Societal Collapse

Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz thrive during a dark time in Israel’s history—the days when the judges governed. The final two segments in Judges (chaps. 17–21) summarily demonstrate that when autonomy prevails, people and society deteriorate into spiritual and moral chaos. According to many scholars, the book of Ruth stands as an independent novella encouraging random acts of love and kindness. On the other hand, many Bible interpreters contend that the book of Ruth whispers daringly as a diatribe of two industrious women who manipulate a male-dominated society through sexual prowess in order to survive. Through the grammatical-historical method and a close examination of the canonical text, I conclude that these books are integrally connected and that the characters in Ruth provide a stark contrast to those in the summary episodes of Judges. I show that through the use of historical setting, behavioral contrasts, and intertextual connections with Torah the author of the book of Ruth provides a subtle polemic against personal autonomy. This polemic, although specific to its historical backdrop when the judges governed, continues to cry out against personal autonomy and provide hope through obedience to the spirit of Torah.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

The 2012-phenomenon includes apocalyptic fantasies regarding an impending collapse of our contemporary society, supposedly prophesized by the ancient Maya and their Long Count calendar. Sometimes connections to the ancient Maya collapse are made. That also happens to be the quite common in academic circles. Some academic researchers believe we can learn from the past failures for future solutions. The objects that were involved in the ancient Maya collapse were not the same as now and therefore we have little to learn from the Maya collapse in relation to our own ecological crisis. The ancient and contemporary Maya’s sensual profiles of ecology, time and space were/are quite different from those found within the “2012-phenomenon” and academia.

Global chemical contamination is an underexplored source of global catastrophic risks that is estimated to have low a priori probability. However, events such as pollinating insects' population decline and lowering of the human male sperm count hint at some toxic exposure accumulation and thus could be a global catastrophic risk event if not prevented by future medical advances. We identified several potentially dangerous sources of the global chemical contamination, which may happen now or could happen in the future: autocatalytic reactions, exposure to multiple subthreshold sources, and long-term unintended consequences, arising from both natural and bioengineered sources. We list several especially dangerous chemicals-dioxin, organiс compounds, and toxic heavy metals. We also discuss the features of such dangerous chemicals-molecules that can stay in the biosphere for a long time and affect it over time. We explore several social processes and scenarios where global chemical contamination becomes possible: large natural catastrophe like meteorite impact, supervolcano eruption, new ways of predicting properties of the chemicals via machine learning and their manufacturing via synthetic biology, uncontrolled "capitalistic" economic development with a corresponding large waste production, quick adoption of many chemicals with unknown long-term properties and unintended side-effects. These are all low probability, so work on other global catastrophic risks should be prioritized, but chemical risks could exacerbate other types of catastrophe contributing to social collapse. Highlights: • Criteria for a chemical to pose a global catastrophic risk are stability in the biosphere, high activity, ability to travel large distances, and slow acting. • Several known classes of chemicals are capable of causing global toxic contamination: organochloride pesticides, toxic heavy metals, greenhouse gases, protein isomers. • Scenarios of global chemical contamination include natural catastrophe, Doomsday weapons, unintended consequences of previously unknown chemicals, and the combination of numerous subthreshold toxins. • Global toxic chemical contamination is unlikely to cause a global catastrophe as technological progress continues, but could contribute to population decline after a different type of global catastrophe.

I 1743 sende Danske kanselli ut ei spørjeliste med 43 spørsmål om geografiske, økonomiske , historiske og kulturelle forhold. Mottakarane var embetsmenn og geistlege i Noreg. Lista gjekk ut i ein periode der Noreg var prega av uår og epidemiar, og i 1741-1743 kan vi snakke om ei såkalla demografisk krise.  Som samtidsskildring vert svara på spørjegranskinga ei unik kjelde til lokale og regionale utslag av den demografiske krisa. Råka ho samstundes og likt på Austlandet og Vestlandet, korleis vart krisa tolka i samtida, og kan svara på spørjegranskinga fortelje noko om svolt og epidemiar var like viktige årsaker til krisa?

... Collapse and Regeneration from Funan to Angkor The history of the Khmer civilization is characterized by cycles of fragmen-tation, collapse, and reorganization. ... When the Thai army sacked the capital of Angkor in ad 1432, they conquered a distinctly Khmer kingdom. ...

