In 1995, Jared Diamond wrote an article for Discover magazine that began:

In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?

Diamond expanded on his thesis ten years later, with the best-selling Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Many people concerned about resource depletion and overpopulation now think of Easter Island as a symbolic case study. Something about those statues, too, that seems to haunt us.

I have noted that Easter Island as a green parable and cautionary lesson

 appears to rest on scientifically shaky ground.

Mark Lynas discusses the latest evidence that calls the tale into question.

More recent archaeological work has now challenged almost every aspect of this conventional ‘ecocide’ narrative, most completely and damningly in a new book by the archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo entitled ‘The Statues That Walked’. Hunt and Lipo did not set out to challenge the conventional story: their initial studies were intended merely to confirm it by providing some greater archaeological detail. However, as they dug and analysed, things turned out very differently.

Moreover, Lynas suggests that we might be drawing the wrong lessons from the history of East Islanders, since the modern-day inhabitants aren’t doing so bad:

Perhaps the more recent studies of their history will help challenge the Hobbesian and pessimistic view that human nature necessarily tends towards destruction and violence. Resilience and sustainability are just as likely outcomes, even over the longer term.

There is no real solution to our predicament. Even if a cheap liquid fuel could be found in abundance tomorrow, at most what it would do would be move the problem down the road a little way. Population would continue to grow. Pollution would become a greater and greater issue. We would have more problems with fresh water. We would likely come to another limit, in not too many years.

This pessimistic outlook is oddly embraced by one of the writers at Ecological Sociology:

What I love most about Gail’s presentation is that she finally concludes that “there is no solution.” This is the conclusion I came to almost a year ago. When you put the whole ball of wax together, you have to face that fact that there really is no solution. That’s either a ‘bad thing’ or a ‘good thing’ depending on what is collapsing and whether you’re really invested in keeping it going. What is collapsing is globalized Capitalist civilization, and frankly, I’m not sorry to see it go.

This cavalier attitude really rubs me the wrong way. The dominant global economic order may well be poised to collapse, but wishing for it to happen strikes me as insensitive to the amount of suffering that would occur. And just out of curiosity, exactly what sort of (sustainable) economic system does this writer see rising from the ashes? [UPDATE: Shaun's response is here.]

Thankfully, a much less depressingly fatalistic view can be found over at the Oil Drum thread:

From what I see in urban Seattle, the generation of people in their 20′s and 30′s are developing a very different set of expectations than the generation before them. Younger people are driving smaller vehicles if not walking or biking, living in smaller spaces, delaying having children, renting instead of owning, spending their money on experiences and good food rather than consumer goods. It reminds me most of European urban living where a high quality of life requires a much lower level of consumption.

I’m not disagreeing with Gail’s premise at all. The current Business As Usual is not sustainable. What people often miss, however, is that there is a generational change underway and that the upcoming generation may not want or miss the current BAU.

In other, less well endowed countries there will undoubtedly be much misery in the years ahead (see Somalia today). But in the US at least, there are (and always have been) many ways to live within our still bountiful resources. It won’t necessarily look like what many people think of as ‘normal’ today. But for some of us it will be a very welcome change.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Indeed. It’s also better than waiting (expectantly) for the world to crumble all around you.

An even more overlooked problem is overpopulation (defined as living unsustainably, whether due to a high number of people at a low level of consumption or a smaller number of people at a high level of consumption – basic human ecology). In most or all of the Arab countries undergoing civil unrest, unemployment is rampant due to a rapidly expanding number of people flooding the job market. Also, the fraction of the population that are children is enormous, meaning the problem will get worse very soon. Expect more countries to undergo this process, continued unrest, failed states, wars, and terrorism. Smaller families would have prevented this a generation ago.

I think he’s conveniently overlooking the venal corruption and oppression of the regimes in those countries as a major factor, and making a faulty assumption about smaller families. No matter. Here’s his solution–and because it will come too late, the consequence to humanity:

Now it will take 1 – 2 generations at one child per family just to stop growth, and a century or two to bring population down to a sustainable level. We don’t have that much time before we hit the wall of climate change, inadequate resources, and mass extinction. That’s true worldwide: we need smaller families everywhere, and drastically reduced consumption in developed countries. Since that won’t happen, expect collapse of modern civilization.

