few humans were able to save themselves in a number of ‘arks’, built in secret in China. The 2011 film Contagion, in more of a documentary style, explored the effects of a global pandemic, which caused the breakdown of social order; the film reflected real contemporary fears about possible pandemics such as SARS and H1N1 flu.

Other myths of apocalyptic collapse too come to mind from our shared past culture. The flood myths shared by numerous cultures around the world are often taken to suggest that floods had a profound effect on people in the past, strong enough to warrant being passed down in stories, although floods, like other themes can have metaphorical rather than literal meanings.¹⁵ The flood myth recounted in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, and later the Christian Bible, have even inspired people to search for a real catastrophic geological event that may underlie the story – some suggest the flooding of the Black Sea.¹⁶

Also from the Bible we have the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, recounted in Deuteronomy 29:23. The cities were destroyed by God in his anger at the wickedness and vice of their inhabitants. But other kinds of destruction were also foretold. In Isaiah 17:1–2, a prophecy of the destruction of Damascus is given, in which it is predicted that the city will become a heap of ruins. The destruction of the mercantile city of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar was also graphically prophesied in Ezekiel, which describes the utter destruction of one state by another. Destruction is a consequence of wrongdoing – a precursor to our modern environmental stories of collapse.

The Atlantis myth is a story of catastrophic and apocalyptic collapse par excellence. It has been a part of Western culture since Plato composed it in the early fourth century BC; we know it from his Critias and Timaeus.¹⁷ However, it is probably better known now than ever before; Alan Cameron notes it as the inspiration for over 20,000 books.¹⁸ A Platonic myth rather than a Greek myth, invented by a man devoted to exploring order, a crafter of ideal societies, and political utopias, the story relates how Atlantis, a fictional ideal state located on an island in the Atlantic, fell from grace as its once blessed and virtuous people grew corrupted and greedy over time, eventually trying to enlarge their empire and conquer the world. For this hubris Zeus wanted to punish them, and the ancient Athenians, who in contrast to the Atlanteans were still virtuous, defeated them in war, freeing all the conquered and enslaved peoples, and averting the threat from the invaders. Afterwards, ‘there were earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single dreadful day and night all your fighting men were swallowed up by the Earth, and the island of Atlantis was similarly swallowed up by the sea and vanished’.¹⁹

Interpretations of the Atlantis myth abound as people make the story conform to their desires, but it seems clear enough that Plato, in the fourth century BC, was teaching his fellow Athenians (and others) to be mindful of their ambition and their priorities.²⁰ They had been embroiled in the creation of an empire and had had a major conflict with Sparta, which led to defeat at the end of the fifth century BC. He perhaps wanted them to recall their ancestors in the earlier fifth century who had, somewhat against the odds, defeated the enormous might of the invading Persian king. Athens was the focus of the story; Atlantis represented an undesirable, avoidable fate. The story elaborates the age old aphorism that pride comes before a fall – much like the story of Croesus and the Delphic oracle.

Alan Cameron notes that ‘it is only in modern times that people have taken the Atlantis story seriously; no-one did so in antiquity’.²¹ Indeed, many have ‘believed’, including the British prime minister and Homeric scholar William Gladstone, and have tried to associate the Atlantis myth with ‘real’ history.²² K. T. Frost in 1913 wrote that ‘The search for Atlantis has given rise to so many conflicting views (most of them palpably absurd) that few scholars are prepared to take it seriously’, before offering his own view, about which most modern scholars would express equal scepticism, that the story represented Minoan and Mycenaean history.²³ Frost noted that while ‘it seems ... futile to seek for the geographical or geological site of a huge island now submerged. On the other hand a political and national disaster, a cataclysm in the usual instead of in the literal sense of the word, can destroy an ancient civilisation as completely as any flood’.²⁴ But despite his comments others have continued to look, and to make associations with the archaeological, geological, and historical evidence of the Late Bronze Age Aegean, in particular the eruption of ancient Thera and its effects on Minoan Crete.

An interesting example of an apocalyptic story from the pre-Hollywood blockbuster days that ticks the same boxes, and shows that our modern disaster discourse is no new thing, is the volcanic disaster narrative.²⁵ This was a type of entertainment devised by pyrotechnical entrepreneurs, who produced ‘volcano entertainments’, spectacles with painted backdrops and sound effects, which became popular in the nineteenth century, but which originated in the eighteenth. They reflected increasing interest in geology and the natural processes of the Earth combined with excitement over the excavation of the buried city of Pompeii, which began in the 1740s.

In the 1880s, one such show, called The Last Days of Pompeii, was toured by the Pain family, who were fireworks manufacturers (Figure 1.1). It visited New York and London, among other places. In its first performance at Manhattan Beach, Coney Island, the show attracted more than a thousand spectators, with later shows attracting up to 10,000. In June 1889, the Pains put on a modified version of the show, announced in the New York Times (9 June 1889):

In addition to their romantic and tragic appeal, stories of collapse are ideal fodder for the creation of modern parables for our time – especially parables of human relationships with the natural environment. Examples of this are not hard to find, and they are frequently repeated in the literature, becoming factoids that purport to be straightforward historical facts. One noted environmental writer, Lester Brown, for example, in his book World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, used as examples ancient Sumer and the Maya. The former collapsed because their successful irrigation systems eventually led to high salinity, resulting ultimately in food shortages and collapse. The latter chopped down too many trees, leading to soil erosion, and again, food shortages. Brown draws an explicit parallel between past and present: ‘for us it is rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere that are raising the global temperature, which could ultimately shrink grain harvests and bring down our global civilization’.²⁷ The lessons we are to learn from the past are clear.

