The Collapse of Complex Societies: What’s past is prologue

Complex human societies have come and gone, and the drivers of their evolution and the causes of their demise are many, and for most of them, mysterious; that is, our archaeological tools are still insufficient to clarify their stories through the hazy film of time.  What does seem clear is that overpopulation, over-consumption, and degradation of arable land are common to many of their stories, including those of history’s paragons, the Mesopotamian, Indus Valley, Roman, and Mayan civilizations.[i]  Societies often outstrip their local resource base, forcing them to put more energy into exploiting the resources farther away, lands usually covetously held by neighboring societies.  Every empire—a dozen within today’s Middle East alone—has gone down this well-worn path.[ii] Many societies—the Mesopotamians, the Mayans, the Anasazi, and the Indians of Cahokia among them—cut down the surrounding forests for agriculture.[iii]  When they ran out of flat land they continued upslope, and the rainwaters—that would have normally nourished them—flooded them instead and sent their fertile farm soil downstream towards the oceans.[iv]  In southern Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, parts of the Roman Empire, and in the Ancient Pueblo societies of the American Southwest, fragile arid lands were irrigated literally to death.[v]  Either the salts left by the evaporated waters killed the soil, or the water pooled in places where the underlying geology did not allow drainage, and the crops drowned.

Before collapsing, all these societies thrived for centuries, sometimes millennia. Human ingenuity solved many of their ongoing problems. Societies are problem-solving entities. Until they are not. As their natural resource base degrades, the societies become less resilient to the continual onslaught of stressors to which they are all subject—floods, droughts, invaders, incompetent leaders, epidemics.  Weakened, a powerful stressor eventually overwhelms them.  The stressor is either prolonged, as in the Great Drought of the 13th century C.E. that brought down the Pueblo Indian societies, the prolonged (900 year) drying of the Indo-Gangetic Plain that ended the urban Harappan civilization about three thousand years ago, or the megadroughts that brought down both the Classic Mayas and the Andean Tiwanaku Empire in approximately 900 C.E. and the Khmer Empire in the 15th century C.E.; or the society was beset by a series of environmental and societal challenges that whittled down its resilience, as in the case of the Late Bronze Age Greece, and the Romans, the Mayans, the Axumites in Ethiopia in the first half of the first millennium C.E., the society on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Akkadians in Northern Mesopotamia, and, after them, the Sumerian’s Ur III empire of Southern Mesopotamia.[vi]

We are treading down the same path as past societies, overpopulating, overconsuming, and destroying the underlying biosphere, but do not have to come to the same dismal conclusion. Our numbers and our consumption will necessarily come down to whatever is sustainable within Earth’s biogeochemical systems. We can do it voluntarily or nature will do it for us through a dieback. The collapse of Civilization is certainly not a given. We can prevent collapse. It will probably take great determination, innovation, courage, honesty, and wisdom. It will require an honest assessment of our beliefs, values, and behaviors. It is principally this effort towards honest assessment that guides this website.  

Large crowds gather in the afternoon on Cacuaco bay, north of Luanda, Angola. Credit: Getty Images / iStock / mtcurado

ENDNOTES

[i] For example, Hughes (1975, 2001), Tainter (1988), Culbert (1988/2003), Ponting (1991), Redman (1999), Haug et al. (2003), Harper (2004), Redman et al. (2004, 2007), Wright (2004), Diamond (2005a,b;2007;2009), Aimers (2007), Redman et al. (2007).

Hughes, J.D., (1975) Ecology in Ancient Civilizations. Univ. of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Culbert, T.P. (1988/2003) The Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization, pp. 69-101, in Yoffee, N. and Cowgill, G.L. (Editors) The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.

Tainter, J.A. (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, U.K.

Ponting (1991) A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. Penguin Books, New York.

Redman, C.L. (1999) Human Impact on Ancient Environments. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.

Hughes, J.D., (2001) An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life. Routledge, London.

Haug, G. H., Gunther, D., Peterson, L.C., Sigman, D.M., Hughen, K.A, Aeschlimann, B. (2003) Climate and Collapse of Maya Civilization. Science, v. 299, pp. 1731-1735.

Harper, C.L. (2004) Environment and Society: Human Perspectives on Environmental Issues. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey.