Now this final part, a riff on the nature of  ”graceful collapses,” is what fascinates me most:

In principle collapse could be “graceful,” with preservation of knowledge and diversity and an orderly retreat to agrarian, nomadic, and hunter-gatherer societies as humanitarian calamities rapidly lower population and consumption through natural disasters, disease, and famine that we will be powerless to prevent or adapt to.

Graceful collapses have happened before, but the odds are against it now for two reasons. First, languages and cultural knowledge are already being lost at a rapid rate as cultures go under. Second, the powerful will try to maintain their own well being by force, leading to more unrest, wars, terrorism, and possible nuclear holocaust.

Ungraceful (“graceless?”) collapse would probably mean the end of our species, and millions of years for the world’s ecology to rebuild after the mass extinction – if climate change doesn’t sterilize the planet.

Jeez, that makes Soylent Green seem like a Disney flick.

So here’s my question: Does anybody know of examples of “graceful collapses” in human history?

As for the “orderly retreat to agrarian, nomadic, and hunter-gatherer societies,” well, good luck with that Flintstones/National Geographic mashup. For a nice tonic to such romanticism, see this recent piece, the main point of which you can glean from its subhead:

Pre-modern lifestyles were fraught with violence, disease, and uncertainty. We should be happy that indigenous societies are increasingly leaving them behind.

So this is how the world ends: Not with an action-movie bang, but with a guy sitting in a darkened room, chain-smoking and warning that “things are falling apart.”

Ms. Scape found the movie plausible enough to be sufficiently haunted by it. I, on the other hand, found the chain-smoking guy to be too preposterous to take seriously. After all, remember the last chain-smoking guy who got us all paranoid:

So I’m happy to report that Ms. Scape’s despair has now been tempered after watching this documentary on CNBC last night that was originally released in the Fall.

Ruppert periodically posts videos on Collapse Network, such as this beaut from last week, in which he explains why Americans should be “scared shitless” by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. His prediction:

It will not be long before we start seeing these same events happen in Europe and happening here as well. This is a very dangerous time.

Like Beck, Ruppert is also not shy about his prophetic prowess:

I’m the guy who can tell you which tree is gonna fall on you first–hopefully.

Now what’s really interesting to me about all this is that Ruppert has linked up with New Age survivalist/guru Tom Brown, who I’m familiar with. But that is a story or a post for another time.

So what happened here?  There are two main types of explanations, environmental and social, and their relative popularity has varied over the years.  The environmental explanation depends largely on the striking coincidence of the abandonment of Mesa Verde with the so-called “Great Drought” of AD 1276 to 1299, one of the earliest major climatic events to be identified in the tree-ring record.  The near-perfect alignment of the drought with the final abandonment of the area is indeed remarkable, and this explanation has been pretty popular and remains so today, but there is considerable evidence that there was more going on.  For one thing, while all of the Southwest is in some sense marginal for agriculture, within that context the northern San Juan is one of the most productive and reliable agricultural areas.  Indeed, much of southwestern Colorado is used today for commercial farming, largely using dry-farming methods not all that different from those used in antiquity.  The Mesa Verde area gets plenty of rainfall, and while a short growing season can be an issue at the higher elevations, throughout most of the region it is not generally problematic.  Models of agricultural potential based on tree-ring data have generally shown that the carrying capacity of the Northern San Juan greatly exceeded any plausible estimate of its overall population throughout prehistory, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that individual communities would always be able to support themselves on the land they happened to have.

Social factors, then, are probably involved along with the drought.  There is definite evidence for a considerable amount of violence during the thirteenth century in this area, and settlement patterns become increasingly defensive over time.  There is also an increasing diversity in public architecture among the various communities, suggesting that traditional religious or ideological structures may have been breaking down and being replaced by new ones.  A strong tendency toward settlement aggregation, perhaps due to defensive considerations, may have played a role in these religious trends.  Furthermore, all of this may have been influenced or set in motion by deteriorating environmental conditions; environmental and social factors were not necessarily separate things.

So where did the people go?  The general assumption is that they mostly went to the northern Rio Grande Valley, which sees a remarkable increase in its population right around AD 1300, just as Mesa Verde is emptying out.  This is a bit problematic, however, since there is relatively little evidence for people with obvious Mesa Verde cultural traits showing up in the Rio Grande at this time.  This may be because people were emigrating away from Mesa Verde in small groups and assimilating into existing Rio Grande communities, or it may have been because people were changing their cultures as they moved, perhaps abandoning the old social institutions that had been ineffective in preventing the abandonment and adopting new ones that seemed to work better.  It’s hard to say, really, and this is a topic of ongoing research.  One interesting effort recently has been the Village Ecodynamics Project by Washington State University and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, which has used agent-based modeling and other innovative techniques to try to understand the culture history of the Northern San Juan.