Figure 1.1.

Graham Charles. Fireworks at Manhattan Beach – ‘The Last days of Pompeii’.

Source: Harper’s Weekly 25 July 1885, 476. General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

None of this is to say that there is only one ‘correct’ version of collapse that exists to the exclusion of all others, nor that the academic archaeological version (not that there is ‘one’ single version) is the best – in doing history there are many stories and perspectives that can be usefully brought into play. But it is important that we recognise the constructed nature of our ideas about collapse. I think Stephanie Moser puts it best:

Our thinking on collapse, and the stories we tell of it, popular and academic, are reflections of our own times and concerns. As we read back through accounts of collapse from different times, we can see this influence clearly.²⁹ But we must beware of over simplifying or skewing our accounts of past collapses just to turn them into lessons for modern society.

What I hope to have shown so far is that we often see collapse in very particular ways, which are structured by how we share knowledge – through stories or narratives. Collapse stories often bridge information and entertainment, fulfilling our needs on a variety of levels. Scientists are problem-solving heroes, societies are tragic characters, destined to fail, and collapse is a lesson to be learnt from. There is nothing inherently bad about this – it is human nature to make everything into a story. But if we really want to know about collapse, we have to begin by trying to see past the popular stories. A result of this, and one that many might find unsatisfying, is that we may end up without straight answers or simple plausible-sounding storylines; we might have to admit that sometimes (or a lot of the time) we do not know what happened or who or what was to blame for something that we think was going on.

What Is Collapse?

Before we get too far along, we should think about what collapse actually is and what kind of things can collapse. Assumptions about and lack of definitions of collapse are two of the problems in how it is represented. Very often, the implication is that collapse is some kind of apocalyptic event – everyone starves and the monuments of a civilisation decay and are lost only to be rediscovered much later on, posing a riddle to explorers and archaeologists. As Joseph Tainter suggests, many ‘authors assume that we know what it means, without individual, cultural, or temporal variation’.³⁰ However, there is no guarantee that we are in fact all sharing the same idea of what collapse is.

Describing the Maya collapse, archaeologist Arthur Demarest takes the problem a step further, blaming controversies over interpretation not only on assumptions about what collapse is, but also on confusion over what is collapsing:

But there are definitions of collapse, and of what it might apply to, and I shall introduce and discuss some of those next.

Joseph Tainter’s 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies is still probably the most referenced book on collapse; the author has written much about collapse, complexity, and sustainability. His definition of collapse goes like this:

Tainter sees collapse very specifically as a political process connected to the degree of complexity of a society. Human societies become more complex as a response to the problems and opportunities that they face, and through collapse they become less complex.³³ Collapse then is a rapid process of simplification – where rapid means not instantaneous, but perhaps a few decades. Importantly, in Tainter’s way of thinking, collapse itself is an adaptation not simply a failure.

What does this definition apply to? In his main examples, Tainter writes about the Western Roman Empire, the Classic Maya, and the Ancestral Puebloans of southwestern North America. These are three quite different entities, operating at different scales. The first was a large empire; the second a group of independent but competitive states of varying size making up what we could call a ‘culture zone’; the third is a smaller single culture. So in Tainter’s view, political collapse can happen to a range of ‘things’. We might wonder, however, whether all of these are really comparable.

George Cowgill and Norman Yoffee discussed what collapse applies to in another key publication from 1988, The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations. They suggest that we should ‘clearly differentiate between state, society and civilization, and use the last term in a specifically cultural sense’.³⁴ Collapse occurs within civilisations, which are the ‘cultural tradition[s] in which the state is embedded,’ consisting of ‘literature, customs, languages’.³⁵ To some, this may seem like academic semantics, but it is important. Often we read or hear about the collapse of civilisations, but Roman, Maya, and Ancient Puebloan civilisations did not collapse at all – all three survive, transformed, to this day. It is specific political regimes that collapsed, social systems that changed, and religious and ideological systems that were transformed and/or rejected.

Take another example – Mesopotamian civilisation. Jane Rempel and Norman Yoffee asked the question, ‘did Mesopotamian civilisation end?’ They emphasised that while politically Mesopotamia contained many different states and empires over the years, which rose and fell, and eventually the whole region fell prey to even bigger empires passing through Persian and then Macedonian and Greek hands, ‘Mesopotamian civilization did not undergo a similar collapse.’³⁶ That is not to say it did not change, it certainly did – it transformed over long years, but it did not collapse in the blink of an eye. The cuneiform writing tradition could be taken as an index of the presence of Mesopotamian civilisation and its disappearance as late as the third century AD could be said to mark the end of Mesopotamian civilisation.³⁷ But this single indicator is an arbitrary one – a civilisation is a set of features that transform at different rates (and with different implications for the people and societies in question).

There is no need to see such transformations as decline – the value of cultural items and practices such as writing changes, as do the ways people seek to construct their personal and cultural identities. Likewise with the end of the Western Roman Empire. Its political system collapsed in the fifth century AD, its territory fragmenting into multiple independent states, but Roman civilisation did not collapse. It had always been changing, and this did not end abruptly with the death of the last Western emperor; the Roman heritage remained alive, being reused, reinterpreted, and transformed by the people who inherited it – in the twenty-first century the Americans still place importance on the concept of liberty, and retain senators and a senate.

