THE ARCHEOLOGY OF COLLAPSE

RETHINKING CYCLE, COLLAPSE, TRAGEDY, AND PATHOLOGY

I’ve been doing a bit of a dive into the archeology of collapse. This literature provides a welcomed corrective to the mysticism of Spengler, or the neo-religious environmentalism of Diamond. It’s not only that such crypto-religious explanations are discounted, but also that any single vector explanation is problematized. Indeed, even the very idea of collapse, itself, is questioned. As one scholar put it: “The recognition that early complex societies were prone to episodes of falling and rising has led to the advancement of a cyclical model in which societies oscillate from periods of urbanism and sociopolitical centralization to intervals of ruralism and local autonomy.”¹ It seems in fact that the more we know about a society the less that the collapse narrative really fits the facts.²

Despite such revisions, though, it remains striking the degree to which the spatial prejudice – which of course we’d expect to find among academics – inadvertently continues to perpetuate the spatial perspective. So, while it’s common in the archeological discourse to gesture beyond a simple “collapse” nomenclature, that gesture is often in the direction of a rhetoric of “regeneration.” While this is clearly more dynamic than “collapse,” regeneration is usually conceived as a return to so-called complexity and density. So, space biased societies are uncritically posed as the naturally superior state of affairs. Both these emphases, collapse and regeneration, then express the same spatial prejudice. And while the latter holds out hope for a return to greatness, each implies a tragedy of lost greatness.

This tendency, even within the “regeneration” circles is captured nicely in this remark by Alan Kolata:

the aftermath of empire is often imagined as a period of cultural degradation, a backsliding into “dark ages” shorn of the rich material trappings of imperial splendor. The initial decline of social complexity after state collapse apparently renders this period of transformation less compelling as an object of analysis for many historians, art historians, and archaeologists. The study of “high civilization” still remains the holy grail of historical scholarship. But this is at once a parochial and an elitist conception, one that fails to acknowledge that the regeneration of cultural complexity, in whatever forms it takes, is a complex process of social change fascinating in its own right.³

Those with a default spatial perspective though are not the only ones who fail to appreciate the full dimensions of the cycle as I’d present it. For instance, Hertler et al, who clearly view the cycle through a more temporalist-sensitive lens characterize the space biased phases of the cycle as the expression of dysgenics and invoke “social amplification epistasis models [that] can potentially explain some of the variances. Social epistasis is the accumulation of spiteful and deleterious mutations accruing to a population that has stayed itself from the sharpest cutting edge of evolutionary selective pressures by virtue of anthropogenically engineered environments.” While the specific environmental points I take to be precisely correct, characterizing those who are the phenotypic logic of such conditions as “spiteful” mutants – implying deviation from some normative stasis, or possibly even morality – is to miss the point no less than those who can only see the spatial-to-temporal turn as a collapse or fall.⁴

My argument will be that that spatial-to-temporal turn is neither tragedy nor pathology. In fact, if we’re to be precise, even the cycle analogy may not be quite right. Rather than cycle, a better visualization would be a horizontal spiral. Yes, there is a circulating back aspect, returning to more space or time biased society. But it’s never a return to the past. During the most recent cycles things have changed, exogenous and endogenous. So, the horizontal dimension captures this change, provided the horizontal dimension isn’t misperceived as meta improvement or progress.

Nonetheless, despite all these difficulties in getting to the heart of the matter, beginning in the latter decades of the 20th century it became increasingly clear within archeological theory that a better metaphor would be transformation or maybe better still reconfiguration. This focus is more on boundaries, both territorial and institutional, and how these have been constantly in flux, though perhaps under certain conditions they may be more rapidly and dramatically redefined, and so giving rise to the impression of that collapse. In broad strokes, though, these processes might be conceived as oscillations or pendulations between more and less centralization.

Such broad strokes are nicely captured in the words of one of the leading archeologists who has contributed to a rethinking of the “collapse” metaphor, Norman Yoffee, speaking about the contribution from another leader in these developments, E. N. Eisenstadt⁵:

…historic states are centrally organized with differentiated roles and activities existing within executive, military, and religious hierarchies. Political goals emanate from this center, but in establishing them the center also provides arenas of political struggle within itself. Tension between the center and periphery also exists, since the center is concerned with detaching the means for political action from the periphery, and groups on the periphery are reluctant to surrender their political autonomies. Eisenstadt’s periphery consists of traditional aristocracies, kin-based units, peasants, specialized economic groups, such as crafts people and merchants. Recruitment to the center rests on either political or economic motives, both of which are detached from ascriptive qualities of individuals. Indeed, the fundamental organizing principle of early states is precisely that which counteracts the traditionally ascribed ties that characterize much of the periphery.⁶

This broad stroke framing of the matter strikes me as deeply resonating with the Innis-Nisbet (aided by Weber) model I’ve been working out on this substack over recent months. The spatials at the center seek to expand their territorial and institutional reach at the expense of local, periphery traditional people, whom we would call temporals. (Go back and reread the post on the French peasants during the revolution for a reminder how eternal these dynamics really are!) As Yoffee makes clear in a later passage, this is not merely a colonization by the center of territory and resources, but also of a differing culture:

…conflict may emerge when the center refuses to incorporate the needs and orientation of local leadership in the formulation of political goals, in some cases attempting to replace beliefs and values of the peripheral groups with the beliefs and values of the central ruling elites.

