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 Reference Tainter1988; Yoffee & Cowgill Reference Yoffee and Cowgill1988).
Collapse is most often situated in wider narratives concerning the rise and fall of civilizations, though it has not received the same systematic attention as, say, state formation. Most scholarly treatments focus on particular macroregions or culture areas, with the Classic Maya and eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age as frequently recurring case studies (e.g. Cline Reference Cline2014; Demarest Reference Demarest2004; Iannone Reference Iannone2014; Knapp & Manning Reference Knapp and Manning2016). Popular accounts by non-archaeologists (Diamond Reference Diamond2005) and archaeologists (Fagan Reference Fagan2008) have highlighted environmental degradation and climate change as particularly influential factors, drawing comparisons with the contemporary world and hoping to issue correctives. Recent attention has critiqued environmentally deterministic explanations for collapse, focusing on transformation, resilience and historical context (Butzer & Endfeld Reference Butzer and Endfield2012; Cunningham & Driessen Reference Cunningham and Driessen2017; Faulseit Reference Faulseit2016; McAnany & Yoffee Reference McAnany and Yoffee2010; Redman Reference Redman2005; Schwartz & Nichols Reference Schwartz and Nichols2006).
Two recent attempts at synthesis pull together much of the above discussion, albeit in very different ways. Both are single-author comparative studies that utilize a variety of case studies, several of which overlap. Both are written for non-specialist audiences as introductions to the study of societal failure. This is where the broad-brush similarities end, however. While Middleton's goal is to provide an overview of ‘collapsology’ and the multitude of ways in which collapse has been understood in the study of past societies, Johnson addresses the specific problem of human–environmental interaction, inspired by our current global predicament of rapid climate change.
Here I provide overviews of each book and discuss points of comparison, dissonance and contextualization. For the most part, I leave detailed summary and critique to other, independent reviews. I first focus on the overall approaches of each book and their relative merits. I then turn to issues that are relevant to both books—and to the wider study of collapse—that are deserving of further treatment: (1) variation in how we identify collapse based on archaeological, historical, and environmental evidence; (2) the disciplinary and terminological implications of ‘collapse’ and what this means for questions of comparison; and (3) the broader role of comparative studies concerning societal failure.
Middleton provides a series of 10 case studies, buttressed by introductory and concluding chapters. The introductory chapter asks probing questions concerning how collapse is defined, what exactly collapsed and the nature of comparison. The first seven cases (chapters 2–8) concern the Old World: Old Kingdom Egypt, the Akkadian empire, the Indus Valley civilization, Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites and the western Roman empire. He then turns to the New World (chapters 9–11), looking at Rio Viejo and Teotihuacan, the Classic Maya and the Andean civilizations that preceded the Inka. He finishes with the classic case studies of the Khmer empire (Angkor) and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) (chapters 12–13). A bibliographical essay at the end provides a useful guide for further reading. Throughout, Middleton builds upon an earlier review article (Middleton Reference Middleton2012) to examine competing narratives of societal breakdown. In each case he summarizes arguments for and against various explanations that have been put forward for rapid, often catastrophic decline. He applies the term ‘collapse’ with some reluctance in favour of complex, historically contingent explanations for transition and change. Rather than advancing a single theory of civilizational failure, Middleton aims to provide an introduction to ‘collapsology’, offering a wide-ranging and impressively comprehensive overview of previous scholarship, written in an accessible and succinct way that will be appealing for undergraduate or graduate courses on the collapse of complex societies, or for scholars seeking overviews of regions in which they do not specialize.
