Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Popular historians and non-fiction writers are partial to the concept of sudden social collapse, which they have used to explain the “disappearance” of such past civilizations as Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Classical-era Mayans, the Ancestral Puebloans, and even the Roman Empire. Many of us like the drama of rapid change, the pathos of social decline, and the ease of finding a moral lesson - beware of war, don’t mistreat the environment, obey your leaders - in a tale of decline and fall. Archaeologist Guy Middleton has recently reminded us that life and death, especially the life and death of an entire human society, are rarely so simple. Elements of a civilization can and do decline over time, but cultures can endure for centuries. Confusing the fall of a single powerful city or the overthrow of a small elite with the death of a whole civilization distorts the lived experience of most of that society’s people, and encourages us to adopt an elitist view of history.

Middleton’s particular specialty is the Mycenaean civilization, which ostensibly fell apart at the end of the Bronze Age. Middleton argues that much of Mycenaean culture (e.g. pottery, religious beliefs) survived the abandonment of its palace complexes in 1200 BCE, and finds little evidence of the kind of violence or resource exhaustion that might have caused a sudden collapse. The Mycenaeans instead abandoned a particular kind of political system, replacing the centralized palaces with smaller and more diffuse settlements, and their old semi-divine kings with the basileis of the early Hellenic era. What ended in 1200 was a polity, not a society. His description reminded me of the fate of the Ancestral Puebloans, whose Pueblo Indian descendants overthrew their priestly elite (ca. 1300 CE), stopped building large stone towns on the elite’s behalf, and moved into smaller but more numerous agricultural towns in the more fertile Rio Grande valley. In each case there was a period of political disruption and social change, but only the old elite and their latter-day sympathizers would see this as devolution.           

Calakmul, Classic-period Mayan city

The Mayans and Easter Islanders provide additional examples of the evolution-not-devolution model of cultural change. Fiction writers and television programs have generated much popular interest in the question “What happened to Mayan civilization?” Middleton's answer is both simple and surprising: it survived in one form or another until the Spanish destroyed the last city-state in 1697. States rose and fell in the Classical period (750-1050 CE), and drought or intra-elite violence led to the abandonment of some urban centers, but the post-Classical Mayans continued to build cities, write books, and engage in maritime trade well into the early modern period. Middleton has little patience for those who charge the Mayans with destroying themselves, and even less for writers like Jared Diamond who castigate the people of Rapa Nui for wrecking their environment and becoming a pack of starving, deracinated wretches. Historical evidence shows that indigenous Easter Islanders instead lived fairly rich and decent lives, maintaining a stable population and a sizable agricultural surplus well into the nineteenth century. The toppling of the island’s distinctive statues, or moai, occurred not in one spasmodic bout of desperate violence, but in a smaller series of conflicts over the course of 200 years. As with the Mayans, the destruction of Rapa Nui’s people came from outside forces, in particular the arrival of Euro-American slavers in the 1860s.   

Middleton’s insight can even be applied to the largest and most dramatic episode of civilizational collapse in historical literature, namely the fall of Rome. There is a good reason that the most famous historian of this process, Edward Gibbon, took 2,700 pages and fourteen years to chronicle “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:” Rome’s so-called collapse took nearly 1300 years from start to finish, a period spanning twenty human lifetimes and exceeding by a millennium the institutional lifespan of the United States. The Eastern Empire, home to the imperial capital and most of the old empire’s wealthy urban centers, did not end until midway through the Renaissance, while in the West a soi-disant Roman Empire held on until Napoleon’s time. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Roman civilization did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downward. Indeed, the Roman language and ecclesiastical bureaucracy (in the form of the Catholic Church) remain with us today. Slow change and cultural persistence make for a less exciting story than the sturm und drang of socio-political collapse, but they more accurately characterize the lives of far more people, rich and poor, famous and obscure, than war and ruination.  

(My thanks to John Barnes for linking to Middleton's fascinating article.)