Redman, C.L., James, S.R., Fish, P.R., and Rogers, J.D., Editors (2004) The Archaeology of Global Change: The Impact of Humans on Their Environment. Smithsonian Books, Washington D.C.

Wright, R. (2004) A Short History of Progress. Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, PA.

Diamond, J. (2005a) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking, New York.

Diamond, J. (2005b, April) Collapse: Ecological Lessons in Survival. Natural History, pp. 38-43.

Diamond, J. (2007) Easter Island Revisited, Science, v. 317, pp. 1692-1694.

Aimers, J.J. (2007) What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands, Journal Archaeological Research, v. 15, pp. 329-377.

Redman, C.L., Crumley, C.L., Hassan, F.A., Hole, F., Morais, J., Riedel, F., Scarborough, V.L., Tainter, J.A., Turchin, P., and Yasuda, Y. (2007) Group Report: Millennial Perspectives on the Dynamic Interaction of Climate, People, and Resources, pp. 115-148 in Costanza, R., Graumlich, L.J., and Steffen, W. (Editors), Sustainability or Collapse: An Integrated History and Future of People On Earth. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Diamond, J. (2009) Archaeology: Maya, Khmer and Inca. Nature, v. 461, pp. 479-480.

Population rises often required intensification of farmland, which, if successful, allowed for further increases of population. For those who have followed the academic debates over a Boserupian versus Malthusian relationship between population and agriculture, it seems that both processes occur in a mutually positive feedback loop. Decreasing crop varieties also negatively impacted the resilience of the agricultural societies (Rhoades, R. (1992, April) The World’s Food Supply at Risk. National Geographic. P. 75-105.)

 [ii] Tainter (1988).

[iii] Good and Reuveny (2009), Middleton (2012)).

Good, D.H, and Reuveny, R. (2009) On the Collapse of Historical Civilizations. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, v. 91(4), pp. 863-879.

[iv] Hughes (1975, 2001), Olson (1981), Ponting (1991), Diamond (2005), Homer-Dixon (2006), Diamond (2005), Scarborough (2007).

Olson, G. W. (1981) Archeology: Lessons on Future Soil Use. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, v. 36(5), pp. 261-264.

[v] Tainter (1988), Diamond (2005), Childs (2007), Butzer (2012).

Childs, C. (2007) On the Trail of the Ancestors. Natural History, v. 116(2), pp. 58-63.

[vi] Tainter (1988), Weiss et al. (1993), Redman (1999), Weiss and Bradley (2001), Diamond (2005, April), Lawler (2007), Redman et al. (2007), Butzer (2012), Giosan et al. (2012), Medina-Elizalde and Rohling (2012), Middleton (2012). Some dispute a megadrought hypothesis for the Classic Maya collapse, given the many endogenous and exogenous factors affecting Mayan civilization; that drought conditions hit different Mayan states at different times; and that each state experienced unique demographic and sociopolitical changes (Middleton, 2012).

Weiss, H., Courty, M.A., Wetterstrom, W., Guichard, F., Senior, L., Meadow, R., and Curnow, A. (1993) The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization, Science, v. 261, pp. 995-1004.

 Redman, C.L. (1999) Human Impact on Ancient Environments. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.

 Weiss, H., and Bradley, R.S. (2001) What Drives Societal Collapse? Science, v. 291, pp. 609-610.

 Diamond, J. (2005, April) Collapse: Ecological Lessons in Survival. Natural History, pp. 38-43.

Lawler, A. (2007) Climate Spurred Later Indus Decline. Science, v. 316, pp. 978-979.

Giosan, L., Clift, P.D., Macklin, M.G., Fuller, D.Q., Constantinescu, S., Durcan, J.A., Stevens, T., Duller, G.A.T., Tabrez, A.R., Gangal, K., Adhikari, R., Alizai, A., Filip, F., Sam VanLaningham, S., and Syvitski, J.P.M. (2012, May 29) Fluvial Landscapes of the Harappan Civilization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

 Medina-Elizalde, M. and Rohling, E. J. (2012) Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization Related to Modest Reduction in Precipitation, Science, v. 335, pp. 956-959.

Winner, C. (2012) Climate Change Spurred Fall of Ancient Culture. Oceanus Magazine. Available at https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/LiviuIndia. Accessed November 4, 2013.