1
Introducing collapse
Guy D. Middleton
R eaders of this volume should be aware that there are many
different ideas of what ‘collapse’ means, as well as theories
about what caused any given collapse (see e.g. Middleton
2017a; Storey and Storey 2018). This short review aims to
provide an introduction to some of these ideas and related
concepts, so that readers may weigh up the evidence pre-
sented in the volume and place it in what they feel to be an
appropriate context.
Wh at i s c ol l ap se ?
It has been suggested that arguments about collapse, its nature
and causes, often stem from different understandings of what
is meant by the term and what it is applied to (Demarest
2001; Middleton 2017b; Tainter 2006). Schwartz (2006, 5–6)
gives a useful summary of what many archaeologists have
in mind: ‘the fragmentation of states into smaller political
entities; the partial abandonment or complete desertion
of urban centres, along with the loss or depletion of their
centralizing functions; the breakdown of regional economic
systems; and the failure of civilizational ideologies.’ These
are all potentially detectable by archaeologists through
changes in material culture and without historical evidence.
Inevitably, though, a lack of historical evidence means that
narratives of prehistoric collapses are difficult to construct
and will tend to lack securely identifiable actors and events.
This can increase the tendency for overly neat, simplistic
or deterministic explanations (such as ‘megadrought’) to be
proposed and found plausible.
Some authors on collapse have focussed on population
or the environment – in combination, overpopulation and
environmental damage, or climate change, caused apoca-
lyptic collapse, which was characterised in particular by
population loss – a neo-Malthusian ‘overshoot’ model.
Diamond thus states that collapse is ‘a drastic decrease in
human population size and/or political/economic/social
complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended
time’. Post-collapse periods are then seen as times of
environmental regeneration and low population (Chew
2005; R edman and Kinzig 2003).
However, this overshoot model and Diamond’s approach
to collapse have been found wanting by Tainter (2006) and
others (McAnany and Yoffee 2014; Middleton 2012). The
apocalyptic view of collapse – hundreds or thousands dying
in a nightmare scenario of chaos and violence – is not what
most archaeologists have in mind when they discuss the
subject, even though in a number of examples declining
population is thought to have accompanied or resulted from
collapse. Poverty too can explain the decreased visibility of
parts of the population, or why people ‘disappear’ (in some
cases, the poorer sections of the population may never have
been visible in the first place). elevant to note here is that
the massive population loss caused by the Black Death
in Europe did not cause any states to collapse, nor did
either the Athenian plague of the late fifth century BC or
the Justinianic plague of the sixth century AD bring about
Athenian or eastern R oman collapse.
A bogey word in collapse studies is ‘civilisation’, on
which Yoffee and Cowgill, and the other authors in their
1988 volume, provide useful guidance. Both Yoffee (1988)
and Cowgill (1988) suggest separating consideration of
states, or political units, which can and do collapse, from
civilisations or ‘great traditions’, which do not. Civilisations,
if the word must be used, are distinct constellations of
material and non-material ‘phenomena’, constantly trans-
forming, and the collapse of political states embedded in
them usually – and unsurprisingly – involves some visible
changes to the civilisation, especially in elite material culture
2 Guy D. Middleton

and practices. Cowgill (1988, 256) also argues that neither
the term collapse or fall should be used to describe the
political fragmentations of states or empires into smaller
parts, because there might be no reduction in complexity
in those parts. In practice this is what the term is usually
used for, though, but Cowgill’s point about complexity in
the remaining parts should be held in mind.
We can consider the changing material, and political and
social culture of the R oman R epublic and Empire over cen-
turies as a clear example of ‘civilisational’ transformation;
when the last western emperor died, the western Empire fell
and was succeeded by ‘barbarian’ kingdoms and post-R o-
man enclaves; it was the collapse of a political unit. In this
instance, material culture and established traditions did not
come to an abrupt end, despite significant economic and
material repercussions from the events around the collapse
(compare Brown 1971 and Ward-Perkins 2005). The Hittite
collapse too was political, but much of established elite
Hittite culture continued in the Neo-Hittite kingdoms, if
not in the old Hittite heartland (the capital Hattusa having
been gradually abandoned – what happened to the king
and inhabitants is unknown). The Classic Maya collapse
involved the end of many independent city-states at different
times (the end of royal lines and the abandonment (total or
partial) of urban areas) within the three-century Terminal
Classic period, with a long transformation in the totality
of Maya material culture observable between, say AD 800
and 1100. Neither the Maya nor their culture disappeared.
