This article is a key read for anyone interested in archaeological transformation and collapse. It successfully contextualizes several examples of social changes, with a specific emphasis on the Maya Terminal Classic Period and the Byzantine Empire’s successful adaptation after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The authors stress the importance of considering human agency in driving social change, as well as of understanding such events from a historicized perspective. After all, many great ‘collapses’ happen over a span of several lifetimes, such that to contemporaneous commentators it is a gradual and ordinary process. The modern image of a ‘collapse’ as a fiery political implosion is exaggerated and fails to consider the multiplicity of experiences in such an event: a catastrophe in the ruling class might barely register in the lifestyles of thousands of commoners. This tendency towards the dramatic is especially relevant in the context of climate change discourse, where the absence of an imagined ‘collapse’ warps our image of how we should react.
The authors’ engagement with human beliefs and social heterogeneity contributes to a sophisticated understanding of the past that shirks easy explanations, as would be blaming massive social changes on climactic factors alone. This approach, however, isn’t simple contrarianism; it means carefully considering climate as one dimension of a cultural, economic, and even spiritual process. The presented vision of a complex archaeology empowers the discipline to shed meaningful light on the past, as well as on our own lives and experiences.
Collapse is a human-driven process, not dramatic or teleological. It includes social and environmental factors.
‘Collapse’ often dramatizes and mystifies the past. The collapse/sustainability binary is simplistic. Collapse should be a careful, nuanced concept.
Describing changes as collapses is a “substantial injustice” to how people reacted to changing times. It warps our image of how we should react, too.
Human actions need to be understood in terms of their timescape. “As Wallerstein and Braudel have pointed out, we tend unconsciously to privilege time (distance to the past) over duration (distance within the past).” Events are only described as ‘collapses’ after the fact.
The resolution of paleoscientific methods is too coarse to understand the details of historical change; the complexity becomes unjustly compressed. Looking at recent social changes shows why this is fallacious.
For example, the Little Ice Age affected the Ottoman and Spanish empires. We have precise data about this. The ‘collapse’ lasted centuries, and should not be ascribed to the Little Ice Age alone. ((Are older societies more sensitive to environmental changes?))
Even the collapse of Rome meant little for most Romans, who lived typical daily lives. Change was incremental. When the empire actually fell, the people who experienced it “had become acclimatized to the evolving moment” (7) ((Is it always incremental? Can historical turning points exist?))
Human agency is also neglected, since it demands “engagement with beliefs and perceptions” (7).
Humans choose to modify their environment, or not, depending on their beliefs and priorities about it. Cosmogonies direct people to some actions, perhaps at the expense of “agricultural adaptations” (10). The authors bring in examples from multiple societies. “The point here is not to belabour the obvious, but rather to insist that such responses reflect perceptions and ways of understanding the world that directly impacted social action and that need to be taken into account in our analyses
of both systemic fragmentation as well as social resilience and vulnerability” (11). ((Who are we to judge what is the right form of adapting?))
Those who experienced the historical events in question may not have been aware (and indeed might not agree) that anything was collapsing at all, even if they did perceive rapid change (12)
When we talk about collapse in the past, we are typically talking about ourselves.
Collapse is:
Slower processes are ‘transformations.’
Collapse should transcend levels of the social system. This does not mean everything falls apart; it is perceptible everywhere, but affects different levels in different ways and with different intensity.
Climate events in the Levant and worldwide aren’t all to blame for social collapse. Heterogeneity must be considered, and understood in a human context. “Any megadrought may provide only a background context in such
cases rather than the prime driver of change” (18). ((How big is this background?))
In most cases, transformation is a more accurate descriptor of the events, especially when, in reality they’re spread out over centuries.
The authors present case studies of Byzantium and the Maya.
Byzantium recovered from the fall of the West and dominated the east Mediterranean, maintaining its political complexity. It adapted and benefitted from incidental factors, political and environmental. It also benefitted from ideological cohesion through Christianity. For contemporary observers, the crisis was overcome.
However, the Maya abandoned most cities in a span of two centuries.
The Maya case reveals that in little more than a century significant shifts in demography, exchange relationships, elite composition, cultural production, the transmission of political power and governance took place. This fundamentally transformed the overall texture and system identity of the Classic Maya civilization and resulted in changes radical enough that they clearly meet the criteria outlined above in respect of systemic collapse, as based on current evidence. (31)
Change is a result of fragility. The origin and dimensions of this fragility must be considered. Change isn’t always collapse; it can mean adaptation and readjustment.