Resilience and Revitalization After Collapse

* Book: Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies. Edited by Ronald K. Faulseit. Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

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Abstract

“The Maya. The Romans. The great dynasties of ancient China. It is generally believed that these once mighty empires eventually crumbled and disappeared. A recent trend in archaeology, however, focusing on what happened during and after the decline of once powerful societies has found social resilience and transformation instead of collapse. In Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies, editor Ronald K. Faulseit gathers scholars with diverse theoretical perspectives to present innovative approaches to understanding the decline and reorganization of complex societies.

Essays in the book are arranged into five sections. The first section addresses previous research on the subject of collapse and reorganization as well as recent and historic theoretical trends. In the second section, contributors look at collapse and resilience through the concepts of collective action, eventful archaeology, and resilience theory. The third section introduces critical analyses of the effectiveness of resilience theory as a heuristic tool for modeling the phenomena of collapse and resilience. In the fourth section, contributors examine long-term adaptive strategies employed by prehistoric societies to cope with stresses. Essays in the fifth section make connections to contemporary research on post-decline societies in a variety of time periods and geographic locations.”

Contents

1. Collapse, Resilience, and Transformation in Complex Societies: Modeling Trends and Understanding Diversity Ronald K. Faulseit

From the introduction:

A recent online article hosted by the British newspaper the Guardian (Ahmed 2014), highlighting “NASA-funded” research that predicts the imminent collapse of “industrial civilization,” underscores both the academic and popular interest in this subject. This is not a new phenomenon, as Gibbon’s (2010 [1776– 1788]) History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has maintained a high level of popularity through numerous reprints. Within the discipline of archaeology, the collapse of complex societies has been an important and sustained research focus for more than four decades (e.g., Butzer 2012; Culbert 1973; Demarest et al. 2004; Middleton 2012; Railey and Reycraft, eds. 2008; Tainter 1988; Webster 2002; Yoffee and Cowgill 1988). Conversely, concepts such as resilience, sustainability, and postcollapse reorganization have only recently gained widespread attention in the field (e.g., Hegmon et al. 1998; Nelson et al. 2006). In particular, Schwartz and Nichols’s (2006) volume After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies set the stage for expansion of the subject matter to address how societies reorganize after the decline of sociopolitical complexity. The field of archaeology has recently seen increased diversification in philosophical orientations and interpretive approaches, yielding a variety of alternative understandings for societal collapse, resilience, and reorganization (e.g., compare Storey and Storey with Hutson et al., current volume). As an unfortunate consequence of this diversification, the study of societal collapse is often contrasted 4 R. K. Faulseit against the study of societal resilience, based on the favored epistemological focus of the particular archaeologist. On the one hand, scholars seek to model comparative cross-cultural trends for collapse and reorganization, while, on the other, scholars seek to understand cultural diversity in particular complex societies. McAnany and Yoffee (2010:5), who prefer the latter approach, note that “studying collapse . . . [is] fine when viewed at a distance but dissolves into disconnected parts when examined up close.” Thus, they suggest that rather than focusing on how societies collapse, we should be focused on what makes them resilient. This is an unnecessary dichotomy, because collapse and resilience are part of the same phenomenon, and one cannot be studied without addressing the other. Rather than setting up these approaches as foils, it is important to accept that, in general, cross-cultural trends in prehistory are visible at large spatial and temporal scales, but cultural diversity becomes more apparent at the smaller scales. In this way, studies with varying theoretical approaches conducted at different scales should not be seen in contrast to one another but as complementary, providing a holistic understanding of these complex phenomena.

This volume builds on both the long-standing research on societal collapse and the recent focus on societal resilience by engaging concepts such as collapse, resilience, revitalization, and reorganization on various scales through novel and exciting theoretical frameworks. The subtitle for this introductory chapter, “Modeling Trends and Understanding Diversity,” derives from the effort to encourage contributions from authors who take a variety of theoretical approaches to interpreting their data sets. In this introductory chapter, I hope to demonstrate how the works in this volume build on previous research and combine to advance our understanding of complex societies. Definitions and Limitations Many scholars have identified and discussed the problems associated with developing a generally accepted nomenclature for the subject of this volume, i.e., defining terms such as collapse, resilience, reorganization, revitalization, and transformation (e.g., Cowgill 1988, 2012; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013; Middleton 2012; Railey and Reycraft, 2008; Tainter 2000).

In the second chapter of this introductory section, Joseph A. Tainter provides an extensive and in-depth treatment of this elusive task, highlighting the inherent professional and philosophical viewpoints and biases incurred over the very long history of study. I do not wish to rehash any of those arguments here but, rather, briefly discuss and perhaps tie together the use of three important terms as they specifically apply to the themes addressed in this volume: collapse, societal transformation, and resilience. Collapse Professional archaeologists have long eschewed the popular notions of societal collapse, which comprise the catastrophic and sometimes mysterious disappearance of an entire civilization or cultural tradition (e.g., Eisenstadt 1988; Collapse, Resilience...