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 often admitted. Rather than positing a single explanatory model of collapse - economic, social, or environmental - Middleton gives full consideration to the overlooked resilience in communities of ancient peoples and the choices that they made. He offers a fresh interpretation of collapse that will be accessible to both students and scholars. The book is an engaging, introductory-level survey of collapse in the archaeology/history literature, which will be ideal for use in courses on the collapse of civilizations, sustainability, and climate change. It includes up-to-date case studies of famous and less well-known examples of collapses, and is illustrated with 25 black and white illustrations, 3 line drawings, 16 tables and 18 maps.

'Middleton's book is the best introduction to 'collapsology'. It carefully dissects theories, especially grand theories, and marshals data so that the reader can see what collapses (and what doesn't) in major cases from Rome and Egypt to the Maya and Easter Island. It is informative from beginning to end and gracefully written.'
Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan

'Understanding Collapse is a remarkable work of scholarship, synthesizing literature and describing a variety of collapse cases in extraordinary detail. The breadth and depth of coverage are exemplary.'
Joseph A. Tainter, Author of The Collapse of Complex Societies

Progress traps come about when human ingenuity introduces problems that it does not have the resources to solve, preventing further progress.

Are we able to short-circuit our awareness of man-made changes to the environment? What if these innovations cause harm? Can a society unknowingly engineer its own collapse? This study explores the history and behavioral aspects of these issues. It finds that the intuitive, divergent side of the mind/brain must thrive and be engaged in order to predict and prevent progress traps.

The sample chapter "Excuses, excuses" encapsulates the book's main points.

www.progresstrap.org        http://progresstrap.blogspot.com
http://www.amazon.com/Escaping-progress-Daniel-Brian-OLeary-ebook/dp/B003F77CVU/

During the environmentally influenced demise of the Moche of Peru (A.D. 200-800), new archaeological and bioarchaeological data provide evidence that sites chose differential responses of resilience, including forging new political alliances, expanding economic production, and adopting new religious practices. Biodistance analysis shows that adjacent, highland Cajamarca peoples arrived in the Jequetepeque Valley and interbred with local inhabitants interred at San Jose de Mora during both the Late Moche (A.D. 650-800) and subsequent Transitional (A .D. 800-900) periods. Culturally, local ceramicists at San Jose de Moro reflected this influence by experimenting with hybrid vessels that blended local Moche forms and designs with highland ones. By contrast, recent excavations at the site of Talambo-located at the lower neck of the Jequetepeque Valley-indicate that the changes detected at San Jose de Mora and other sites in the valley were not uniform. Specifically, almost no evidence for adjacent highland influence was found at Talambo. Instead, investigation of independent craft production at Ta-lambo indicates that local artisans thrived during the transition from the Late Moche through Lambayeque (A .D. 800-1100) periods with minimal stylistic hybridization. We suggest that unlike changes noted elsewhere in the Jequetepeque Valley, the population at Talambo was able to moderate external influence and remain economically independent during a period of political and environmental instability.

Urban Fantasy coalesced as a genre in the early 1980s born in reaction to the tumultuous musical subcultures that permeated urban society in America and England at the time. This paper reflects the way the early Urban Fantasy texts sought through their magical narratives to help Western youth to navigate the shadows of the urban jungle and traverse a period of both societal and personal difficulties.

This paper considers current concerns about resource depletion (" energy descent ") and the unsustainability of current economic structures, which may indicate we are entering a new era signaled by the end of growth. Using the systems thinking tool of PatternDynamics™, developed by Tim Winton, this paper seeks to integrate multiple natural patterns in order to effectively impact these pressing challenges. Some of the Patterns considered include Energy, Transformity, Power, Pulse, Growth, and the polarities of Expansion/Contraction and Order/Chaos. We tend to have horrible visions associated with downturns and "collapse." Can we even entertain the possibility that we might be entering a period of decline in energy and standard of living? Can we reexamine our assumptions about " growth " and " development " ? Jean Gebser's emphasis that every mutation of structure is preceded by a crisis is considered, and Howard T. Odum's ideas about energy as the basis of man and nature informs the discussion. Edgar Morin's dialogic Method of active inquiry in regards to the interplay of polarities assists in our understanding and response to the complex challenges we face.

When I mention my shotgun, some people nod knowingly and say, “Good home defense gun.” And I explain, “No, not exactly,” or “Really, no, not at all.” I keep it locked up, unloaded, inaccessible. If somebody wants to break into my home while I’m there, I have a baseball bat. If they only want my stuff, well, that’s not worth killing or dying for. My gun’s not a defensive gun. It’s not a gun for the present, though I do shoot clay pigeons to keep in practice and because it’s fun. My gun isn’t for shooting people, at least in these times. (For shooting people in other times? Maybe; one hopes not; maybe.) This is an end-of-one-world gun, and it is nice to think that the circumstances that would make owning such a gun rational will never arrive. (It is very white to think they are not already here, but also very white to ward them off by collecting and displaying guns like talismans.) My non-defensive gun is, in short, a response to climate change.

