This is part three of a multi-part series that highlights archaeological research into how and why societies dramatically change, and what that tells us about societies both past and present. This part is a bit longer that previous entries, since it lays the theoretical foundation necessary to interpret the data moving forward.

Social and Ecological Factors of Societies

As mentioned previously, certain anthropological and ecological frameworks allow us to focus on how humans (and the societies they construct) respond to issues like climate change. Those responses are complex but fundamentally social and ecological in nature, which can be challenging to disentangle. Fortunately, with the right theoretical perspectives, we can untangle how and why social and environmental characteristics affect the resilience of societies. This results in a deeper understanding of what causes dramatic societal change than just focusing on proximate stressors like a drought—the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Three characteristics in particular are thought to structure the course of societal change in various anthropological theories—environmental diversity, social connectivity, and sociopolitical organization (e.g., Adams 1974, Crumley 1995). These factors are also central to a body of theory in ecology and the study of complex adaptive systems more broadly: Resilience Theory.

Resilience Theory focuses on the interaction between these key social-ecological properties and how they shape resilience or vulnerability to stressors in a society, ecosystem, or other complex adaptive system.

Resilience Theory

This theory originated in ecology as a means to understand how the structure and function of ecosystems influence change within those systems. Since its inception in the 1970s, it has shifted from its original focus on ecosystems to now encompass social-ecological systems as a whole—because complex systems (including societies) behave in fundamentally similar ways, and societies are deeply interconnected with their environments.

  • Origins in Ecology during the 1970s
  • Explains how complex adaptive systems change over time
  • Shifts the focus from how individual stressors force changes in systems to the underlying characteristics affecting adaptability

It now provides a broader framework for understanding how all sorts of complex adaptive systems persist and change over time, and aligns well with an anthropological understanding of societal change. This shift of focus from individual stressors to the underlying state of societies undergoing change has led Resilience Theory to contribute to a growing literature on the dynamics of societal change in anthropology and related fields.

Anthropological Theories of Change

Equipped with this framework, more recent anthropological research has sought to explain not just which stressors may have precipitated societal change, but how exactly various social, political, and ecological characteristics of a society (like those outlined above) influence change. That’s because it is one thing to 1) look at societal changes, then 2) look at potential stressors that occurred around the same time as them, and then 3) assume a causal relationship. An example of this type of logic is: “There was climate change around the time of societal change, and climate change is intractable—therefore, climate change caused societal change.”

On the contrary, there are numerous historic and ethnographic examples where the onset of stressors actually prompted adaptive responses and resulted in societies flourishing. Several such cases were highlighted by Georgina Endfield in her work on colonial Mexico, where a combination of rich archival material and climate change at various timescales provided a rich case for analysis. She drew on these historical examples to explore how societies adaptively responded to stressors and avoided what earlier scholars perceived as a collapse (Endfield 2012).

One of these historical cases comes from the 1785-1786 “year of hunger” that followed extensive and consecutive droughts (Méndez and Magaña 2010). Despite the severity of this famine, it did not result in collapse. On the contrary, evidence suggests that many people responded with cooperative action within and across communities to adapt their way of life to the significant challenges (Endfield 2012).

Therefore, if one is to understand the causal mechanisms driving change, then it is more useful to explore factors related to resilience that underlie all societies and assess these characteristics leading up to societal change. A marriage of Resilience and anthropological theories provides a framework to do that.

What are these social, political, and ecological characteristics? How do they influence change on a societal scale?

Why would environmental diversity affect societal resilience?

The diversity of the environment a society occupies affects access to key ecosystem services, such as arable land, pasture, water, and other things required for subsistence of one form or another. By examining environmental variation, one gains insight into community subsistence strategies, degrees of diversity and self-sufficiency, and thus how vulnerable they are to disruptions. Theoretically, the richer and more varied a community’s local environment, the more resilient that community is to stressors. For example, diverse local environments should be associated with self-sufficiency and the ability to withstand occasional crop failures. After all, it’s generally not a good idea to keep all of one’s eggs in the same basket! It’s important to spread the risk around.

Why would social connectivity affect societal resilience?

The social connectivity of a society consists of the interrelations within and between communities—whether they are more or less intertwined with each other. The effect on resilience is, admittedly, less straightforward in this case. Theoretically, the more connected a community is with its neighbors, the more vulnerable it is to non-local stressors. For example, tight connections between communities could lead to interdependence and increased exposure to cascade effects from disturbances elsewhere in the network. Think along the lines of the domino effect in the financial system during the leadup to the Great Recession in 2008. Conversely though, social connectivity can also create a safety net where communities can tap into aid from others during periods of strain. In both cases, the resilience of a community is directly affected by its social connectivity!

Why would sociopolitical organization affect societal resilience?

Put another way, sociopolitical organization is the structure of decision-making power in a society. Are decisions made by leaders at the top of a power structure, far removed from the “conditions on the ground”? Or, are decisions made by those closest to the issues facing them? Maybe something in between? These factors affect how capable communities are to respond to their local needs as well as any external demands. Theoretically, the more hierarchical the organization, the more vulnerable a community would have been to most stressors due to its rigidity. For example, it’s expected that communities with more horizontally arranged decision-making power are associated with greater self-determination and therefore the ability to respond in a more agile way to disruptions in their local conditions. As with social connectivity though, there are exceptions. For example, certain stressors may require a community to mobilize more quickly than can be done in cases where consensus is required. Centralized decision-making power at the top of a hierarchy can respond more rapidly in such cases.

Taken together, how can these factors inform us of the resilience or vulnerability of a society, and thus how it can respond to stressors?

Empirical research has been done where 1) these properties were measured, 2) interactions between them observed, and 3) the hypothetical outcomes tested (based on the theoretical framework laid out above). The results, which will be detailed in a later part of this series, clearly indicate that each property (and specific combinations of them) are significantly related to documented changes within a variety of communities in the past—societal collapses in some cases, persistence in others.

What makes a society resilient?

We live in a globalized society that faces increasingly intense global challenges to social, economic, and political stability. Valid concerns about our vulnerability to these stressors permeate our culture. Archaeological and historical examples show us that societies can respond to such challenges in different ways, whether by building flexible institutions, adaptively transforming, or by doubling-down on preexisting strategies and structures. In every case, the outcome is not predetermined as these responses to crises are fundamentally social. Even the effects of dramatic climate change on any society are socially mediated—there are examples of societies flourishing in response to such challenges as well as those that have resulted in a so-called collapse.

If we are to address modern anxieties and overcome the enormous challenges facing us, we need to hone comprehensive models for societal resilience to identify the salient social-ecological dynamics of past societies that facilitate adaptations to a crisis. In this way, we can reveal strategies to bolster the resilience of our societies before it is too late.

With this theoretical framework in place, the next part of this series will address why the Ancient Near East (in general) and the Jezreel Valley (in particular) is a useful case for studying dramatic societal changes.

Have a question or comment on anything mentioned here? Leave a comment and let’s carry on the discussion!