A political collapse, the collapse or failure of a state, whilst
certainly having knock-on effects, need not result in an all-
out loss of culture and traditions, or a sudden mass die-off
of people (Middleton 2017b).
More widely referred to in the archaeological literature,
though not always followed, is the definition of ainter in
his classic work on collapse (Tainter 1988). He suggested
that collapse is when a society displays a rapid, significant
loss of an established level of socio-political complexity’
(Tainter 1988, 4). In this clear and helpful view collapse is
a political process in which a society becomes less complex
and its hierarchy and parts are reduced. his simplification
may also affect other aspects of life, such as the ability
of a power to organise groups, a reduction in the level of
investment in monumental architecture and art, a reduction
in socio-economic differentiation, stratification, and gen-
eral stability, and may result in the appearance of smaller
post-collapse polities. As for causes, Tainter (1988, 38)
adopts an economic perspective; he argued that ‘declining
marginal returns’ were key – an increase in complexity to
solve problems at some point stopped paying off, leaving
structures to decomplexify over perhaps two or three dec-
ades. Issues that arises here concern the role of people and
events in collapse – how did a process of simplification
actually play out ‘on the ground’?
Tainter’s views owe something to R enfrew (1984, 367–
369), who provided an outline of the features of ‘system
collapse’. These are worth reproducing in full (in Table 1.1),

a le eatures o colla se identified y en re

General features of system collapse
1 Collapse of central administrative organisation a) Disappearance or reduction in number of levels of central place hierarchy.
of the early state
2 Disappearance of the traditional elite class
3 Collapse of centralised economy
b) Complete fragmentation or disappearance of military organisation into (at most)
small, independent units.
c) Abandonment of palaces and central storage facilities.
d) Eclipse of temples as major religious centres (often with their survival, modified,
as local shrines.
e) Effective loss of literacy for secular and religious purposes.
f) Abandonment of public building works.
a) Cessation of rich, traditional burials (although different forms of rich burials
frequently emerge after a couple of centuries).
b) Abandonment of rich residences, or their re-use in impoverished style by
‘squatters’.
c) Cessation in the use of costly assemblages of luxury goods, although individual
items may survive.
a) Cessation of large-scale redistribution or market exchange.
b) Coinage (where applicable) no longer issued or exchanged commercially,
although individual pieces survive as valuables.
c) External trade very markedly reduced, and traditional trade routes disappear.
d) Volume of internal trade markedly reduced.
e) Cessation of craft-specialist manufacture.
f) Cessation of specialised or organised agricultural production with agriculture
instead on a local homestead’ basis with diversified crop spectrum and mixed
farming.

Continued
 1. Introducing collapse 3

a le Continued
4 Settlement shift and population decline a) Abandonment of many settlements.
b) Shift to dispersed pattern of smaller settlements.
c) requent subsequent choice of defensible locations – the flight to the hills’.
d) Marked reduction in population density.
Aftermath
5 Transition to lower (cf. ‘earlier’) level of a) Emergence of segmentary societies showing analogies with those seen centuries
socio-political integration or millennia earlier in the ‘formative’ level in the same area (only later do these
reach a chiefdom or florescent’ level of development).
b) Fission of realm to smaller territories, whose boundaries may relate to those
of earlier polities.
c) Possible peripheral survival of some highly organised communities still retaining
several organisational features of the collapsed state.
d) Survival of religious elements as ‘folk’ cults and beliefs.
e) Craft production at local level with ‘peasant’ imitations of former specialist
products (e.g. in pottery).
f) Local movements of small population groups resulting from the breakdown in
order at the collapse of the central administration (either with or without some
language change), leading to destruction of many settlements.
g) apid subsequent regeneration of chiefdom or even state society, partly influenced
by the remains of its predecessor.