What about famous examples of collapse such as the Greenland Viking communities, or the lost city of Roanoake, or Rapa Nui? In the former case, we have two communities that were eventually abandoned – but these did not collapse in Tainter’s sense, and the latest research suggests they were abandoned by their inhabitants in good order rather than that they fell into chaos and calamity with everyone starving to death or killing each other.³⁸ With Roanoake (the City of Raleigh, on Roanoke Island, Virgina), the English settlement founded in North America in 1587, we have an example of a mystery – another settlement abandoned – but again not a collapse in the view of many.³⁹ And what about Easter Island? Whether there was a collapse – a simplification of Rapa Nui society – at some point before Europeans arrived is controversial, as we shall see later on. In all these examples of supposed collapse, what probably happened is far less dramatic than the apocalyptic stories we are often presented with.

Many authors who write about collapse cite Tainter in their own lists of references, but not everyone strictly follows his definition of collapse. Jared Diamond, one of the most well-known popular writers on collapse, gave a definition in his 2005 book Collapse that is clearly drawn in part from his reading of Tainter and other thinkers on collapse, but it differs in key respects:

The first thing we should note is that, unlike Tainter, Diamond emphasises ‘drastic’ decreases in population over a wide area and long period of time. This reflects not only the common view of apocalyptic collapse, but also Diamond’s background in ecology and biology, where collapse is something that happens to populations in ecosystems (think of the mysterious ‘colony collapse disorder’ that has affected bee populations in recent years). This focus on population and disaster also follows from Thomas Malthus’ influential An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, in which populations grow until they are checked by some kind of catastrophe. The focus on population in Diamond’s definition is almost the opposite of Tainter’s view that collapse is primarily a political process.

It is easy to imagine that a demographic collapse would be a terrible thing – something that would by its very nature have to be brought on by plague epidemics or famines caused by extreme droughts or climate change or damage to a society’s supporting environment, which reduced its carrying capacity. Such a disaster would surely have serious repercussions for any society – even possibly bringing about its demise (though clearly the medieval European states survived the massive disruption and population loss caused by the Black Death). Thus, Diamond envisions the Greenland Viking’s collapse as:

A focus on demographics conjures up a stereotypical descent into a dark age largely devoid of people and of the kinds of activity that comprise civilised life. Whereas for Tainter a political collapse could have repercussions in other areas of life and society, including being a cause of depopulation, for Diamond it is primarily depopulation that is collapse.

We have looked at two quite different visions of collapse, both drawn from works attempting to give general explanations of why collapse happens – one taking an economic perspective, the other an environmental one. But what about archaeologists themselves, how do they see collapse? In an important book about collapse and regeneration, from 2006, entitled After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, Glenn Schwartz explains:

This broad description is different again. It does not necessarily describe the simplification of a given society, unless we see the fragmentation of empires or states as simplification, nor does it necessarily involve demographic collapse, although this can be indicated by the abandonment of sites (but this can also indicate the nucleation of population at a few sites or a shift in subsistence strategies). But rather than insisting on a single meaning, it gives us a number of descriptive features of collapse that we can tie to specific examples, and these reflect well how archaeologists apply the term ‘collapse’ in practice.

A more recent definition from their 2012 paper is given by archaeologist Karl Butzer and environmental historian Georgina Endfield, who suggest that:

Although there is some overlap with the previous definitions, this one is different again, since it defines collapse as large-scale transformation with a number of possible impacts on five interlinked areas. One problem with this definition is that there is no idea of the timescale of such transformation – are such transformations rapid? Does collapse as transformation have to be measured in a few years, in decades, or can it take place over centuries, in which case how does it differ from plain ‘change’? Also, can we equate ‘demography’ with ‘settlement’ – that is, equate population with how populations are spread through the landscape?

Another problem (depending on your point of view) is that state formation or ideological changes, such as new systems or ideologies of power, may count, in this definition, as episodes of collapse. Was the pyramid age of Egypt an era of collapse because of its new centralisation and a new system of ruler-focused monumental propaganda? Can either the founding of the Roman Empire (from an oligarchical republican system), the Christianisation of Rome (or indeed Europe), or the extension of the franchise to women in the UK, as profound real and ideological changes, count as collapses?

Finally, let us include a definition from the sustainability literature, as given by Marianne Young and Rik Leemans:

• has negative effects on human welfare, which, in the short term, are socially intolerable;

• will result in a fundamental downsizing, a loss of coherence, and/or significant restructuring of the constellation of arrangements that characterise the system; and

• cannot be stopped or controlled via an incremental change in behavior, resource allocation, or institutional values.⁴⁴

This definition is drawn from the results of a Dahlem workshop, published in 2007 as Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth.⁴⁵ These authors, as with some of the others, do refer to timescales – since change is normal, collapse represents a change in its rate where certain effects are present, including simplification and ‘socially intolerable’ effects on human welfare. It is also seen as an unstoppable process – one that cascades from changed situation to changed situation, taking the unit considered further away from a particular first set of circumstances.

