Collapse? What Collapse? Societal Change Revisited

Lawler, Andrew

doi:10.1126/science.330.6006.907

Cited by 23 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Scholarly and popular interest in the collapse of societies has produced a vast and multifaceted discourse (Aimers 2007;Anderson and Chase-Dunn 2005;Denning 1999;Lawler 2010;Moyer 2010;Vince 2009;Webster 2006). Collapse is addressed at a number of scales, including the destruction or abandonment of individual sites, the end of archaeological and historical cultures, systems, and empires, and in grand narratives of human history and theories of social change.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

Middleton

2012

J Archaeol Res

118

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The study of the collapse of past societies raises many questions for the theory and practice of archaeology. Interest in collapse extends as well into the natural sciences and environmental and sustainability policy. Despite a range of approaches to collapse, the predominant paradigm is environmental collapse, which I argue obscures recognition of the dynamic role of social processes that lie at the heart of human communities. These environmental discourses, together with confusion over terminology and the concepts of collapse, have created widespread aporia about collapse and resulted in the creation of mixed messages about complex historical and social processes.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

Middleton

2012

J Archaeol Res

118

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…5.2 kyr BP and the desertion of the Akkadian imperialized landscape at ca. 4.2 kyr BP (12) have fueled debate on the complex interactions between hydrologic instability, human adaptation/migration, and urban origin/decline (13)(14)(15). Thresholds above which agro-innovations were not achievable led to regional habitat-tracking to riparian, paludal, and karst springfed refugia (16).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Drought is a recurring challenge in the Middle East

Kaniewski

Campo

Weiss

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

105

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

International audienceClimate change and water availability in the Middle East are important in understanding human adaptive capacities in the face of long-termenvironmental changes. The key role ofwater availability for sedentary and nomad populations in these arid to semiarid landscapes is understood, but the millennium-scale influence of hydrologic instability on vegetation dynamics, human occupation, and historic land use are unknown, which has led to a stochastic view of population responses and adaptive capacities to precipitation anomalies. Within the time-frame of the last two global climate events, the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age, we report hydrologic instability reconstructed from pollen-derived climate proxies recovered near Tell Leilan, at the Wadi Jarrah in the Khabur Plains of northeastern Syria, at the heart of ancient northern Mesopotamia. By coupling climate proxies with archaeological-historical data and a pollen-based record of agriculture, this integrative study suggests that variability in precipitation is a key factor on crop yields, productivity, and economic systems. It may also have been one of the main parameters controlling human settlement and population migrations at the century to millennial timescales in the arid to semiarid areas of the Middle East. An abrupt shift to drier conditions at ca. AD 1400 is contemporaneous with a change from sedentary village life to regional desertion and nomadization (sheep/camel pastoralists) during the preindustrial era in formerly Ottoman realms, and thereby adds climate change to the multiple causes for Ottoman Empire "decline.

show abstract

“…Even biologist Jared Diamond's bestseller on the fall of civilizations did not hold water in the archeological record. 11,12,13 The precedent indeed was set at the dawn of modern anthropology by Franz Boas, who, in 1904, recalled the first generation of Darwinism and its value for anthropology.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%