6 Development of romantic Dark Age myth a) Attempt by new power groups to establish legitimacy in historical terms with the
creation of genealogies either (i) seeking to find a link with the autochthonous’
former state or (ii) relating the deeds by which the ‘invaders’ achieved power
by force of arms.
b) Tendency among early chroniclers to personalise historical explanation, so
that change is assigned to individual deeds, battles, and invasions, and often to
attribute the decline to hostile powers outside the state territories.
c) Some confusion in legend and story between the Golden Age of the early van-
ished civilisation and the Heroic Age of its immediate aftermath.
d) Paucity of archaeological evidence after collapse compared with that for
preceding period (arising from loss of literacy and abandonment or diminution
of urban centres).
e) endency among historians to accept as evidence traditional narratives first set
down in writing some centuries after the collapse.
f) Slow development of Dark Age archaeology, hampered both by the preceding
item and by focus on the larger and more obvious central place sites of the
vanished state.
Diachronic aspects
7 The collapse may take around 100 years for completion (although in the prov-
inces of an empire, the withdrawal of central imperial authority can have more
rapid effects).
8 Dislocations are evident in the earlier part of that period, the underlying factors
finding expression in human conflicts – wars, destructions, and so on.
9 Boundary maintenance may show signs of weakness during this time, so that outside
pressures leave traces in the historical record.
10 The growth curve for many variables in the system (including population, exchange,
agricultural activity) may take the truncated sigmoid form.
11 Absence of a single, obvious ‘cause’ for the collapse.

not least because they are in great part influenced by the
circumstances of the Mycenaean collapse and Early Iron Age
Greece (R enfrew 1984, 367). In R enfrew’s view, collapse
could take around a century to fully complete, and would
affect the political, social, and economic worlds as well as
population and settlement. It would be followed by a dark
age that displayed elements of continuity and that was at
least partly constructed by post-collapse origin myths and
the tastes of modern archaeologists. The collapse would not
have an obvious cause.
More recent contributions have produced somewhat
different or extended definitions, owing something to the
4 Guy D. Middleton
development of the archaeological and wider discourses of
collapse (Middleton 2017a). Johnson (2017), for example,
dislikes the term ‘collapse’:
What archaeologists see as a collapse is usually just a tran-
sition to a different way of life … the idea of a rapid failure
of the systems on which a population depends is intriguing
but not an accurate way to describe what happens to most
complex societies … ‘Transition’ is a neutral term that
better conveys what happens … I use the term ‘collapse’ in
a general way, and in most cases I will avoid ambiguity by
qualifying what type of breakdown occurred.
This view contrasts strongly with the ‘traditional’ – or at least
‘popular’ – idea of collapse as a negative change or a terrible
catastrophe, though ‘just a transition’ perhaps underplays
the nature and significance of some of the changes we call
collapse, and their impacts on the people who lived through
those periods.
Storey and Storey (2017, 11–12) in their informative
comparative study of the collapse of the western R oman
Empire and the Classic Maya give both a more and less
formal explanation, which attempt to draw together the
variety of terms centring around collapse. Thus: decline =
‘things going to hell’; political fall = ‘when things go to
hell to the extent that major political institutions cease to
function’; collapse = ‘if things go so completely to hell that
the culture loses coherence and the major defining elements
and dimensions of that culture disappear’; and resilience
= ‘after collapse, there is a giving way to a new cultural
entity’. More formally they see collapse as:
a major disjuncture in the trajectory of a complex culture
(those commonly called ‘civilizations’); the political integra-
tion completely fails, and the Great Tradition (the assemblage
of material culture and reflected ideologies unique to that
culture) similarly comes to an end.
Unlike some of the authors mentioned above, this definition
suggests that ‘fall’ applies to political entities and ‘collapse’
should be seen as an end of cultural entities – civilisations.