After 2017 NY Times publication, the stigma of the scientific discussion of the problem of so-called UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) was lifted. Now the question arises: how UAP will affect the future of humanity, and especially, the probability of the global catastrophic risks? To answer this question, we assume that the Nimitz case in 2004 was real and we will suggest a classification of the possible explanations of the phenomena. The first level consists of mundane explanations: hardware glitches, malfunction, hoaxes and lies. The second level involves explanations which are not changing completely our model of the world, but only updating it: new military tech, large psyop operation or new physical effect like ball lightning. The third level of explanations requires a complete overhaul of our world model and includes a large set of fantastic hypothesis: alien starships, interdimensional beings, glitches in the matrix, projections from the collective unconsciousness, Boltzmann brain's experiences etc. The higher is the level of the hypothesis, the less probable it is, but the bigger is its consequences for possible global catastrophic risks. Thus, "integrating" over the field of all possible explanations, we find that UAP increases catastrophic risks. Technological progress increases our chances of direct confrontation with the phenomena. If the phenomenon has intelligence, the change of its behavior could be unexpected after we pass some unknown threshold. But we could lower the risks if we assume some reasonable policy of escaping confrontations.

Most sustainability analyses of the future privilege the urban in future scenarios of climate change at the expense of providing scenarios about the future of the rural, in part because rural regions provide the urban with most of its resources. It is also expected that urban regions will potentially account for up to 70% of the global population by 2050 so most future scenarios of sustainability focus on such regions. Given this over privileging of the urban in sustainability studies, this chapter instead presents a condensed overview of three possible future scenarios of rural areas beginning in 2050 and beyond. Each scenario correlates with a different level of possible human-caused global warming and the correlated implications of possible sustainability in rural areas depending on how hot the earth will become by the end of the century. A variety of social, environmental, and economic metrics are briefly analyzed, with their implications for sustainable futures in rural areas analyzed and discussed.

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 scholarship emphasizing historical process (e.g. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–1789). Modern studies of collapse have highlighted the topic as a historical and anthropological problem of comparative interest in the archaeology of complex societies (see the foundational works of Tainter 1988; Yoffee & Cowgill 1988)...

The role of climate variability in pre-colonial southern African history is highly disputed. We here provide a synthesis and critique of climate-society discourses relating to two regionally defining periods of state formation and disaggregation. The first period involves the eleventh-thirteenth century development of socio-political complexity and the rise of southern Africa’s first state, Mapungubwe, followed by its collapse and the shift in regional power to Great Zimbabwe. The later period encompasses the early-nineteenth century difaqane/mfecane mass migrations, violence and ensuing state-building activity. To further our assessment, we consider the wider contentious issues of climate causation and determinism in a regional context, but dispute suggestions of paradigm shift towards simplistic environmental collapse. Nevertheless, we specifically point to ambiguities in palaeoclimate records, a narrative tendency toward monocausal explanations, and a lack of integration among the literature as reasons for a sustained divergence in interpretation regarding the significance of climate. We move on to discuss the potential of integrative approaches to illuminate understanding of the complex interactions between past climate variability and human activity. In order to do so, we highlight interlinked concepts such as vulnerability and resilience as key for bridging the gap between the natural and social sciences. To conclude, we point to future climate-society priorities and ways forward in the form of research areas, data prospects and questions.

ABSTRACT_62_RECOVERY
Democracy – Planning for Recovery BEFORE the Coming Collapse — A Book of Hope provides the recovery design plans for democratic nations where other books provide only predictions of the collapse with no remedial or recovery plans.  The technological wizardry that created the world that we know so well is of no use to resolve the coming collapse.  The collapse is not a technological problem.  It is a human problem where objects and quantities have been given more importance than quality-values that are at the core of the survival of the organizational existence of our families, communities, and societies. 

What these plans call for is a culture change that begins with a change of consciousness from the limited thinking of materialism, monetization of everything, and from quantity-object value systems.  These plans call for a change of consciousness to quality-value based value based decision-making systems that add value to individual citizens, families, communities, and societies. 

This book calls for the use of Directed Social Change to develop the evolution of social institutions so that their intentions are coordinated and complemental with each other to create beneficial future social circumstances for the generations that will come into existence.  A redesign of democratic societies is fundamental to their survival using design plans that plan for beneficial outcomes 10, 20, 30 years, and 50 years into the future. 

