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1 The Concept of Slow Collapse
Societies collapse when their political systems either fail or change dramatically, and the “Great Traditions,” the panoply of cultural features that uniquely characterize them, also fail, or change drastically. The Roman Empire and the Classic Maya have both long been regarded as the best examples of societies that have collapsed. They are still discussed, both by academics and the general public, because no one has ever definitively explained why both collapsed. We offer here our own attempt at explanation. However, numerous scholars of both cultures now explicitly deny that either of them collapsed. We disagree with that assessment, but our argument is that, due to the inherent inertia of cultural change in large and complex cultural systems – such were the Romans and the Maya – collapse takes a long time, a period of anywhere from a couple to several centuries. This “slow” collapse explains why it is possible to deny that there has been a collapse at all, and why the process whereby a complex culture, that changes into a different form and recovers from collapse to highlight human resilience and continuing cultural complexity, can look and feel more like a transition or transformation. In essence, the concept of slow collapse is intended to reconcile the arguments of those who favor transition and those who favor collapse.
It seems characteristic of complex societies that some members think that things are always “going to hell.” This outlook appears to have been first articulated in the west by the Greek poet Hesiod. Ever since, and probably before, the idea became current, at numerous times and in numerous complex states, that things in one’s culture were getting progressively worse. One was always living during a time of decline from an always better past. Hesiod set the pattern by characterizing that past time as a Golden Age. At different times in their history, individual Romans thought that their culture had declined from its past Golden Age: Cato the Elder and Younger, Sallust, Tacitus, Pliny the Elder and Younger, all either explicitly or implicitly characterized their own times as flawed or failing. Yet none of those authors really thought the Roman way of life was going to collapse.
Europeans, claiming a Roman heritage, adopted this ancient habit of decrying their own time as inferior to a past Golden Age. Edward Gibbon (1932[1776–1788]), who at times thought and behaved as if he were the last of the Romans, promulgated the evocative phrase “Decline and Fall,” which provided up to that time the strongest version of this outlook and has since saddled the systematic study of how cultures develop (the branch of study we call cultural or social evolution in anthropology) with the belief that everything must, eventually and inevitably, fall apart, in the same way that organisms are born, develop, live, and die.
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We believe the reason why this outlook is so common in complex societies can be explained thanks to Tainter (2010). People in complex societies have a natural bias toward complexity because they have internalized a “progressivist framework” (Tainter 2010: 710). We humans believe that our complex society is the best because it provides such a wealth of possibilities in life. It follows then that to lose this complexity must be a bad thing. When a culture collapses and loses this complexity, it is a form of failure. Our two cases have been considered to fit this description of failure via loss of complexity and richness of life. Tainter laments that even professionals are guilty of furthering this biased view by use of progressivist terminology: rise, decline, dark ages, florescence, classic, postclassic, and terminal classic (Tainter 2013).
As many scholars have come to notice recently (we credit Romanists with contributing), that outlook is just not necessarily factually true; things are not always “going to hell.” This newer outlook has sometimes even declared that nothing has ever gone to hell, arguing that commonly used progressivist terms should be thrown out. This viewpoint advocates the use of preferred terms such as “change,” “transition,” “transformation,” or “resilience.” This is accompanied by the assertion that “decline,” “fall,” or “collapse” are biased and full of preconception, and so no longer acceptable. However, as Middleton (2012: 263–264) correctly pointed out, none of the alternative terms are free of bias and without preconceived baggage either. As Tainter put it (2013), as much as we wish there were alternatives to the terms used, there are none, so each investigator must define clearly what he or she means by their use of the terms.
In this chapter, we define our terms. Let us start with rough definitions that seem to be understood by everyone: “Things going to hell” is “decline,” and when things go to hell to the extent that major political institutions cease to function, that is a “[political] fall.” And if things go so completely to hell that the culture loses coherence and the major defining elements and dimensions of that culture disappear, we have a “collapse.” After this collapse, there is a giving way to a new cultural entity, which is the usual outcome, and represents the “resilience” very characteristic of human cultural evolution. Our working definition includes the new additional qualifier that most times this has happened, it has been a slow collapse.
We define collapse as:
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Our definition of slow collapse uses several concepts needing clarification. Let us start with culture. Notably, anthropologists have never agreed on a single definition of culture. But our definition is a standard anthropological one: “the taken-for-granted notions, rules, moralities, and behaviors within a social group” (Welsch and Vivanco 2015: 10). Cultures are social groups whose shared and learned symbols, values, norms and traditions are expressed through social institutions. Cultures are dynamic, always having to adapt and make changes. Although meant to reflect this characterization of living cultural entities, the archaeological definition of a “culture” sometimes comes across as static.
We recognize that cultures such as “the Romans” and “the Maya” were dynamic and not simply homogenous, unchanging, fixed groups lasting for the couple of thousand years they both existed in antiquity. However, their social institutions, encompassing political, economic, and material components, were sufficiently coherent that characterizing “the Romans” and “the Maya” as cultural groups is not illegitimate. Of course, membership in these cultural groups was fluid and identities were highly malleable; referring to “Romans” and “non-Romans” is a shorthand for heuristic purposes acknowledging the fluidity. A good illustration of heuristic use is how “Romanness” united Roman soldiers of diverse origins and ethnicities into behaving as “the Roman army” and as standard-bearers for Roman “civilization” (James 2014).
The Maya and the Romans, as well as most of the cited examples of collapse, conform to the anthropological definition of civilization. A civilization is a state-level society that possesses a distinctive Great Tradition expressed mostly in stylistic aspects of its surviving material culture. State-level society is to be understood in its anthropological sense as a socially stratified, hierarchically organized, class- or caste-based series of associations integrated chiefly through non-kin-based institutions characterized by a legalized monopoly of force wielded by the political authority (Fried 1967; Service 1975).