In terms of timescale, there are also some differences of
opinion. For Tainter (1988), collapse is rapid, taking two
or three decades, but for R enfrew (1984) and Storey and
Storey (2017) it can take a century. Partly the problem with
this area is where to sketch in the beginning and end of any
collapse ‘event’. The western R oman collapse can be seen
in hindsight to have had its origins in the late fourth century
A and taken around a century to work out to its final end
(Heather 2005), although collapse was not inevitable and
the R oman Empire could have collapsed at many points
much earlier than it did (there were many instances of civil
war and successful and attempted secessions). The Classic
Maya collapse, so-called, took place across the course of the
Terminal Classic Period – three centuries. But in the latter
case, the collapse of individual Maya states could be very
rapid indeed – marked by conflict and the execution of royal
families. Arguably the collapse of individual Mycenaean
states could have been very rapid too, even if the collapse of
the palace states as a whole took place over several decades.
Given the difficulty in identifying neat boundaries to
collapse, it can be hard to detect clear beginnings of pro-
cesses of collapse, and so to isolate causes on multiple
levels. While tempting to try to recognise signs of ‘anxiety’,
‘crisis’, or ‘decline’, or at least ‘problems’ prior to collapse,
it is possible to fall foul of hindsight and teleology and
then to overlook the possibility of sudden and unexpected
collapse. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union at the time
it happened, came as a surprise, though was predicted in
a general sense (Aron 2011). Many ancient states were
frequently in a state of crisis, for one reason or another,
but clearly these crises did not always lead to collapse; this
suggests a key role for chance historical factors in collapse
(Bronson 1988; Kaufman 1988). There is an inescapable
‘fuzziness’ here, which makes the study of collapse and
causality particularly difficult.
C ol l ap s e – god or b ad ?
Collapse is often envisioned as ‘a bad thing’ – after all,
when businesses, ecosystems, or populations collapse, it
can well be. Scott (2017, 186) points out that collapse is
‘often understood to be a deplorable regression away from
a more civilized culture’. The apocalyptic turn in collapse
studies has been noted above; while not dominant, it lurks
ever present in the minds of many. It is also formalised in
some popular and authoritative views of collapse. Diamond
thus painted a gloomy and violent picture of the end of the
Norse settlements in Greenland, which he says was:
sudden rather than gentle, like the sudden collapse of the
Soviet Union [ the Eastern settlement was] like an over-
crowded lifeboat … famine and disease would have caused
a breakdown of respect for authority … starving people
would have poured into Gardar, and the outnumbered chiefs
and church officials could no longer prevent them from
slaughtering the last cattle and sheep … I picture the scene
as … like that in my home city of Los Angeles in 1992, at
the time of the so-called R odney King riots … thousands
of outraged people from poor neighbourhoods … spread
out to loot businesses and rich neighbourhoods (Diamond
2005, 271–273).
From a Dahlem workshop on sustainability and collapse
comes an affirmation of this view, in which oung and
Leemans (200 , 450), define collapse as a rate of change
to a system that ‘has negative effects on human welfare,
which, in the short term, are socially intolerable’. In the
archaeological literature, Storey and Storey (2017, 11–12)
add that the ‘process also entails human suffering on a large
 1. Introducing collapse
scale, largely through diminution of population, which almost
never means total disappearance of a population; but there is
significant loss of life and a smaller population left behind’.
Yet to characterise such ‘big’ events as the collapse of a
state as good or bad, or a state as a success or failure, is too
simplistic – and thus any very general portrayal is bound to
be partisan and to break down on close examination. Young
and Leemans’ statement is immediately problematic, given
that many people could and did live in socially intolerable
conditions in the heyday of a given state or empire (even in
the contemporary UK, nearly four million people in poverty
have used foodbanks; also consider in the ancient world
those at the bottom of the heap – slaves, prostitutes, and
the rural and urban poor). Scott (2017, 186) observes that
collapse does ‘not necessarily mean a decline in regional
population … in human health, well-being, or nutrition [ it]
may represent an improvement …’
Numerous authors have pointed out that past collapses
appear usually to affect a society’s elite much more than
its majority population of peasant or subsistence farmers,
and that at a lower level both populations and traditions
continue (e.g. R enfrew 1984; Tainter 1999; 2016; Scott
2017). Elites that were disempowered or on the losing side
would have experienced events as ‘bad’, such as the exe-
cuted rulers of Maya cities mentioned above (see Demarest
2014), yet for elites on the winning side, assuming conflict
of some kind to be a key part in many collapses, the out-
come may have been positive. For the majority there may
have been little change – or possibly a positive reduction
in taxes and duties owed to the rulers (although increased
instability and conflict could have negatively affected rural
life). Storey and Storey (2017, 54) suggest that the fact
that peasants survive is ‘unremarkable’, but this seems to
privilege the place of the elite in society and to downplay
the resilience of the majority – this resilience would seem
to suggest an important conclusion for modern complex
societies looking for lessons from history. With imperial
collapse, formerly ‘attached’ regions may have achieved
a cherished – and perhaps more practical – independence,
though in these cases it may still have been elites that
benefitted more than those still at the lower end of the
socio-economic spectrum (though if independence brought
about less conflict and exploitation, the benefits would
have been wider).