The definition is reminiscent of the idea of failed or failing states, an equally inexact concept popular since the 1990s, which is of clear concern to policy makers seeking to ensure that states become or remain sustainable and do not collapse. Of these, Cojanu and Popescu explain:

Socially intolerable conditions can be quite a tricky concept to define. It may simply mean that living conditions become much worse – intolerably so, for a given period of time. They may, however, become tolerable as people’s expectations and values change. For whom (and for how many) do conditions have to be intolerable? The slave miners in the Roman world, the child miners of nineteenth-century Britain, or other exploited or socially excluded groups surely lived in conditions that others might find intolerable ... But these were normal features of ‘successful’ societies that were not collapsing. We might also, when we take society to refer to an identifiable social unit like an empire or state, think of circumstances that the system itself, rather than its people, is unable to bear.

Most reasonable people would expect there to be some leeway in language usage; after all, we usually adopt or create terminology to help us think about the thing we are trying to describe, and not as an end in itself, as Patrick L. Gardiner reminds us:

Each definition of collapse brings with it different observations, ramifications, and repercussions. There is little of the apocalyptic to be seen, except perhaps in Diamond’s and Young and Leemans’ ideas, and the demographic definition is not one that archaeologists or historians usually use, except in specific cases such as collapse of native populations during instances of European colonialism. Much more frequently, collapse is used to mean the fairly rapid ending of states (including empires and much smaller entities), which itself can involve fragmentation into smaller units, simplification of political and social systems, change in urban settings, redistribution of population in the landscape, and changes in ideology made visible in architecture and the arts.

Many archaeologists agree that collapse often affected the elite members of societies most – or at least most visibly – and that those least affected (at least in some ways) would be the peasant farmers that made up the bulk of the population in pre-industrial societies. Thus collapse could be ‘socially intolerable’ to the elite but welcomed by ‘middle classes’ or others. But it is also true that collapse would have had effects that ran through a whole society to some extent. Fragmentation could bring instability and conflict, driving down agricultural production, trade, and exchange, all of which might affect the population levels, while the end of rulership, its specific ideology, and all that went with it would have had its own set of economic and social effects.

At any rate, whenever we think about collapse, it is a good idea to be critical – not for the sake of argument, but in order to grasp more fully what we (and others) actually mean and what we are really exploring.

What Collapsed?

In Tainter’s definition, collapse is something political that can happen to any established society – ones that are both more complex and less complex. But in practice, people apply collapse to many different kinds of ‘units’, and so I want to take a step back and consider the kind of units that collapse is said to happen to and to think about the implications of this. This is important because many authors take a comparative view of collapse, yet it is not always clear why some examples of collapse are thought to be comparable with others. To begin with, it may be helpful to consider the variety of entities that we encounter in the modern world, if only to remind us of some of the different categories involved.

Nowadays, we tend to think about the world as carved up into fixed territorial political units that we call countries, states, or nations, and which we often refer to generally as ‘societies’, owing to their nature as politically and socially defined in-groups in which people imagine a common identity. These may often be the biggest unit for which we have certain legally defined relationships and statuses, and a strong sense of identification. Some states, Switzerland, China, the United Kingdom, or Spain, for example, are multi-ethnic and multilingual, while in others, such as Korea or Japan, more stress has been placed, in recent times at least, on ethnic and cultural homogeneity.

Of course, there are also bigger entities like the European Union, in which many Europeans are voting citizens, but it is unclear whether this legal and political entity is also something with which many of its citizens strongly identify, in contrast with their other identities. There are other concepts that are made use of, such as ‘westernness’, ‘Arabness’, or ‘Asianness’, which are grounded in cultural or behavioural commonalities and sometimes in the idea of shared cultural heritages – sometimes equated with that loose idea of ‘civilisations’. Much of Europe, and therefore the USA and other recent states, share an origin rooted partly in Roman and classical heritage. Some transnational identities and institutions are neither ‘national’ nor ‘ethnic’ and are based instead on religious or other affiliations – Catholicism is a prime example of an enduring non-ethnic group identity, Islam is another.

‘Nation’ can also refer to people who identify themselves as a unit, on the basis of some (possibly imagined) shared descent, ethnicity, or ‘national’ identity, for example. Nations may be non-sovereign groups, or groups with a degree of autonomy either within one or several sovereign states – the 30 million Kurds who live in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, for example, or native American groups, are nations. Tribal or aboriginal groups elsewhere, within states, may also sometimes be considered as nations. In the past, as in the present, states and nations do not necessarily overlap territorially – empires and states may incorporate different peoples in different ways. In classical Greece, the helots of Sparta, Messenian Greek slaves owned by the state, were part of the state only to the extent that the state claimed ownership of them, keeping them subjugated for centuries. Despite this situation, a Messenian identity continued to exist and the Messenian state was reconstituted after the battle of Leuctra in 371 BC.⁴⁸

What Are We Comparing in Past Collapses?

A brief glance at some of the examples rostered in comparative approaches to collapse shows that many different kinds of units are often considered together (Table 1.1). We can see empires, such as the Akkadian and Roman; cases that may be empires or states, such as Han China, Tiwanaku, and Wari; states like Uruk and Old Kingdom Egypt, and Axum. We can also see what may be best described as ‘culture zones’, including the Classic Maya, Crete and Late Bronze Age Greece, and Mesopotamia, which were made up of numerous independent states and other possibly non-state communities, which nevertheless shared a degree of cultural and sometimes linguistic similarity (probably the Harappan/Indus Valley societies fall into this category too).