What we want to give to ourselves is the hope that our progeny of future generations will remember us fondly for the planning, decisions, and fortitude of planning well for their life and living situation to be better than what we are experiencing to day.  ##

"Recent discoveries of megadroughts, severe periods of drought lasting decades or centuries, during the course of the Holocene have revolutionized our understanding of modern climate history. Through advances in paleoclimatology, researchers have identified these periods of climate change by analyzing high resolution proxy data derived from lake sediment cores, marine cores, glacial cores, speleothem cores, and tree rings. Evidence that megadroughts occurred with frequency and abruptly over the last 12,000 years, a time span long assumed to be stable compared to earlier glacial periods, has also altered our understanding of societies’ trajectories. The fact that severe, multi-decadal or century-scale droughts coincided with societal collapses well known to archaeologists has challenged established multi-causal analyses of these events. Megadroughts, impossible to predict and impossible to withstand, may have caused political collapse, regional abandonment, and habitat tracking to still-productive regions. The nine megadrought and societal collapse events presented in this volume extend from the foraging-to-agriculture transition at the dawn of the Holocene in West Asia to the fifteenth-century AD collapse of the Khmer Empire in Angkor (Cambodia). Inevitably, this collection of essays also raises challenges to causal analyses of societal collapse and for future  paleoclimatic and archaeological research."

Il Seicento è il secolo che ha stravolto la cultura europa del Rinascimento e ha forgiato la contemporaneità. Il '600 è un secolo infatti di contraddizioni, con pregresso scientifico e crisi economica, proprio come il contraddittorio Duemila. E queste contraddizioni sono evidenti nel Barocco così come nelle Avanguardie, quelle correnti artistiche che rappresentano le inquietudini di un mondo in continuo cambiamento, inquietudini che l'uomo europeo, oggi come allora, esorcizza demonizzando il diverso

The causes for the decline and collapse of the Roman Empire have long preoccupied historians, but until very recently, few Roman historians have paid any attention to the role of the most devastating and definitive cause: adverse climate change.  Tacitus blamed corruption and moral decadence; Christian historians attributed the decline to the wrath of God; Edward Gibbon pointed to barbarian invasions and Christianity; and modern historians have identified over 200 possible causes.  More startlingly, historians rarely mention one of the most significant environmental disasters in human history: the climate catastrophe of 536 CE. This event—triggered by massive volcanic eruptions that filled the sky with ash and reduced solar energy around the world—caused the Dark Age Cold Period, crop failures, famine, and plague. This incident, more than any other, ended any chance the Roman Empire had to reconstitute itself after the barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries.
While decadence and invasion certainly played a part in Rome’s decline, solar cycles, violent volcanic activity, and cooler climate-loving bacteria also played significant roles. Because both ancient and many modern historians rarely knew and barely understood these silent killers, they continued to blame the usual suspects. Who could fault them?  Nearly five centuries after the dawn of the Age of Science, however, scholars have no excuse for not re-examining mounting evidence. It is time to consider the data that scientific studies produce about the role of climate change in history and to revise the narrative that many historians continue to ignore. 
Evidence derived from new scientific methods—unavailable to previous historians—now reveals that environmental issues played a significant role in the rise and decline of the Roman Empire in both the West and the East. Adverse climatic change in Europe, North Africa, and even Southwest and Central Asia contributed not only to Rome's inability to feed its population (and the Western army by 444 CE), but also to the westward migrations of the Huns, the Goths, other Germanic peoples, and later the Arabs.  Finally, bacteria-carrying fleas on vermin that thrived under ideal climate conditions set off a time bomb that wiped out as much as half of the Mediterranean’s estimated 75 million population in the early sixth century.
In an age of rapid climate change and states in collapse or decline because of it, it is more important than ever to understand the mechanisms of environmental catastrophe on human society and its ability to adapt to it.  Modern failed states like Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen offer bitter lessons of what happens when states are unable to understand the relationship between human societies and their natural environments. The Roman Empire offers one of the best examples of how environmental catastrophe served as a catalyst for disease and how these two forces together were catalysts for a failing state.  To better comprehend the tragedy of the current situation, it is useful to start by reviewing what historians have said over the centuries about the causes of the decline of Rome and climate change.

