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After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies

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After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies edited by Glenn M. Schwartz, John J. Nichols (University of Arizona Press) From the Euphrates Valley to the southern Peruvian Andes, early complex societies have risen and fallen, but in some cases they have also been reborn. Prior archaeological investigation of these societies has focused primarily on emergence and collapse. After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies is the first book-length work to examine the question of how and why early complex urban societies have reappeared after periods of decentralization and collapse.
Ranging widely across the Near East, the Aegean, East Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, these cross-cultural studies expand our understanding of social evolution by examining how societies were transformed during the period of radical change now termed "collapse." They seek to discover how societal complexity reemerged, how second-generation states formed, and how these re-emergent states resembled or differed from the complex societies that preceded them.
The contributors draw on material culture as well as textual and ethnohistoric data to consider such factors as preexistent institutions, structures, and ideologies that are influential in regeneration; economic and political resilience; the role of social mobility, marginal groups, and peripheries; and ethnic change. In addition to presenting a number of theoretical viewpoints, the contributors also propose reasons why regeneration sometimes does not occur after collapse. A concluding contribution by Norman Yoffee provides a critical exegesis of "collapse" and highlights important patterns found in the case histories related to peripheral regions and secondary elites, and to the ideology of statecraft.
After Collapse blazes new research trails in both archaeology and the study of social change, demonstrating that the archaeological record often offers more clues to the "dark ages" that precede regeneration than do text-based studies. It opens up a new window on the past by shifting the focus away from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to their often more telling fall and rise.
It's been eighteen years since the anno mirabile of 1988, when Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies and George Cowgill's and my edited volume, The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, appeared. These studies have resonated in archaeological theory, since they emphasized that social change was not simply a process of mutually supportive interactions that produced an irreversible succession of levels of holistic integration. They challenged views that human social systems inherently tend to persist or expand and required that levels be broken down into social groupings of partly overlapping and partly opposing fields of action that lend the possibility of instability as well as stability to overarching social institutions. Collapse studies also call attention to what happens after collapse, since collapse seldom connotes the death of a civilization as opposed to the end of a particular form of government. The studies of"regeneration" in this volume explicitly explore issues of what happens beyond collapse.
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. For example, Steven Falconer and Stephen Savage (1995) have argued that Syria/Palestine in the Middle Bronze Age was a "heartland of villages," and Lisa Cooper in this volume (chapter 2) presents the variations on this theme. 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 complexsocial 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, and there is an important example of this principle in one of the chapters in this volume (by Kenny Sims). I also must note that if collapse can be multidirectional, resulting in both more- and less-complex societies, it is simply a species of social change that must be investigated in its appropriate larger temporal and spatial sequences. Logically, then, regeneration--meaning the return to a condition (albeit with significant adjustments) after a collapse--is not necessarily a new category of research or theory, but a more focused attention on a kind of social change.
Comparative studies of social phenomena need to ensure that the comparisons, especially the scale of the social units being compared, are useful. There is no point in comparing the rise, abandonment or partial abandonment, and rise again of particular sites with whole regions or states or civilizations.

The title of "After Collapse" suggests a companion volume to Jared Diamonds "Collapse", a well constructed and fascinating book with both an overview and particular examples of the fatal problems of societies. Alas, After the Collapse is an edited collection of individual essays with no more construction or broad views than a collection of poster displays at a scientific meeting. A few are interesting, but I regret having bought the book.

The book, an edited work, seeks to address a gap in scholarship, to wit, where others have covered why and how complex societies have collapsed, there is vitually nothing on how some, not all, regenerate. The editors do point out that most collapses are not total, and something is left (see my review of The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) for a more nuanced review of this matter). It fails to go the full distance possible.

The combined authors posit a cycle of growth, collapse, and regeneration between ruralism and local autonomy, and urbanization with centralization of control.

In an excellent but not quite complete summary of the causes of collapse, the editors outline the following:

1. Fragmentation into smaller political entities
2. Partial or complete desertion of urban centers
3. Loss or depletion of centalizing functions
4. Breakdown of regional economic systems
5. Failure of civilization's ideology

They do not mention the latest and best explanation, that the more complex a society becomes, the more expensive it is to make incremental improvements in management, and the unaffordability of the always increasing cost for each always decreasingly effective improvement ultimately leads to implosion (see Collapse as linked above).

They do however mention in passing that large-scale inegalitarian systems tend to collapse over time--they are unsustainable. This tallies nicely with Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People while also contrasting with the literature on the The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization, and so on.

The authors are somewhat narrow in focusing on prior structures of rule, authority, and governability. One puts this book down with the impression it was a first date between a political scientist and an anthropologist, and they fell into psycho-babble as a neutral common ground. See my loaded image, with the full thesis at my web site under my photo/Early Papers.

An isolated but interesting observation on how state control of time and space (e.g. Daylight Savings Time, or in the US the more recent and most unwelcome additional hour of time change) are part of mind control, was worthy of note--just a the power of the state to define crime and insantity leaves us with a The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, legalized corporate greed, and a mendacious Vice President who has committed 25 impeachable offenses and yet carries on with impunity (see Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

The conclusion, in two parts, consists largely of psycho-babble (the first part), and a very fine second part, much more interesting for its applicability to our time, that posits that when a centralized government goes too far in overseas adventurism, this opens the way for the provinces to secede and become autonomous again. I note that we have 27 secessionist movements in the USA, and they are having their second annual meeting in October of this year. I for one feel that there is no one now running, including Ron Paul, that understands that the secessionists, not the "party base" are the ones we should be listening to, for they are the only ones that see clearly that the Republic is no more.

To save the Republic, we must destroy two things and create one thing:

1. Destroy the Democratic and Republican parties (see Running on Empty: Contemplative Spirituality for Overachievers) and
2. Destory the unbound Executive and the abdicated Congress
3. Create a transpartisan ticket that demands electoral reform prior to 2008 and provides both a Sunshine Cabinet with integrated policies announced in advance, and a sustainable balanced budget that eliminates all personal income taxes while taxing the Federal Reserve for local, state, and federal revenues.

We need to make every budget transparent, and to publish every budget in time for citizen participation in the evaluation of every trade-off. We do this, or the United States of America is destroyed, courtesy of Wall Street, the Bush Family, the Saudis, and Dick Cheney.

This is a useful book, but only an elementary start. The authors are all well-positioned to go on now to the next level. See also the various books on surviving the The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.