Table 1.1.Objects of study in works on collapse

Source: Tainter, J. A. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Yoffee, N. and Cowgill, G. L. (eds.). (1988). The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations. Tucson: Arizona University Press; Weiss, H. and Bradley, R. S. (2001). ‘What drives societal collapse?’ Science 291: 609–610; Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. London: Penguin; Redman, C. L. et al. (2007). ‘Group report: Millenial perspectives on the dynamic interaction of climate, people, and resources.’ In Costanza, R., Graumlich, L. J., and Steffen, W. (eds.). Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. Cambridge: Dahlem University Press and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp. 115–148; Costanza, R., Graumlich, L. J., and Steffen, W. (eds.). (2007). Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. Cambridge: Dahlem University Press and Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Schwartz, G. M. and Nichols, J. J. (eds.). (2006). After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Butzer, K. W. and Endfield, G. H. (2012). ‘Critical perspectives on historical collapse.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 109(10): 3628–3631 - see also other articles in PNAS 109(10)).

Other units are included too – societies that might not be considered ‘state level’, such as the Ancestral Puebloans and Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and communities that were part of larger cultural groups such as the Greenland Norse. The very prehistoric ‘Natufians’ were not a people – the name refers to a more sedentary culture that appeared among hunter-gatherer communities in the Near East.⁴⁹

It seems clear from the list that these are not all identical types of unit, but they are each supposed to have experienced some kind of collapse – the Western Roman and Akkadian Empires ended; the Easter Islanders descended into famine, violence, and chaos, losing their high culture; the Maya abandoned their pyramids and cities; and the palaces of Late Bronze Age Greece and Crete were burned and deserted. But are they really comparable, as some claim? To me they often seem to be very different, and so grouping them together, and even assigning the same causes to their collapses, as some wish to do, seems problematic. Imperial collapse – the fragmentation of a single unit into multiple units, seems different from a sudden depopulation, or to collapses that are said to happen across entire culture zones, which involve widespread desertion. An empire is a clear political unit, but a culture zone is not, even if states or units with a culture zone sometimes build bigger states (or empires) within it, as happened among the Classic Maya, Mesopotamians, and perhaps others.

Taking a cue from Arthur Demarest, I think we can divide up the units into five kinds, in a fairly arbitrary and approximate scheme, which may nevertheless help us to see things in a clearer light, and perhaps to understand problems in previous approaches to collapse where many examples are seen as straightforwardly comparable – an approach which helps generate definitions of collapse that are then necessarily very broad, and not necessarily very satisfying (Table 1.2). Any comparative account should surely pay attention to the nature and comparability of the units under investigation.

Table 1.2Five units implicated in collapse

Why Does Collapse Happen?

There are, of course, a host of explanations that people have put forward to explain collapse, and these will be discussed in the context of the case studies throughout the book. But we can look broadly at some ideas before we start.

Tainter explains collapse by referring to an economic theory, that of declining marginal returns.⁶⁶ In this theory, when the quantity of a particular variable is increased, ‘output’ initially rises rapidly, but then slows and eventually may decrease.⁶⁷ He expresses this in four moves: (1) Human societies are problem-solving organisations, (2) socio-political systems require energy for their maintenance, (3) increased complexity carries with it increased cost per capita, and (4) investment in socio-political complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.

In other words, societies can initially do well by becoming more complex; adapting to circumstances increases their complexity, which allows them to cope. But societies constantly face challenges, and so by constantly adapting and becoming more complex, they can eventually become over-complex, no longer delivering any benefit, at which point they collapse into more simple systems. What is interesting in this view is that collapse is itself an adaptation – the simpler societies that arise out of collapse are better adapted, and they may themselves start along the path of increasing complexity, suggesting a cyclical process of collapse and regeneration (on some level). However, this explanation still requires a cause – what problems was a given society facing that tipped it over into collapse?

Nowadays, many people associate past collapses with the environment. Indeed, the volume mentioned earlier, Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth, based on the results of a Dahlem workshop that involved archaeologists, historians, and sustainability experts, focussed on climate change, environmental damage, and collapse, looking at what might have happened to past societies and the threats and dangers faced by contemporary societies.⁶⁸ These studies build on old ideas. Almost a century ago, in 1917, Ellsworth Huntington proposed that climate change had undermined the agricultural base of the Roman Empire.⁶⁹ Huntington, pioneering scientific methods still used today, used data based on tree ring records as proxies for climatic conditions and changes. More recently, in 2001, Harvey Weiss and Raymond Bradley published a famous and influential paper in the journal Science, where they argued that many ancient collapses were probably caused by climate change.⁷⁰ This view has recently been reasserted by Michael Marshall in his 2012 article in the New Scientist.⁷¹ This environmental approach to collapse is common, indeed it seems dominant, and this is no surprise given our own contemporary environmental concerns.⁷²

However, many, though not all, archaeologists remain sceptical about climate change explanations of collapse – certainly when they are applied as single cause theories.⁷³ This is not because archaeologists are ignorant of these theories (indeed, some have pioneered them), or because they have closed minds, or are unwilling to consider different kinds of evidence, but simply because they view collapse as a human story, one that is much more complex than the equation ‘climate changes = societies collapse’. Climate change, when it happens (as with earthquakes), can also have very different effects in different, even proximate, locations.