Johnson follows a different track, taking as a central thesis the crippling capacity of social hubris—the failure of societies to respond to changing environmental and social circumstances, born of over-confidence in established practices and orders. The book is structured in pairs of linked thematic chapters and individual case studies that illustrate how each theme applies in each case. After a brief introduction to social hubris, a second chapter highlights surplus agricultural production as the foundation of every complex society on Earth. The paired thematic chapters and case studies proceed as follows: the environment and the Maya (chapters 3 and 4); agricultural systems and Mesopotamia (5 and 6); trade systems and Rome (7 and 8); social organization and Egypt (9 and 10); and unexpected catastrophes and the Aztecs and Incas (11 and 12). A final chapter (13) examines ‘where we are today’ and suggests ways forward. Each case study introduces the relevant history of the culture at hand and works through the various themes that structure the book (environment, agriculture, trade, social organization, natural disasters), accompanied by a more detailed discussion of the theme in the paired chapter. Johnson's agenda is clear from the start, arguing that the intensified human–environmental impacts that threaten the present world order are likely to have devastating outcomes, which we should reflect upon by understanding how past societies functioned and how they adapted to—or failed to acknowledge—changing environmental circumstances, often of their own making. These are important considerations, to be sure, but I often found myself wondering about the intended audience of this book, which is never made clear. The thematic chapters amount to rather basic overviews of how human societies function—content largely derived from Johnson's undergraduate anthropology courses (p. 164). The case studies are short and largely dominated by introductory material. They provide some critique and nuance to previous environmentally driven explanations for social change, but some likely will still find them overly deterministic.
In comparing the two books there is some divergence evident in the disciplinary backgrounds of the authors. Middleton is an archaeologist and ancient historian whose field of specialization is Late Bronze Age Greece. In recent years he has emerged as a leading figure in the comparative study of collapse, producing another book and two substantial review articles on the subject (Middleton Reference Middleton2010; Reference Middleton2012; Reference Middleton2018—this last is also a review of multiple books on collapse, including Johnson's). In each of his case studies Middleton discusses a broad range of alternative explanations for social change, emphasizing most often historical contingency and continuity. As a Mayanist, Johnson's inclinations and training are anthropological. In particular, his book draws upon traditions of processual archaeology to foreground relationships between surplus agricultural production, social hierarchy and organization, and adaptation to the natural environment. Middleton provides a greater number of more detailed case studies, with more explicit attention on detailed comparison, while Johnson aims to situate his work in scholarship concerning the evolution of complex societies.
Environment and agency between prehistory and history
Recent developments in the study of past environments have resulted in numerous interdisciplinary studies concerning climate change and its impacts on human populations (e.g. Weiss Reference Weiss2017). In many, environmental factors (climatic shifts, ecocide and catastrophe—whether truly natural or not) are set up against human agency, social processes and culture change. Johnson and Middleton both acknowledge that any societal collapse is necessarily a social process, but in these and previous studies there is a wide range of opinions concerning what that means and where the balance falls between environmental factors and human action. Middleton (pp. 11–12) follows Tainter (Reference Tainter1988) in emphasizing that most discussions of collapse are fundamentally about sociopolitical organization—they thus demand primarily sociopolitical explanations.
Middleton emphasizes that climate change and disaster narratives have long obscured our understanding of what we term collapse. Natural developments provide important contexts, but causation is rarely simple. Johnson's work is much more environmentally focused, although his thematic chapters come off as overly broad, generalizing discussions of how societies ‘work’. He pushes back against critiques of environmental determinism (p. 101), with a focus on human–environment interaction, especially in the context of agricultural systems. An obvious takeaway is that a balance of human and non-human factors should be considered in formulating understandings of social change. Individual studies often skew one way or another, though frameworks of systems and complexity thinking have long offered compromises (e.g. Renfrew Reference Renfrew, Renfrew and Cooke1979; Woolf Reference Woolf and Minamikawa2017).
Historical sources are at once illuminating and problematic when it comes to constructing narratives of collapse, not least in their variety. Egyptian, Hittite and Roman texts describe intrigue in royal courts, harem conspiracies and waves of foreign invaders. Mesopotamian and Egyptian documents record periods of drought and famine, though these often emphasize the disorder of the past in order to exalt a recent restoration of order, raising questions about the degree to which they contain environmental or political information.