Consistent with what I’d expect from the Innis-Nisbet model, then, Yoffee’s explanation situates the “collapse,” such as it exists, at the point of the center’s (i.e., spatials’) bureaucratic and ideological overreach:

Collapse, in general, ensues when the center is no longer able to secure resources from the periphery, usually having lost the “legitimacy” through which it could “disembed” goods and services of traditionally organized groups. The process of collapse entails the dissolution of those centralized institutions that had facilitated the transmission of resources and information, the settlement of intergroup disputes, and the legitimate expression of differentiated organizational components.

It seems then to be precisely as the Innis-Nisbet model would suggest that such states and civilizations grow precisely as they expand their reach out over more temporalist, traditional, likely gemeinschaft regions of the periphery. And they “collapse,” insofar as that’s a valid description, when they lapse into overreach, extending their material and ideological hegemony beyond that which can be maintained by the capacities of spatialist bureaucracy.

This depiction is remarkably consistent with the Innis-Nisbet model I’ve been developing. My only contention with these passages, as should be expected from my above comments, is the reflexive resort to the language of “collapse,” though given Yoffee’s own intellectual commitments this seems to be either passive neglect or resort to a nomenclature more likely to be comfortable for his readers. That he sees clearly beyond the entailed assumptions though is beautifully illustrated in a passage I’ll cite from a different essay of Yoffee’s⁷:

Of course, what happens beyond collapse depends on what it was that underwent the collapsing, why collapse occurred, and what institutions were left in place after collapse. Although the term collapse usually implies a downward change from something more complex and larger to something else that is less complex and smaller, one might also consider collapse as a movement from a relatively more stable condition to one that is less stable…Thus, if stability connotes village life, then the appearance of urban sites in the region—which were based, in part, on connections with outsiders and were unstable—could be called a collapse! Of course, such unstable urbanism itself collapsed into the village life from which it sprang. Archaeologists (and others) are not used to talking about the rise of more complex social systems as a collapse, and I’m not saying that they should begin to do so. I do wish to point out, however, that trends toward less-complex social organizations need not be thought of as failures of those more-complex organizations…if collapse can be multidirectional, resulting in both more- and less-complex societies, it is simply a species of social change...

This for me is the key insight to understanding cyclical history (or horizontally spiraling history). If we’re to talk of collapse, without lapsing into the prejudice of either phenotype, it must be understood that collapse is in the eye of the beholder. Furthermore, coloring the collapse as tragedy or pathology confuses accurate understanding of the dynamics, and distracts us from the enantiodromia⁸ process that gives rise to the turns in the cycle (or spiral), inhibiting effective scholarship and derailing accurate analysis.

If then, as I proposed in the last post, cyclic history is driven by enantiodromic reaction norm dynamics – between the high openness (with low conscientiousness) and high conscientiousness (with low openness) phenotypes, which I’ve characterized as spatials and temporals, respectively – these characterizations from the archaeological theory literature are a better way to conceive such cycles.

In the next post, I’ll be providing what I consider a fascinating argument of how these last two posts can be tied together, which parsing one of the more challenging arguments in the field. So, if you haven’t yet, please do…

And if you know of others who might be interested in these discussions, please…

1. Glenn M. Schwartz, “From Collapse to Regeneration,” in After Collapse, ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John J. Nichols, Reprint edition (Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 2010).

2. G.W. Bowersock, “The Dissolution of the Roman Empire,” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, Reprint edition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991).

3. Alan L. Kolata, “Before and after Collapse: Reflections on the Regeneration of Social Complexity,” in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John J. Nichols, Reprint edition (Tucson, Ariz: University of Arizona Press, 2010).

4. Steven C. Hertler et al., Life History Evolution: A Biological Meta-Theory for the Social Sciences, 1st ed. 2018 edition (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Matthew Alexandar Sarraf, Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie, and Colin Feltham, Modernity and Cultural Decline: A Biobehavioral Perspective, 1st ed. 2019 edition (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

5. Norman Yoffee, “Orienting Collapse,” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, Reprint edition (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1991).

6. Eisenstadt’s fascinating sounding book, The Political System of Empires, which appears to be a history of ancient bureaucracies, has just arrived, I’ve been notified by my public library, in response to my interlibrary loan request. I look forward to sharing a post on it some time in the future.

7. Norman Yoffee, “Notes on Regeneration,” in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John J. Nichols, Reprint edition (Tucson, Ariz: University of Arizona Press, 2010).

8. I’ve concluded this is a better term for what I’ve been trying to get at, but I’ll elaborate on it further in my next post.