How do archaeologists study societal changes in general? What about so-called collapses in particular?
This is part two of a multi-part series that will highlight archaeological research into how and why societies dramatically change, and what that tells us about societies both past and present.
What causes societies to dramatically change?
Human societies grow and change over time due to all sorts of factors ranging from the highest-level policies of modern governing systems to the smallest decisions made by individuals in farming villages during the Neolithic. The direct and indirect effects each of these factors has on the shape of sociocultural evolution is not always clear though. This is even the case with modern societies equipped with advanced measurement tools, scientific theories, etc.
Archaeology is a discipline that is well-positioned to illuminate the different courses of change across societies due to its focus on long periods of time (i.e., the longue durée). With such a perspective of the past, we can observe extensive stretches of growth, transformation, disintegration, and so on.
Research on Early Social Complexity
Much archaeological research in the 20th century focused on the fluorescence and growth of complex societies. Little attention was paid to what happens after states and other complex societies form, resulting in minimal research on transformation and discontinuity. However, research on such transformations has shifted in recent decades.
“Collapse”
Dramatic societal changes—especially those that result in discontinuity—are now of particular interest to both researchers and the public. This recent shift has occurred in light of global challenges that currently threaten to upend institutions and ways of life that have persisted for centuries or more.
The specter of such dramatic changes to past societies, in particular, captures the imagination of many people today that are anxious about global climate change, environmental degradation, economic disenfranchisement, and more. In so doing, many liken our modern globalized society to those of the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, the Maya, or the Roman Empire—and the perceived collapse of those complex societies.
Modern Anxieties about Societal Change
This modern anxiety and the notion of grand societal collapses hugely motivate both the scholarly and popular interest in this subject today. Despite this global concern about institutional or economic collapse, and the efforts of many researchers to explore the causes underlying such dramatic changes, both the public and policymakers are chiefly confronted by popular narratives that present oversimplified or downright fallacious causal mechanisms for change, such as Jared Diamond’s popular volume on collapse.
Gaps in Archaeological Approaches
In this same vein, much of the archaeological research on this subject has continually focused on specific stressors (e.g., drought, invasion, and economic disruptions) as the direct or sole causes for dramatic changes in past societies (e.g., Cline 2015, Hoggarth et al. 2017). Such explanations fail to explain why a drought would necessarily result in dramatic changes, especially in light of cases where societies have persisted or even flourished when faced with such stressors. They don’t take into account the resilience or vulnerability of a society to such stressors.
Examples of commonly-referenced stressors:
- Depletion or cessation of a vital resource
- The establishment of a new resource base
- The occurrence of some insurmountable catastrophe
- Intruders or invaders
- Economic factors
- A combination of several stressors
If anthropologists want to understand the mechanisms that truly influence dramatic changes in past and present societies, then this frequent focus on stressors as the main or most important causes of dramatic change is problematic.
The Last Straw
That is not to say that stressors are unimportant when it comes to processes of societal change, only that they are at most proximate causes. These proximate causes mirror the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” and only raises the question: Why was that society unable to overcome that stressor—or metaphorically—Why was the camel unable to withstand that single straw?
This approach can also be problematic since it is impossible for any society to anticipate or avoid all stressors. In the end, an emphasis on stressors typically occurs at the expense of grasping the underlying factors that structure and give context to events and the societal responses to them.
Is there more to it?
Numerous social, political, and economic traits of a society emerge from collective human behaviors. These traits, in turn, mediate societal responses to stressors—after all, humans are not passive observers, nor are their cultures monolithic. This complexity does pose a significant theoretical challenge to understanding the effects of various societal traits. However, research into how and why societies vary and change must delve into these deeper causes, rather than be satisfied by proximate causes.
Fortunately, anthropological and ecological perspectives allow us to focus on how humans (and the societies they construct) perceive and react to factors like climate change in fundamentally social ways. Instead of: What went wrong? The question becomes: How and why do underlying social and ecological traits affect societal resilience?
To that end, the next post in this series will examine how and why such environmental and social characteristics affect the resilience of societies, with the ultimate goal being to reveal deeper causes of dramatic societal change.
Have a question or comment on anything mentioned here? Leave a comment and let’s carry on the discussion!