Collapse can be seen as a ‘reset’ of sorts, a situation in
which there were both winners and losers before, during
and after. For some change was a disaster, for some just
change, and for some things stayed largely the same. Given
that so many perspectives are possible and that multiple
‘accurate’ narratives can be constructed for any historical
event and the people living through them, those seeking to
characterise collapse or its consequences, or to add some
kind of qualitative dimension to their descriptions, must
proceed carefully.
5
C ol l ap s e , r e s i l i e n c e an d f r a gi l i t y
The concepts of resilience and the regeneration of complex
societies after collapse have both come to the fore in collapse
studies (e.g. Blanton 2010; Faulseit 2016; R edman 2005;
Schwartz and ichols 200 ). esilience has a specific mean-
ing drawn from ecology, which Walker and Salt (2006, xiii)
explain as ‘the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance
and still retain its basic function and structure’. R esilience
conceptualised as an adaptive cycle, expressed as a figure
. here are four phases in the cycle: exploitation (r), con-
servation ( ), release ( ), and reorganisation (a). Collapse
is seen as the release or phase, which is followed by
reorganisation (a). When multiple adaptive cycles are linked,
the term ‘panarchy’ is applied, represented as connected
figure eights’ (Gunderson and Holling 2002). hus repeated
and cyclical change – growth and collapse is imagined, in
something resembling a biological metaphor.
R esilience thinking is applied to population groups, to the
environment, and to cultures and societies as a whole and in
terms of parts (e.g. R edman and Kinzig, 2003). When using
the concept, it is helpful to be specific about what exactly it is
being applied to. Collapse would imply that a system (using
this word in a broad sense) as a whole was not resilient,
though some constituent parts of it and visible expressions
of it may have been. A population may be resilient through
collapse (i.e. a village, or region, or broader defined group)
in terms of continued biological survival, whilst abandoning
or rejecting elements of the former culture or system – in
which case that system (economic/ideological etc.) could be
said to be not resilient. To be less abstract, resilience can
refer, in an archaeological sense, to the themes of continuity
and change in all areas and a society or system as a whole.
However, it might be wondered how useful resilience
thinking is as a tool for understanding past collapse – or
non-collapse. Iannone argues that it can provide a common
language and set of concepts for communicating ideas
across disciplines, but this assumes many people will
be familiar with the terms and concepts (Iannone 2016,
130). He also observes that ‘not all systems pass through
the various phases of the adaptive cycle in the anticipated
order’ and ‘not all of the ideal characteristics of a particular
phase will be exhibited by a specific archaeological exam-
ple’, thus fitting an example into a resilience framework
can be ‘a matter of taste’ (Iannone 2016, 181, 204–205).
R esilience seems able to be used for both continuity
through and reorganisation (‘adaptation’) after collapse.
Thus, for this author at least, the concept of resilience
seems – beyond a common sense understanding of the
idea – somewhat problematic.
Fragility is another concept that has attracted recent
attention in relation to the formation, survival and collapse
of ancient states (Scott 2017; Yoffee 2019). Scott suggests
that early states can be seen as like multi-storey pyramids
built by children – the higher the rows of blocks rose, the
6 Guy D. Middleton
less stable and more prone to collapse the growing pyramid
was; ‘that it soon falls apart is hardly surprising’ (Scott
2017, 183–184). The blocks themselves were more resilient
than the larger structures they were incorporated into (see
also Kaufman 1988; Yoffee 2005, 135–136; Simon 1965).