Another problem often pointed out is that it can be very hard to tie down climate changes with any chronological precision, therefore it is difficult to associate them securely with political and societal changes. In this vein, there has been a tendency among supporters of climate change explanations to see correlation as causation – that is, when evidence indicating possible climate change seems to coincide with collapse, it is assumed to have been a causal factor in that collapse. Despite doubts about climate change-based explanations, no archaeologist would deny that agriculture-based societies – all pre-industrial societies – would have been vulnerable to bad years – too much or too little rain, excess cold and frost, and so on, that would potentially cause social disasters and destabilise societies. Even so, complex societies are often geared to offset such problems, for example, by relying on polyculture rather than monoculture, which would reduce the chance of total crop failure, by storing produce as an insurance, and by arranging for imports of food. Often, there is also ambiguity over whether climate changes were sudden shocks (i.e., events that happened at a point in time) or less dramatic shifts over time (the average for a period differs from earlier and later periods’ averages) – the former would clearly be harder to cope with.

Readers of environmental histories, such as Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World, originally published in 1991, will be familiar with the notion that ancient societies cause their own collapse by destroying their own supporting environments, perhaps by deforestation or over-intensive farming, or a combination of ‘ecocidal’ behaviour.⁷⁴ This has been a theme of Jared Diamond’s work too, not only in Collapse, but also in his book The Third Chimpanzee (1992), and in a 1994 paper entitled ‘Ecological collapse of past civilizations’.⁷⁵ He advanced the idea that ‘self-destructive abuse of our environment, far from being a modern invention, has long been a prime mover of human history’.⁷⁶ Others, such as Sing Chew, have focussed on this, advancing the idea of cycles of societal development, environmental degradation, collapse, and environmental recovery.⁷⁷ This line of thinking is found in archaeology too – American archaeologist Charles Redman’s book Human Impact on Ancient Environments discusses a range of examples of proposed ecocide, including the Puebloan culture and Rapa Nui.⁷⁸

There is nothing new in such theories, whose modern origins date back to the work of George Perkins Marsh and his 1864 book Man and Nature – Marsh gave historical examples of land degradation and warned that humanity might reduce the Earth to the barrenness of the moon.⁷⁹ Later, in 1916, Vladimir Simkhovitch advanced the theory that Rome collapsed because of agricultural exhaustion; his argument owed its origins to quotes from Latin writers on agriculture and to recent developments in agricultural and soil science.⁸⁰ But although humans have always modified the natural environment, and the modern agricultural and industrial revolutions have done this on an increasingly large and harmful scale, coincident with massive and unprecedented population increase, it is certainly far from clear that many, or indeed any, of the ancient states that collapsed did so because they caused environmental damage that undermined their ability to exist. Even so, climate and ecocide arguments for the fall of the Roman Empire, and other collapses, can still be found embedded in modern research and historical narratives even a century and more after they were first proposed, with scholars in many fields seeking to build up scientific, especially palaeoclimatic, data.⁸¹

Although Diamond set out to write his Collapse book explicitly focussed on the environment and collapse, where historical examples would provide instructive parables, he had to concede that he knows of no ‘case in which a society’s collapse can be attributed solely to environmental damage’, and even that ‘it would be absurd to claim that environmental damage must be a major factor in all collapses ... It’s obviously true that military or economic factors alone may suffice’.⁸² For this reason, he provides a number of factors that could cause or contribute to collapse, three of which are environmental: (1) Environmental damage, (2) climate change, (3) societal responses to environmental problems; other factors are (4) changes with trade partners and (5) hostile neighbours. Even so, the tone of the book is clearly geared towards the notion that collapse is often caused by environmental damage. He claims, for example, that ‘deforestation was a or the major factor’ in the Rapa Nui, Ancestral Puebloan, Classic Maya, and the Greenland Norse collapses.⁸³ Overpopulation should also be added to Diamond’s list of factors, since it plays a key role in many of his explanations.

With both Tainter’s and Diamond’s ‘grand theories’, a precipitating factor is still often necessary to set off the spiral of collapse – invasion, inflation, and loss of tax revenues sparked the demise of the Western Roman Empire, whose complexity finally stopped paying off. With the Classic Maya, Ancestral Puebloans, and the Greenland Vikings, climate change tipped these societies into collapse. In a Malthusian scenario, Diamond has the Rapa Nui, Ancestral Puebloans, and Classic Maya societies overpopulated, deforesting their environments and causing soil erosion, which undermined the subsistence basis of their societies – as population increased, the capacity of the land to support it decreased. This brought about violence, depopulation, and collapse. The final factor was the failure of rulers and elites to manage the situation – a warning to our modern powers that be.

Explanations of collapse that rely on overpopulation and the outstripping of resources are known as ‘overshoot’ models, and these have been critiqued by Tainter in his 2006 paper ‘Archaeology of overshoot and collapse’.⁸⁴ He suggests that there ‘does not presently appear to be a confirmed case of overshoot, resource degradation, and collapse brought about by overpopulation and/or mass consumption’. Overshoot models strongly reflect contemporary interests, and, as Tainter suggests, ‘many of the most ardent proponents are outside of archaeology’. A recurring criticism in the environmental turn is the tendency to see populations as either unwitting victims of natural circumstances, such as climate change, or as ignorant and irresponsible ecocidal architects of their own doom.