"The Akkadians, of southern Mesopotamia, created the first empire ca. 2300 BC with the conquest and imperialization of southern irrigation agriculture and northern Mesopotamian dry-farming landscapes. The Akkadian Empire conquered and controlled a territory of roughly 30,000 square kilometers and, importantly, its wealth in labor and cereal crop-yields. The Empire maintained a standing army, weaponry, and a hierarchy of administrators, scribes, surveyors, craft specialists, and transport personnel, sustainable and profitable for about one hundred years.  Archaeological excavations indicate the empire was still in the process of expansion when the 2200 BC−1900 BC / 4.2−3.9 ka BP global abrupt climate change deflected or weakened the Mediterranean westerlies and the Indian Monsoon and generated synchronous megadrought across the Mediterranean, west Asia, the Indus, and northeast Africa. Dry-farming agriculture domains and their productivity across west Asia were reduced severely, forcing adaptive societal collapses, regional abandonments, habitat-tracking, nomadization, and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire. These adaptive processes extended across the hydrographically varied landscapes of west Asia and thereby provided demographic and societal resilience in the face of the megadrought’s abruptness, magnitude, and duration."

Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of social unrest in every major continent. Beginning with the birth of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, the eruption of civil disorder continues to wreak havoc unpredictably from Greece to Ukraine, from China to Thailand, from Brazil to Turkey, and beyond.

Policymakers and media observers have largely missed the biophysical triggers of this new age of unrest – the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels, and its multiplying consequences for the Earth’s climate, industrial food production, and economic growth.

This scientific monograph for the first time develops an empirically-ground theoretical model of the complex interaction between biophysical processes and geopolitical crises, demonstrated through the analysis of a wide range of detailed case studies of historic, concurrent and probable state failures in the Middle East, Northwest Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. Geopolitical crises across these regions are being driven by the proliferation of climate, food and economic crises which have at their root the common denominator of a fundamental and permanent disruption in the energy basis of industrial civilization.

This inevitable energy transition, which will be completed well before the close of this century, entails a paradigm shift in the organization of civilization. Yet for this shift to result in a viable new way of life will require a fundamental epistemological shift recognizing humanity’s embeddedness in the natural world. While geopolitics cannot be simplistically reduced to the biophysical, this book shows that international relations today can only be understood by recognizing the extent to which the political is embedded in the biophysical.

Although the book offers a rigorous scientific analysis, it is written in a clean, journalistic style to ensure readability and accessibility to a general audience. It contains a large number of graphical illustrations concerning oil production data, population issues, the food price index, economic growth and debt, and other related issues to demonstrate the interconnections and correlations across key sectors.

La périodisation de l’histoire par l’Europe chrétienne comme par le monde musulman voit dans l’avènement de l’islam une rupture majeure. Cette notion de rupture se retrouve, dans une moindre mesure, dans la définition de nos champs disciplinaires : ne distingue-t-on pas l’archéologie islamique de l’archéologie de l’Orient hellénisé et romain ? L’histoire de l’Antiquité tardive de celle de l’islam ? Si cette distinction trouve sa justification dans l’usage d’une documentation spécifique et d’outils méthodologiques propres, elle contribue néanmoins à tracer une barrière entre deux périodes de l’histoire. Au regard de la documentation historique toutefois, cette barrière perd toute réalité. Si un déclin du peuplement de l’Arabie à la veille de l’islam a pu conditionner l’émergence et l’expansion d’une nouvelle civilisation, celle-ci est largement héritière des civilisations préislamiques de la péninsule. Dans les régions voisines, ce n’est pas un changement brutal des modes de vie qui s’observe, ni même une conversion massive à la nouvelle foi, mais nous constatons au contraire la poursuite d’évolutions engagées de longue date.
La réunion d’archéologues et d’historiens spécialistes de l’Antiquité tardive en péninsule Arabique, au Proche-Orient, dans la Corne de l’Afrique, en Perse et en Inde a permis d’interroger les sources documentaires lors d’une table ronde tenue à Paris en 2008. Cet ouvrage en publie les actes en s’interrogeant sur la réalité ou non d’un déclin des civilisations du Moyen-Orient et des régions voisines à la veille de l’islam et sur les ruptures et continuités qui se font jour.

