Resilience Science

In Science (Jan 5 2007), Kathleen Morrison reviews After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies. The book sounds interesting. It is an edited volume focused of the neglected phases of reorganization and growth that have follow civilization collapse:

Glenn Schwartz’s introduction to After Collapse points out, however, not
all of these phases have been equally well studied. Studies of state
collapse and of the initial development of complex societies have
continued to be counted among the big questions of archaeology. Why the
regeneration of complex societies after episodes of collapse has not, to
date, been a major focus of research can be attributed to an
archaeological obsession with origins and in particular with “primary
states,” those six places where complex polities developed without prior
organizational models. The diffusionary logic that the idea of the state
was somehow a sufficient condition for the emergence of complex polities
has been long discredited, yet for some reason archaeological disregard
for so-called “secondary state formation” has continued. Not only do the
vast majority of cases of state development fall under this rubric, but
so do instances of regeneration after collapse. Hence, the reasons for
underanalysis of this important process are, if not clear, at least
explicable. What all this suggests is that the examples presented in
After Collapse have the potential to inform on processes of state
(re)formation more generally; addition of these important cases can only
add to our understanding of state generation as well as regeneration.

Schwartz notes that the study of state regeneration is, in large part, a
study of “dark ages,” a term that, besides encoding value judgments
developed under conditions of centralization, also refers to the paucity
of textual information for periods after collapse. The negative valences
of terms such as dark age and even collapse certainly reveal viewpoints
firmly invested in text-based history (no period is darker than any
other to an archaeologist) and in social hierarchy (what falls apart in
a collapse are often structures of inequality). Archaeology, however, is
well situated to address issues of change where texts disappear.

Here it is worth clarifying what contributors to this volume mean by
collapse. As Schwartz enumerates, collapse “entails some or all of the
following: the fragmentation of states into smaller political entities;
the partial abandonment or complete desertion of urban centers, along
with the loss or depletion of their centralizing functions; the
breakdown of regional economic systems; and the failure of
civilizational ideologies.” Note that this definition refers only to the
collapse of complex political structures and that death and destruction
are conspicuously absent. Although the focus of After Collapse is
decidedly on continuity and renewal, archaeological studies of collapse
itself have always recognized that civilizational traditions
and peoples rarely disappear.

What, then, causes state regeneration and how does it proceed? Are, as
Schwartz asks, such processes simply replays of earlier developmental
episodes? Or are new strategies and trajectories involved? One might
think, given the popularity of climate- and resource-oriented
explanations for collapse, that many scholars would place regeneration
at the feet of climatic amelioration or environmental regeneration.
However, with the exception of Ian Morris’s careful exposition of the
transitions from Mycenaean (Late Bronze Age) Greece through the Greek
Dark Ages and on to the Classical Period, contributors to this volume
have surprisingly little to say about environmental conditions. Perhaps
this is because the Greek case, like the Classic Maya, is an example of
what Bennet Bronson in this volume calls “genuine regeneration,” not
simply the shift of a political or economic center but a transformation
of the entire system. Indeed, the differences between Classical and
earlier periods are profound (with perhaps little more than the memory
of a lost heroic age linking them)–a shift even more substantial than
that seen in the Maya region, albeit one covering much longer periods of
time.

Contributors analyzing other regions (including Egypt, Peru, Cambodia,
and Bronze-Age Syria) favor either Bronson’s “stimulus regeneration,”
state building explicitly based on a hazily understood model distant in
space or time, or his “template regeneration,” a revival process based
on fully understood, well-recorded models, often states close to the
revived polity in space and time. Although both of these terms evoke the
language of early 20th-century diffusionism, they at least have the
advantage of stressing the ways in which regenerating polities make use
of existing models of and ideologies for systems of structured
inequality.

While After Collapse also asks when regeneration might not appear, the
volume presents only one such counterexample, Kenny Sims’s analysis of
the upper Moquegua Valley, Peru. There complex political forms failed to
regenerate after the fall of the Tiwanaku and Wari empires. Sims argues
that restriction of local residents to client status and, at best,
mid-level positions within the Wari administration left them without the
wherewithal to (re)generate a centralized state. The general enthusiasm
for Bronson’s memory and knowledge-oriented categories might reflect the
selection of cases themselves, few of which are examples of more radical
collapse, in which depopulation as well as deurbanization took place.

In many ways, both the strengths and weaknesses of After Collapse
reflect larger trends in archaeology. Contributors carefully consider
how, precisely, people managed (or failed) to regenerate a complex
polity after a political collapse, including some interesting
considerations of the ways in which collapse presented opportunities for
previously marginal elites to become the central players in regenerated
regimes. However, there is disappointingly little willingness to
consider why, specifically, complex polities (re)emerged–to address the
origins of the secondary state, to use the jargon. This is an important
question, with implications for state formation in innumerable cases,
well beyond the sample of collapsed polities. If, for example, as Lisa
Cooper, building on the arguments of Yoffee and Adams, suggests of
Bronze-Age Syria, village-based organization was actually more stable in
the long term than urbanism, then perhaps the formation of a complex
polity might itself constitute “collapse.” Such a perspective, suggested
only half-seriously in Yoffee’s closing remarks, might actually be
salutary in finally purging the discipline of its rise-and-fall
thinking. This could bring us one step closer to using the great
strength of archaeological research, its immense time depth, as a
serious guide for contemporary considerations of the sustainability and
continuity of civilizations in the face of rapidly changing natural and
social conditions.