The model of apocalyptic ecological collapse and historical change a la Diamond has been questioned by archaeologists and anthropologists in a 2010 book, Questioning Collapse, edited by Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, and contributed to by other archaeologists, and at a Cambridge archaeological conference held in 2010.⁸⁵ Diamond himself reviewed Questioning Collapse in the journal Nature and was unsurprisingly critical of it – this led the editors and authors of the book to complain to Nature about the conflict of interest in asking him to review their book, which was composed as a direct response to his work (Figure 1.2).⁸⁶ Other researchers have also questioned the idea of climate and ecocidal collapse. W. H. Wills, Brandon Drake, and Wetherbee Dorshow recently published a paper in PNAS where they conclude that neither ecocidal practices, such as deforestation, nor climate change caused collapse and depopulation at Chaco Canyon. They warn that it ‘should not be used as a cautionary story about socioeconomic failures in the modern world’.⁸⁷

Figure 1.2.

Jared Diamond vs Questioning Collapse.

Source: Cartoon by Jim Hunt.

Often collapse is presented, especially in the popular media, as having a single major cause – whether it be a natural disaster like climate change, drought, or ecodical environmental damage; or a human cause like corruption, invasion, or popular revolt; or economic factors. A fairly representative list of causes, referring specifically to the Classic Maya collapse, but relevant in considering many other collapses, has been compiled by James Aimers (Table 1.3).

Table 1.3Proposed causes of the Classic Maya collapse

Source: Page 333, Aimers, J. J. (2007). ‘What Maya collapse? Terminal Classic variation in the Maya Lowlands.’ Journal of Archaeological Research 15: 329–377.

Despite a popular fixation on finding ‘the cause’, archaeologists tend not to think about collapse in such a cut and dried way. In his recent book on Late Bronze Age collapse in the eastern Mediterranean, Eric Cline has quite properly explained how uncertain things can be:

For Cline, causation is complex – and, as he points out, we often do not know how to weigh up the factors involved or even that we are aware of all of them. His sentiments apply just as much to other instances of collapse. Arthur Demarest too notes that causation is layered – many factors at different levels may be involved.⁸⁹ There may be proximate causes as well as deeper structural issues. The structure, for example, ideology, of a society could determine the range of responses to a given proximate problem. In collapse, we are likely to be seeing multiple factors (rather than competing mutually exclusive explanations), proximate and structural, feeding back into each other and responses may have had unpredictable outcomes – the situations would have been dynamic.

Finally, we must not forget the role that chance plays in survival or collapse and the role of human actors in reacting and shaping events. Herbert Kaufman reminds us of these:

While people will always be tempted to create a grand theory, or push a particular explanation of collapse, the truth will always be more complex – perhaps more complex than we can reconstruct.

Systems, Cycles, and Resilience

Some of the recent work on collapse emphasise that there are normal cyclical patterns visible in history – and suggest that the rise and fall of organisations like states or empires, or their formation and collapse, are inevitable and repeating processes. The theory of cycling is not new, as we saw earlier in this chapter, and like many theories, they themselves ‘cycle’ in and out of fashion.

In collapse studies, cyclical-type theories can be found coming from historical theory, from archaeologists, and from ecology and biology. In what follows, a few of the major contributions will be discussed, beginning with archaeologist Joyce Marcus’ dynamic model. After that, we will look at the approach of scholars who adopt a world-systems approach. Finally, we will examine an approach that has come to the fore recently for its application to sustainability studies – that of resilience theory.

After Collapse

In a 1999 work, Tainter discussed post-collapse societies.¹¹⁶ It might be generally thought that ‘dark ages’ should follow collapse, but Tainter cautioned that, like the term collapse, it ‘is ambiguous and should be used with care’; he associates it with the ‘declines in literacy, writing, and communication that often result from collapse’.¹¹⁷ But to archaeologists, ‘dark ages’ are also periods which we know less about because there are fewer remains (as well as texts) for us to see – but neither of these mean that there were no people, or that nothing was going on. The term ‘archaeological invisibility’ is useful here. Rulers and elites are usually more visible (materially speaking) than the majority of the population, so periods after collapse can seem darker as elite culture disappears. Tainter makes the important observation that collapse is something that often affects social elites and ruling classes more than other sectors of society – ‘dark ages, for most people, were only slightly less luminous than preceding periods’. Archaeologist Colin Renfrew agrees that as well as a loss of central administration and a loss of social and political complexity, collapse has often involved the ‘disappearance of an elite’.¹¹⁸ This is something that many archaeologists agree on.

People who study collapse are not, therefore, interested only in endings. Schwartz and Nichols’ edited volume After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies (2006), deals with both collapse and also its aftermath.¹¹⁹ This focus derives not only from a dissatisfaction with the idea that collapse is just an ending, simply a prelude to dark ages, but also from the comments made by Shmuel Eisenstadt, quoted earlier, about collapse being a process of reorganisation.

Endings, he argued, were also occasions of restructuring, and of new beginnings; in every collapse, there is also continuity and innovation. Implicit in this view is that collapse is rarely the apocalyptic catastrophe it is often presented as; there are still people and social memories and bonds, these people remember the past and recreate or discard elements of it as it suits them in their negotiation of new and meaningful identities and relationships. And collapse is often followed by the continuation of complex society on a different scale, or of the eventual regeneration of complex or large scale societies.