Apparue en 2015 en France, le terme de « collapsologie » est le néologisme d’une mise en récit sur base scientifique d’un Effondrement inéluctable de notre société « thermo-industrielle ». Faisant écho à d’autres théories écologiques plus anciennes comme le mouvement décroissance, cette notion, née sous la plume de Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens et Gauthier Chapelle s’est diffusée en 2015 dans l’espace médiatique français avant de connaître une recrudescence en 2017. Cette recherche vise à la fois à étudier le discours de la collapsologie, sa rhétorique, sa structuration mais aussi sa diffusion par ses promoteurs, leurs conditions d’existence et les conditions d’énonciation de leurs discours. Nous proposons dans cette recherche une cartographie des espaces promoteurs des thèses de l’Effondrement. Pour ce faire, nous nous emploierons à polariser l’espace de la collapsologie en trois grandes sous-parties relativement autonomes. Respectivement : Les Collapsologues politiques, les Collapsologues de réseaux, et les Collapsologues universitaires.


Appeared in 2015 in France, the term “collapsologie” is the neologism of a narrative on the scientific basis of an inevitable collapse of our thermo-industrial society. Echoing other older ecological theories as the degrowth movement in France, this notion, this notion, from the pen of Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens and Gauthier Chapelle spread in 2015 in the French media space before experiencing a recrudescence in 2017. This research aims at both studying the discourse of “collapsologie”, its rhetoric and structuration but also its dissemination by its promoters, their conditions of existence and conditions of enunciation of their discourse. We propose in this research a cartography of the spaces’ promoters of the Collapse’s theses. To that we will work to polarize the space of collapsologie into three large, relatively autonomous subparts. Respectively: Political Collapsologists, Collapseologists by Network, and Academic Collapsologists.

PREFACE
The story of what happened to Mycenaean Greece in the years 1250-1150 BC remains unclear, despite over a century of research. The events that punctuated these years, beyond archaeological ‘events’ such as acts of building or destruction, are also lost – because despite the limited use of writing, the Linear B tablets, do not record any kind of history. Diplomatic correspondence, which might reveal tantalising detail, remains, at least for the moment, lost, although it surely existed given that the ruling families of the Hittites and a major kingdom known as ‘Ahhiyawa’, generally agreed to be a Mycenaean kingdom (‘Achaea’), were in direct contact – a fact we know from the Hittite royal archives. We do not even have a king list, although we could reasonably envision roughly thirteen kings at Mycenae ruling for fifteen years apiece across the flourishing palatial period of Mycenaean Greece, from 1400-1200 BC. If in hindsight this sounds chronologically insignificant, we should recall that a span of two centuries separated the Cleisthenic reforms of 508 BC and the rise of classical Athens in the early fifth century BC, in a world of city-states, and the rise and fall of Alexander the Great and the materialisation of the massive Hellenistic successor kingdoms. A lot can happen in two centuries. The Late Bronze Age Aegean, and each state within it, would have had its own established traditions and practices, a long political history (that perhaps latched itself on to aspects of Minoan Cretan traditions), and played host to many personalities and policies – and the Mycenaean past itself stretched back well beyond 1400 BC. Yet we do know more than we did when Vincent Desborough’s early exploration of the period, The Last Mycenaeans and Their Successors (Oxford University Press), was published in 1964, over half a century ago now. The present volume sheds new light on the Aegean at the end of the palatial era and in the subsequent postpalatial period, with a dual focus on change and continuity ‘on the ground’ in the major regions of the Aegean world, and thematic overviews.
The fact of ‘collapse’ – the end of the Mycenaean kingdoms and their palatial systems and the transformation of the Aegean – is clearly visible and not in doubt, but the reasons behind the changes that occurred are still hotly debated. Perhaps because of the dearth of narrative evidence from Greece itself, and the influence of ancient migration stories and suggestive pictures on the walls of Egyptian temples, the cause of the collapse has frequently been sought in terms of invaders – northern invaders, sometimes ‘later’ Greeks (e.g. Dorians), and/or ‘Sea Peoples’. Blaming an external actor who comes in and bulldozes the existing structures sounds plausible – indeed, the Norman conquest of England offers a clear case of the destruction of of a ruler and a significant proportion of the elite at a single pivotal battle and its replacement by invaders from the outside, with a new elite language and material culture then imposed over time. It has long been known that positive evidence for any invasion of Greece at this time is lacking, but whilst largely discredited, a few scholars have proposed climate-driven mass migrations and invasions both into and apparently from the Aegean. Quite why masses of people would have migrated into areas of drought is unclear. Also unclear is why they should have been violent and destructive – but ‘barbarians’ acting as ‘barbarians’, always desperate and always coming in ‘hordes’ and ‘waves’, seems to be a self-explanatory trope, for some, and fills the vacuum of certain knowledge.
It is also commonplace to situate the Mycenaean collapse in the context of wider events in the eastern Mediterranean, and to see it as one among many interrelated collapses – the collapse of a broader system. The marauding Sea Peoples appear in this narrative too, conveniently linking together everything from Sardinia and Sicily to the Levant. Thus in a number of important volumes on the period, the situation in the Aegean has been given little space and little consideration in its own right. As this volume shows, zooming in reveals a pattern of diversity across the Aegean geographically and temporally c. 1250-1150 BC that on a human scale requires more than calling on barbarian invasions or climate change as prime movers and chief characteristics of the age. No-one disputes the connections of the Aegean to the wider world, at multiple levels, or the mobility and range of people and groups in the central and eastern Mediterranean, but the causal linkage – one driving cause for all eastern Mediterranean collapses and cultural novelties – is unproved. Egypt, of course, did not collapse, and nor were interconnections within the eastern Mediterranean, including to the Aegean, suddenly severed c. 1200 BC; other factors must come into play and the people on the ground in the Aegean must be seen as the primary actors involved in the changes in the Aegean.