The very presence and character of state-based writing systems are alternative proxies for sociopolitical change. Maya royal monuments stop being produced at a certain time in the Terminal Classic—the (quite long) period associated with collapse—although writing continues in the form of codices. In the Minoan and Mycenaean Aegean, the successive disappearances of Linear A and B scripts signal an end to the palatial institutions that relied on them. At the end of the Bronze Age in Anatolia, Egypt and the Levant, Akkadian cuneiform ceases to function as a lingua franca among a brotherhood of ‘Great Kings’.
Etic accounts of collapse provide another type of insight. Spanish priests and explorers recorded the human and cultural atrocities visited upon indigenous populations of the New World at the time of European contact, most prominently in the cases of the Aztecs, Maya, Inka and the people of Easter Island. New diseases like smallpox decimated local groups that were at the same time scammed, betrayed and enslaved by European colonists. Europeans often pointed to earlier monuments of these cultures, as if they had fallen from grace on their own. Narratives of collapse, then, are often tainted with the colonial agenda of civilizing missions that aimed to Christianize cultures whose best days were considered gone; and documentary narratives of decline often advocate a need for a new beginning, or aim tacitly (or not) to justify racial inequality. We should beware the genesis of such narratives in other contexts as well (in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Africa and Asia).
Both authors engage critically with such documentary sources when available, though they do less in terms of comparing how the very presence of texts can skew interpretations in particular directions. It is noteworthy that causation in collapse narratives trends much more toward climate or environmentally determined explanations in prehistoric cases, while in historical contexts, politics and social factors play a much greater role, often in direct relation to the number of written sources available. Scholars interested in comparison should consider this a problem. In studying societal trajectories we should not expect completely different results simply because we have different data sources. While it is true that we can work only with the data we have—and I believe that we should make the most of it—one of the strengths of comparison is in the capacity to acknowledge and explicate such imbalances.
Terminology and comparison
Collapse is typically invoked to describe major social change in a relatively short period of time, where significant qualitative or quantitative decline can be observed in terms of population, quality of life, or level of sociopolitical complexity (e.g. Murray Reference Murray2017). Typical archaeological signatures include the abandonment or destruction of major sites, a drop in evidence for long-distance interaction and other economic activity, changes in settlement patterns such as a decline in numbers of sites or shift in location, etc. In this sense, it is a real, observable phenomenon. Questions of agency and emphasis, however, complicate the term in its application.
The main difficulty of collapse is that the term implies a lack of agency. Something ‘collapses’ under its own weight, becomes unsustainable, etc. Administrative glut and environmental constraints are important, to be sure, but ultimately these are contexts in which human action, decision-making and organization occur. While I would not argue that the term collapse should be discarded, deliberate and intentional reorganization must be brought more often to the fore in our discussions of it.
Sociopolitical reconfiguration—often drastic—has long been recognized as a normal and recurring process. In the second century bc the Greek historian Polybius elaborated the idea of anacyclosis, in which primitive monarchy turns to institutionalized kingship to tyranny to aristocracy to oligarchy to democracy to mob rule (Histories VI.XX). Polybius’ ideas were drawing on Plato and Aristotle, and were eventually taken up by later political thinkers such as Cicero, Machiavelli and Kant. Middleton uses the concept to introduce his chapter on collapse and revolution in Mesoamerica (pp. 213–14). Emphasizing transition and deliberate change seems favourable in order to encourage more nuanced and ultimately realistic explanations for societal transitions, as opposed to simple or blameless notions of breakdown.
Questions of comparison are at the core of each of these books. Where Middleton emphasizes the specific circumstances of each case, Johnson sees his case studies as illustrative of globally shared problems and processes. Middleton (p. 20) enumerates the many social forms being compared, even within his own book: political units, such as states or empires (Rome, the Hittites, Akkad), culture areas (the Maya, Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia), independent communities, world systems, populations, etc. Both authors also recognize that collapse can refer to many different things: political transition, disintegration of social hierarchies, large-scale societal collapse, and/or population decline.
