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Collapse, societal failure, doom and dystopia are popular topics, both in scholarship and in much wider spheres of cultural consumption. The decline or disappearance of human societies has been a point of interest for as long as people have been aware of the vestiges of cultures past, from colonial sensationalism concerning the ruins of apparently mighty civilizations through to early ...
- Guy D. Middleton
Aug 11, 2021 · Collapse moves from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways.
- To Yoshie and our baby Elise Saki, and to my parents Jennifer and Denis, and my family and friends
- Preface
- Preface
- Plan of the Book and Justifications
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements
vi The great old days have gone, and all the grandeur of earth; there are not caesars now or kings or patrons such as once there used to be, amongst whom were performed most glorious deeds, who lived in lordliest renown. Gone now is all that host, the splendours have departed. Weaker men live and occupy the world, enjoy it, but with care. Fame is b...
This book developed naturally out of the years I have spent studying collapse. I fi rst became interested in collapse on a tour of Greece with the British School of Archaeology in Athens in 1999; there I decided that, if I could, I would study Late Bronze Age (LBA) Greece and end of the Mycenaean palace period for a PhD. That study, done at Du...
no easy way in to such a tangled fi eld stayed with me, and led me to this project by way of a paper written for the Journal of Archaeological Research , in which I (rather optimistically) sought to review recent work and ideas on collapse, and really learnt how much was going on. With this book, I hope to provide that introduction; an easy, hop...
The book follows a simple plan. The fi rst chapter introduces collapse as a ‘hot topic’ in current affairs and as a constructed narrative that has a long history in our culture. The subsequent chapters each take an instance of collapse as their subject, running in roughly chrono-logical order; we shall encounter the Egyptian Old Kingdom, the Akkad...
xvii study approach also means that readers are free either to read the book from beginning to end or just to dip in to read the parts that interest them or which they are studying. Some justifi cation for the choices of case studies may also be nec-essary. The examples have been chosen for their fame, interest, and variety, and for the work done o...
It is only possible to write a book of this kind, one that summarises and synthesises, argues, critiques, and interprets, because of the hard work and dedication of many other people – those who uncov-ered the evidence, translated the texts, and put forward their own ideas and theories; I gratefully acknowledge my debt to them and hope not to hav...
for the many emails that followed) – especially for bringing me up- to- date on the Maya collapse. II am also pleased to offer my thanks to Miroslav Barta, Richard Blanton, Jan Boersema, Sarah Clayton, Jonathan Conant, Robin Coningham, Norman Etherington, Ute Frank, Mark Gellner, Felix Hofl mayer, Rosita Holenbergh, Mark Hudson, Maria Iacovou, Gyl...
Sep 4, 2024 · Societal collapse is a complex phenomemon tied to the abilities of a society to meet its population’s basic needs. Understanding past examples of collapse can provide valuable insights.
Understanding Collapse explores the collapse of ancient civilisations, such as the Roman Empire, the Maya, and Easter Island. In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is ...
Cumming and Peterson have argued for clear criteria through which collapse can be described and through which it can be recognized, using quantitative thresholds to identify collapse and suggesting that theories of collapse must connect structure and process.⁴¹ System structure is a crucial influence on the types of collapse (i. e. whether or not a system collapses from the base up or top ...
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Collapse, societal failure, doom and dystopia are popular topics, both in scholarship and in much wider spheres of cultural consumption. The decline or disappearance of human societies has been a point of interest for as long as people have been aware of the vestiges of cultures past, from colonial sensationalism concerning the ruins of apparently mighty civilizations through to early ...