This volume brings together 24 scholars whose experience and expertise in Aegean and eastern Mediterranean archaeology and prehistory has touched on the issues of collapse and transformation in the region in the years around 1200 BC – ‘the collapse’. It seeks to redress the balance from demoting the Aegean to a chapter in the eastern Mediterranean collapse and give a clear picture of the Aegean itself in the years 1250-1150 BC – either side of the Mycenaean collapse. This is done through chapters which explore the main regions of the Aegean – the mainland, Crete, and the islands – some of which contained kingdoms with palace centres and others that were ‘non-palatial’, and through thematic chapters, which detail the pottery, and examine the changing economy, religion, and burial practices, amongst other areas. Other chapters set the Aegean in a wider regional context. The volume provides up-to-date descriptions of the archaeology, as we know it now, along with interpretations of the evidence from a range of perspectives. It is hoped that it will be of use to Aegeanists and specialists in eastern Mediterranean archaeology, interested in this key period, as well as those who study collapse itself, for whom it can provide comparative data.
The authors may not always agree on their views of what was happening in this period and why, or the identity of the parties involved, and no attempt has been made to force or present a single explanation, interpretation or characterisation of ‘the collapse’. As one contributor, Eric Cline has pithily noted in his recent book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, ‘many possible variables may have had a contributing role in the collapse, but we are not even certain that we know all of the variables, and we undoubtedly do not know which ones were critical’ (170). Equally a period that was ‘bad’ for some (in our case, probably the denizens of the palaces in particular) may of course have been ‘good’ for others – every crisis is, after all, an opportunity. It is the editor’s hope, rather, that a sound presentation of the archaeological evidence and a diversity of views will be found more honest, more useful, and more interesting than a single grand narrative or overarching theory.
Finally, I would like to express my sincere thanks to all of the contributors for agreeing to participate in this project and for devoting time in their all-too-busy schedules to producing such excellent, engaging and informative chapters, from which I have learnt much. In particular, thanks must go to Bernard Knapp and Jeremy Rutter for their advice to a first-time editor on constructing this volume, and Eleni Balomenou, who also, in addition to contributing her own chapter, kindly stepped in to translate from the Greek Vasiliki Adrimi-Sismani’s chapter on Thessaly. I would also like to thank Julie Gardiner and Jessica Scott and the editorial board at Oxbow for agreeing to publish the volume and for their help in producing it.

The editor would like to note that his work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project "Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).