Thus it is clear to see how smaller units could survive the
collapse of an overarching unit. States seen this way are
fragile, even those that endured for centuries, and here the
role of chance and the historically specific comes into play
(Kaufman 1988). Longevity is not necessarily the same
as stability – or strength, and, to borrow a phrase from
the financial sector, past performance is no guarantee of
future results’.
R e or gan i s at i on an d r e ge n e r at i on
The resilience cycle has a reorganisation phase following
the release phase, and a number of collapse scholars have
similarly identified both collapse and post-collapse periods
as periods of reorganisation and even regeneration. R enfrew
(1984) noted that collapse could result in the emergence of
simpler and smaller polities, which sometimes echoed those
found in earlier times and even followed earlier territorial
arrangements. He also identified the sometimes rapid regen-
eration, after a gap, of collapsed regions into chiefdoms or
even states. This view is followed by Storey and Storey
(2017, 11), who focused on the western R oman and Classic
Maya collapses:
The people (in most cases) survive, persist, and regenerate
into another complex society; usually there is a gap (large or
small) before re-establishment or re-integration of complexity
into a new political system with a new Great Tradition, which
is partly derivative of the old but also distinct.
Scott (2017, 186) agrees with R enfrew that ‘a “ collapse’”
at the centre is less likely to mean a dissolution of a culture
than its reformulation and decentralization’. Far from slip-
ping necessarily into savage, culturally barren and sparsely
populated dark ages, then, there is always continuity in some
form through collapse – often at a folk level, sometimes, in
part, at a cultural or even organisational level.
None of this is intended to downplay the severity of
events or obscure the magnitude of change in many identi-
fied collapses. Changes could be sudden and profound, but
in the big picture change can be seen as a normal part of the
ebb and flow of dynamic human socio-political organisations
and dominant ideologies. It must be remembered that people
were always, even when environmental factors may have
been key, the agents of collapse and transformation, even
though these could be the unintended, rather than planned,
consequences of actions and policies on many levels.
At an individual level, this means that there was no auto-
matic erasure of the past in the minds of those who lived
through collapse events – though certainly the memory and
representation of the past could be manipulated (the erasure
of the Bastille and symbols of the old regime in revolution-
ary France springs to mind). People made deliberate choices
to shape their worlds before, through and after collapse,
though naturally there were also constraints on action that
may have made the perpetuation or reconstruction of a
system difficult or impossible. Change over time meant
that each generation grew up in different circumstances,
with different realities, expectations, and desires, and so
we should not automatically expect or look for total con-
tinuity. In illiterate societies, the ‘real’ historical past may
have been easily lost. It is an open question as to why the
re-emergence of states in Greece after the Late Bronze Age
took so long to occur – some four-to-five centuries – but it
is wrong to devalue the intervening period as in some way
a failure and indeed to expect new states as some kind of
natural or inevitable outcome. If collapse involved a rejec-
tion of what came before, state regeneration may have been
deliberately avoided.
Eisenstadt (1988, 242) has commented succinctly that
‘the investigation of collapse in ancient states and civiliza-
tions really entails identifying the various kinds of social
reorganization in these types of societies and so viewing
collapse as part of the continuous process of boundary
reconstruction’. States were and are not ‘natural’ and were
not and are not necessarily the ‘best’ organisation for human
communities – they are certainly not the only forms. By
seeing states as entities that sometimes appear in the flow
of human history, we remove the necessity to consider
collapse as either an aberration or something with a moral
value. Collapse can itself be reorganisation and adaptation,
and post-collapse periods too can see different forms of
organisation appear.
C on c l u s i on
This short discussion has highlighted some of the key areas
of thinking on collapse and associated terms and concepts.
It has considered what collapse is – to different scholars,
whether collapse is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and has introduced the
ideas of resilience, fragility, reorganisation, and regeneration.
It is necessarily brief and many of the issues raised could
be explored in much more depth and nuance. Nevertheless,
it should serve as something of an introduction to collapse
and provide some context to the evidence presented in the
rest of the volume.
A c k n ow l e d gm e n ts
I thank Norman Yoffee for alerting me to the publication of
his new and important edited volume on fragility (Yoffee
2019), which clearly bears on the issue of the collapse of
ancient states.
 1. Introducing collapse 7

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