One of the most useful general concepts to come out of the book, which deals with several specific examples, is an idea developed by Bennet Bronson, writing about collapse and regeneration in Southeast and East Asia.¹²⁰ He discussed how complex societies regenerate according to three patterns. First, there are two forms of ‘false regeneration’. The first is when a new complex society arises in the same area as an earlier one, but there is no historical link between them. The second is when the centres of a regional society appear to collapse and new ones arise within a given area, but this ‘intrinsically evanescent’ system itself is stable or constant. Then there is ‘stimulus regeneration’. In this case, the development of a complex society is based on people’s ideas about the past – ideas which may not necessarily be accurate. For example, it may be remembered through folk memories or known (say, through impressive physical remains) that a more complex society once inhabited an area, which stimulates later rulers to try and develop a new one. The final type is ‘template regeneration’, in which there are sufficient memories, writings, and so on to make it possible to regenerate a complex state on the model of an earlier one. Bronson suggests that the best example of this is the repeated collapse and recreation of Chinese imperial dynasties – essentially different but very similar empires; ‘the key was widespread literacy and the existence of accessible historical records that provided a sufficiently detailed blueprint for the pre-existing system to be more or less fully reconstructed’.¹²¹

Why Is Collapse Important?

Many archaeologists actually shy away from collapse, partly because it can attract a ‘lunatic fringe’ and can distract us from the serious business of learning about or presenting the past. Many are dissatisfied with the popular versions of collapse but are rarely called upon to give their own verdicts, at least outside of scholarly publications, conferences, and workshops. Most archaeologists’ stories of collapse would fit far less well into the modes of narrative described at the beginning of this chapter. Nevertheless, history and archaeology are riddled with things we call (for better or worse) collapse, with beginnings and endings, with transformations, and with continuities and discontinuities; for me, these cusps have always held a particular fascination. What is it that makes period x period x, and not period y? How and why did we get from one to the other? To what extent do these periods exist only in our minds? These are important, even key, questions for those who study the past.

Collapse, despite its mixed academic reputation, is one of the challenging and exciting areas of archaeology, one that brings up a host of other questions that require attention – including the questions of what exactly it was that was collapsing and exactly how collapse proceeded – what variables were present, how they might have interacted, what forms it took, and why. A recent project to try to determine ‘archaeology’s most important scientific challenges’ recognised the importance of collapse studies; the group came up with a category of ‘resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse’, and in it they set the question: ‘can we characterize social collapse or decline in a way that is applicable across cultures, and are there any warning signals that collapse or severe decline is near?’¹²²

Another reason that collapse is important relates to the use of collapse as a parable or example to be learned from. Since it is a given that people will seek to use historical examples to make cases about the present and future, one way or another, and even that policy may be based, to some extent, on historical examples, we should expect that the history is as accurate as it can be. The descriptions we saw Lester Brown give in his book are the same as those presented in the European Commission’s Water for Life initiative booklet, published in 2003.¹²³ That document, aimed directly at affecting our contemporary behaviour, reported how Sumerian civilisation was ‘undermined’ by food scarcity while ‘overfarming, deforestation with soil erosion and loss of productivity’ led to ‘the complete demise of ... [Maya] society by AD 900’. These views of Sumerian and Maya collapse can indeed be found in some archaeological and historical writing, but these narratives can in particular be traced back to popular environmental histories of the 1990s and beyond.¹²⁴ They have become fossilised into ‘new’ books (and other media representations) by authors who are largely unaware of the breadth of archaeological research and views. For readers not up-to-date with the archaeology, their content might be taken as an accurate representation of current ideas.

As we look more closely at how collapse is conceived and explained, it becomes apparent that the reality of many popular collapse narratives can be less than satisfying. The Ethiopian famines with their devastating effects on human life and society were not simply natural disasters, not simply caused by a reduction in rain or environmental mismanagement that meant the population could no longer be supported. As Alex de Waal has stated, ‘the repeated famines that have struck Ethiopia, and in particular the great famine of 1983–5 were in large part created by government policies’, and this was during a period of some thirty years of civil war and political instability.¹²⁵ If we accept that the Maya simply died and their civilisation ended because of an environmental change, or we label them as ecocidal ‘failures’, we do a disservice to the people who lived at the time and after, and to their modern Maya descendants who still live, in their millions, in Mesoamerica to this day, and we also leave much of the stories of collapse and transformation untold.

Final Thoughts and Moving On

This long first chapter has covered a lot of ground. So far, we have explored a little of how collapse is often presented to us via the news, and how such narratives of collapse tie in with the kind of stories we are used to and like to hear, whether they be in the realms of infotainment, spectacle, or tragedy. We have also explored some of the different ways that scholars define collapse and the things they apply the term to, taking a look at some broad explanatory, descriptive, and theoretical models of collapse. We have already encountered the idea that collapse is a complex phenomenon, as Mortimer Wheeler observed decades ago in his discussion of the Harappan civilisation, and as Eric Cline recently stated of collapse in the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age.

As with other books and publications on collapse, we will examine a range of examples – fifteen to be precise – some well known, others less so. I hope to put in context what was collapsing, and examine the ways in which scholars have characterised what was happening and how they have sought to explain each collapse. I try also to refer to what happened next – the aftermath of collapse. Although no grand theory of collapse is presented, I take a critical perspective of ideas in each case, and, throughout each chapter, I hope to give the reader an idea of who is saying what and why – giving voice to those researchers who work on and think about collapse and transformation. Even though it is rarely, if ever, possible to be precise or succinct about a collapse, which some might find dissatisfying, I hope readers will, by the end of the book, feel better equipped to make up their own minds about collapse.