A related question is: what is it that is collapsing? In every case discussed here, life goes on, and in many cases flourishes, though in a different form. Advocates of collapse terminology point to scale, degree, or rapidity of change as a determining factor. Yet there are no ‘clean breaks’, as it were, and in many cases we see demonstrations of social memory and interest in ancestral or divine connections to pre-existing forms (Bronze Age Greece in the time of Homer, Teotihuacan in the eyes of the Aztecs, the Khmer's continued dedications at post-abandonment Angkor, etc.). Furthermore, Middleton and Johnson both note that studies of collapse tend to follow the trajectory of societal elites. In many cases we might imagine life improving for ‘commoners’ following the collapse of a social system based on high levels of inequality. Indeed, revolts against the elite are well documented in many historical circumstances, though often in different terms—we talk about the ‘French Revolution’, for example, not the ‘French Collapse’. On the other hand, we refer to the ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’. Ultimately it becomes a question of where agency behind social change lies and who feels its effects, and of course this applies differently in different contexts. While seeking to build terminological consensus in archaeology may be a losing battle, we can at least advocate for specificity in defining one's terms in order to facilitate understanding and comparison, especially across sub-disciplinary contexts.
In general, the challenges of global comparison are more noticeable in Johnson's book than in Middleton's. Johnson's strongest case studies are from the New World. His Old World case studies often come off as thin, either too narrow or too broad, and contain occasional errors of fact. For example: he states that the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible refer to the climatic optimum of 11–6 kya (pp. 87–8)—both of these textual sources are millennia later and could not possibly make any specific reference to a 5000-year period of prehistory; he presents the ‘early Roman heartland’ as a chronological period, 700–264 bc (p. 125)—it is not; he says Constantine the Great died in 395 after the council of Nicea (p. 133), which would have made him 123—he died at the age of 65 in 337. Johnson's book also contains some cringe-worthy essentializations, for example when he argues that Egyptian history lasted 3000 years with minor interruptions because Egyptians had less hubris than other societies, meaning that their idea of social order was more unified, but still more adaptable, than other states (p. 186)—I am not sure what this means, especially in relation to the three intermediate periods presented as collapses on the previous pages. By contrast, Middleton's book stands out as carefully researched, with a high degree of factual accuracy throughout, making it a useful resource for people interested in comparison and the opportunities and challenges it presents.
Whither collapsology?
It is no coincidence that increased interest in the relationship between human societies and global climate change over the last decades has resulted in more acute interest in societal collapse, and from a variety of academic fields (e.g. Constanza et al. Reference Constanza, Graumlich and Steffen2007; Meadows et al. Reference Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens1972). Middleton, here and elsewhere (Reference Middleton2018, 79), argues that ‘collapsology’ should by now be considered an established subfield within archaeology, as with research orientations concerning state formation, gender or colonialism. I agree, although I note that he is the only one who seems to use this specific term (at least in archaeological literature). At this point, with detailed case studies and synthetic overviews in hand, it is perhaps time to turn more attention to specific comparisons in understanding particular societal trajectories (e.g. Storey & Storey Reference Storey and Storey2017 on the Maya and Rome).
A second question concerns the role of academic studies of collapse in contemporary society. Johnson's send-off is to provide a set of recommendations for changing human behaviour at a global scale, based on lessons of the past concerning how socio-environmental systems work. He is right to do so, but there is again the question of audience and efficacy. The challenge is not in making collapse interesting or in identifying potentially disastrous societal behaviours. Lost civilizations and dystopian futures continue to loom large in cultural imaginations at a global scale. It is rather in making real research—concerning past societies and their adaptations (or lack thereof) to changing social and environmental circumstances—relevant in contemporary social life and policy making (Kaufman et al. Reference Kaufman, Kelly and Vachula2018). This is all the more difficult when up against powerful interests that benefit from the very environmental degradation and growing social inequality that engender radical destabilization. Nevertheless, the scale of global society and questions of sustainability facing our planet make this a social phenomenon worthy of constant consideration, which also should be pushed as much as possible into forums well beyond academe.