Guy D. Middleton

Newcastle upon Tyne
December, 2019

Quel est le monde des écologistes ? Cette thèse cherche à dépasser les explications réduisant leur engagement à de simples stratégies sociales en plongeant dans les représentations d’un réseau informel d’écologistes vivant en France et en Suisse qui ont la particularité d’être des producteurs de discours publics, à travers tous types de médias, ce qui en fait des intellectuels engagés de l’écologie (Chapitre II). L’analyse de leurs discours, mais aussi de leurs pratiques, met en évidence la thématique fondatrice de l’effondrement, celui de la « civilisation thermo-industrielle », dans un processus de « prise de conscience ». Par-delà les bases scientifiques avancées pour la légitimer, la perspective catastrophiste est révélatrice d’une quête d’alternative vis-à-vis du « paradigme » moderne ramené au dualisme mécaniste et à l’économie capitaliste (Chapitre III). Cette écologie relationnelle s’inspire par conséquent des courants de l’écologie profonde, de l’écopsychologie, ainsi que de l’hypothèse Gaïa. À une vision holiste en lien avec une approche systémique de l’effondrement, elle mêle une perspective moniste par la perception organiciste d’un monde vivant composé d’êtres unis par des relations d’interdépendance et de correspondance (Chapitre IV). Le Soi est alors en liaison intime avec le Tout, et cette écosophie s’actualise parfois par une relation écospirituelle à travers la méditation, des exercices ou des rituels tels que ceux proposés par les ateliers de « Travail qui relie » (Chapitre V). Cette médiation peut aussi se faire par des pratiques quotidiennes d’insertion dans la « toile de la vie » tel que le compostage (Chapitre VIII). Le « changement de paradigme », passage d’un monde à l’autre, est ainsi attendu et espéré et cette apocalyptique écologique fait souvent écho au millénarisme du New Age, ainsi qu’aux aspects contre-culturels de ce courant. La dénonciation de l’anthropocentrisme et le holisme affiché de l’écospiritualité peuvent aussi donner lieu à des accusations d’antihumanisme et de liens avec l’extrême-droite que cette thèse examine (Chapitre VI). Les variations de positions exprimées au sein du réseau d’écologie relationnelle permettent enfin de les comprendre comme s’articulant autour d’un pôle écocentrique, dans une relation d’attraction/répulsion avec les autres pôles théocentrique et anthropocentrique. En prenant les acteurs au sérieux, ce travail propose une compréhension approfondie des logiques des écologistes catastrophistes et spirituels, par-delà l’objectivité supposée des crises environnementales.

From 2200-1900 BC, Northern Mesopotamia experienced depopulation and a loss of political complexity. Understanding the resettlement of this region—the recovery of complex societies following collapse—has emerged as a major research question in Near Eastern archaeology. Recent studies have employed two models of political regeneration: 1) “template regeneration,” whereby the renewed society follows the same pattern that a society in the same area had before the collapse and 2) “rural resiliency,” whereby the collapse of urban settlements was epiphenomenal and a resilient rural and tribal base allowed for settlement continuity and the regeneration of urban society. This article proposes a different model and argues that this resettlement involved the creation of a new type of polity, the tribal kingdom, which employed novel political, economic and cultural strategies. Tribal kingdoms were characterized by the rise of tribal confederacies, changing mobility patterns, changes in social structure, and new economic systems that used the steppe in different ways, all of which transformed settlements of all sizes as well as the relationships between them. Although these tribal kingdoms sought to establish their hegemony (in a Gramscian sense) partly by appealing to historical precedents, particularly the Akkadian Empire, they did not simply revive third millennium political practices. Similarly, although continuity is evident in some centers, survey and excavation data reveal that the overall settlement systems in Northern Mesopotamia were transformed between the third and second millennia. As a result, this article emphasizes the importance of discontinuity in the archaeological and historical record, in contrast to the usual emphasis on continuity, maintenance and the longue durée in complex societies following their emergence.

Between the 13th and 11th centuries BCE, most Greek Bronze-Age Palatial centers were destroyed and/or abandoned. The following centuries were typified by low population levels. Data from oxygen-isotope speleothems, stable carbon isotopes, alkenone-derived sea surface temperatures, and changes in warm species dinocysts and formanifera in the Mediterranean indicate that the Early Iron Age was more arid than the preceding Bronze Age. A sharp increase in Northern Hemisphere temperatures preceded the collapse of Palatial centers, a sharp decrease occurred during their abandonment. Mediterranean Sea surface temperatures cooled rapidly during the Late Bronze Age, limiting freshwater flux into the atmosphere and thus reducing precipitation over land. These climatic changes could have affected Palatial centers that were dependent upon high levels of agricultural productivity. Declines in agricultural production would have made higher-density populations in Palatial centers unsustainable. The ‘Greek Dark Ages’ that followed occurred during prolonged arid conditions that lasted until the Roman Warm Period.

This book intends to be an alert to the fact that the curve measuring environmental costs against the economic benefits of capitalism has irreversibly entered into a negative phase. The prospect of an environmental collapse has been evidenced by the sciences and the humanities since the 1960s. Today, it imposes its urgency. This collapse differs from past civilizations in
that it is neither local nor just civilizational. It is global and occurs at the broadest level of the biosphere, accelerated by the convergence of different socio-environmental crises, such as: Earth energy imbalance, climate change and global warming, sea-level rise, decrease and degradation of forests, collapse of terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity, floods, droughts, wildfires, and extreme weather events, degradation of soils and water resources, increase in pollution
caused by fossil fuels and coal Increase in waste production and industrial intoxication. This is the PDF of the book.