Our use of the concept of state-level society here calls for some comment on the issue of cultural or social evolution, because one recent analysis of social evolution argued that the entire construct of evolutionary thought in this context implies a belief in “progress,” so Tainter’s warning about the progressivist bias applies here as well (Pluciennik 2004). As with much criticism of cultural evolution, there is the feeling that our typologies put societies in illegitimately reified boxes that are stages that all societies have to go through to arrive at the best society, ours, civilization. That view does not sufficiently take into account the approach to cultural evolution expressed as multilinear evolution (Steward 1955). In its most up-to-date version, societies evolve in diverse ways and along diverse paths that are appropriate to their environmental and ecological context. How societies change need not be always directed “up” toward the progress of the state or civilization. We would define cultural evolution in this way; that there is no pre-determined path that all societies must follow; it is more like a house with different rooms that societies may enter, depart from, enter another, etc. in multilinear possibilities.
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Of course, there are variations in how we may treat all of these processes. Webster (2002) argued that there are many features of the Classic Maya that are not very much like other state-level societies. We agree, but still think that the Maya were a state because its settlement hierarchy shows sufficient diversity to warrant that designation. Pauketat (2007), in a major challenge to cultural and social evolutionary thinking, impugned the very notion of the chiefdom and many versions of evolutionary thinking only to (paradoxically) chide archaeologists for failing to consider Cahokia in North America as a state. Indeed, stadial thinking of this kind might not always be helpful (as Pluciennik 2004 emphasizes). However, it is our contention that one can do cultural evolutionary study without assuming the need for stages. It is a continuum of societal complexity that better characterizes the issue of societal change, about which there is little question regarding the complexity of our two case studies, even though they are not precisely comparable in regards to it.
Turning to the Great Tradition, it is the assemblage of material culture and reflected ideologies that are completely unique to that culture, and are almost never mistakenly attributed to another culture. We employ David Webster’s description of the Great Tradition:
(Webster 2002: 67)
Figure 1.1 shows what we mean. We have depictions of emperors, left to right, Nerva, the four emperors of the Tetrarchy, and Basil II. It is clear that the Great Tradition has evolved from the High Roman Empire to the Eastern Empire, to the Byzantine Empire. There is a disjuncture between Nerva/Tetrarchs and Basil – between the Roman images on the left, and the Byzantine image on the right, and possibly the Latin image on the left, and the two Greek images on the right. The Tetrarchs were originally from Constantinople, so, in the middle, they represent a transitional image, just as the empire started its long, slow collapse, yielding to its rejuvenation in the Byzantine Empire, whose denizens, after all, called themselves “Romans.” As we will explain in the concluding chapter, we do not accept that the Western Roman Empire fell in 476CE and the Eastern Roman Empire persisted until 1453. We think that the Roman Empire as a whole collapsed by the 8th century CE. As Moorhead put it (2001: 265): “The Byzantine Empire, whose territory had shrunk to less than a third of the size it had been after the conquests of Justinian, had become irrelevant.”
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As defined above, the Great Tradition, in virtually all ancient civilizations, represents elite concerns and creations, and not the outlook or lifeways of the mass of common people. Nonetheless, in complex cultures, elite elements generally wield disproportionate influence in directing the lives of everyone in a culture, elite and commoner alike. Inasmuch as these Great Tradition elements are expressed in both mental and material structures, and constitute the foundation of much of the administration and running of daily life, when these elite elements fail and dissipate, the overall quality of life is heavily disrupted and adversely affects the standard of living for the majority of that society’s inhabitants. That is simply the nature of complex societies. In the concluding chapter, we will assess the issue of quality of life in the aftermath of a transition or collapse of a major civilization. However, we emphasize that, in both our cases, demographic decline in the process of slow collapse almost certainly entails loss of life for all social classes on a significant scale, which must be characterized as a negative.
Slow collapse: contrary to popular notion, collapse might not be swift. It can take a long time for the Great Tradition of a culture to disappear, after a long period of loss of coherence of the cultural system (the decline, which observers think is the “going to hell”) and the ending of the political system, which may occur relatively quickly (political fall). Ward-Perkins (2001: 240) accurately characterized the Roman Empire: “as if ‘fall and decline,’ rather than ‘decline and fall’ is what occurred,” thereby reversing Gibbon. The political system fails first, as the Western Roman Empire fell in 476CE, and most lowland Maya sites stopped erecting long count-dated monuments in the 9th century CE. Decline occurs when the complexity of the cultural system, especially in terms of resource utilization and (ultimately) energy capture and consumption, begins to diminish and the physical infrastructure of construction gets simpler and simpler. To archaeologists, who deal in physical remains, the most notable of which are human constructions, the collapse of the Maya and the Romans is most clearly illustrated by the ceasing of common construction in massive stone buildings and the loss of material culture in the style of their respective Great Traditions.
We believe that in the case of large cultural systems, “slow” collapse takes centuries, as long as 200–400 years (Middleton 2012: 267 strongly implies periodicity that long). We offer here an anthropological analysis of how slow collapse seems to have applied to the Classic Maya Collapse, and the end of the Roman Empire. In fact, it can be fairly said that when people think about collapse of complex societies, these are the cases that most easily to come to mind.
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Someone might object that “slow collapse” sounds like another expression for “degeneration” which leads to the “fall” of civilization. A quick internet search shows that the concept of slow collapse garners the most “hits” currently when referring to the slow collapse of glaciers in the wake of anthropogenic global warming or in discussions of the laws of thermodynamics. We would argue ...