Okay, so that’s more or less what happened.  Does it count as a “collapse”?  Let’s look back at Jared Diamond’s criteria for collapse:

1. Collapse involves a major loss of population.
2. Collapse involves a loss of complexity.
3. Collapse occurs over a large geographic area.
4. The changes brought about by collapse persist for a long time.

In this case 1, 3, and 4 are pretty obvious.  The Mesa Verde region was totally depopulated, which is about as major a loss of population as you can get.  It’s also very large, and the changes that resulted from the abandonment of the region and the influx of population to the Rio Grande have persisted to the present day; many aspects of Mesa Verde culture notable in the archaeological record were not brought to the Rio Grande, and are not present in the modern Pueblos there.  Since Diamond apparently considers only one of the first two criteria to be necessary, he probably would consider this a collapse, but most other collapse theorists, including Joseph Tainter, consider loss of complexity to be a more important consideration than loss of population, so let’s look at complexity in the Mesa Verde case.

There basically isn’t any evidence for significantly complexity in Mesa Verde before its abandonment or in the Rio Grande afterwards.  Unlike the Chaco case, the villages in the thirteenth-century Northern San Juan seem to have had relatively egalitarian social structures, at least economically and probably politically as well.  This is not to say that there were definitely no disparities in political power, but that they were likely masked and subverted by an egalitarian ideology that prevented massive accumulation of wealth and power.  This is the case in the modern Pueblos, where despite some possible inequalities in power and political influence among different clans or societies the overall ideology has enforced a general economic equality.  This seems to have been the case in the thirteenth-century Northern San Juan as well, and it could have been in part a reaction to the perceived excesses of the Chacoan era, although it’s noteworthy that a certain amount of Chacoan influence seems to have persisted, especially in the Totah area around Aztec, albeit without much evidence for the economic inequality that marked the Chacoan era itself.

Mesa Verde doesn’t get mentioned in the collapse literature as much as Chaco, although sometimes the two are kind of muddled together incoherently, and for good reason.  What we seem to be seeing at Mesa Verde is a period of societal difficulty that resulted in depopulation and migration, a common pattern in Southwestern prehistory.  While there were some changes in society during the abandonment and migration that make it difficult to tell exactly where the people ended up, these changes don’t seem to have been related to any change in the overall complexity of the society, which remained about as complex as it had been before.

The human occupation of Chaco Canyon goes back a very long way, but the key developments that made it an important regional center seem to have begun in the AD 800s with the initial building of a few “great houses,” which in that period were large masonry structures similar in layout and construction techniques to the “small houses” in which most Southwestern people lived at the time but much on a much larger scale.  These early great houses, including Pueblo Bonito and Una Vida, show considerable signs of residential use in their earliest parts, and it seems that they were at least initially residential structures.  It’s not at all clear what inspired their construction, but there were similar structures being built in other parts of the region at the time, so Chaco may not have been particularly special at first.  Over the course of the next hundred years, however, something seems to have happened to make Chaco a major regional center, and starting around AD 1030 a building boom in the canyon in which the existing great houses were expanded using much more elaborate techniques and an even larger scale of construction coincided with the construction of entirely new great houses both in the canyon and throughout the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico and beyond into Colorado, Utah, and Arizona.  These “outlying” great houses were mostly placed in existing small house communities, which continued to be occupied, and were connected to the canyon via an elaborate road system.

Over the next hundred years, construction both inside and outside the canyon continued almost without pause, and at the same time a vast amount of material of all kinds was brought into Chaco from a vast surrounding region: turquoise, shell, copper bells, macaws, and other exotic materials, as well as more quotidian items such as pottery, construction timbers, and corn.  Then, around AD 1130, everything seems to have come to an abrupt halt.  Construction of great houses, after a shift around AD 1100 toward a different type of architecture, seems to stop entirely by around 1125, and activity in the canyon slowed to a crawl at that point.  There was probably at least a small population remaining until the depopulation of the whole region in the late 1200s, but it was nowhere near as large as the apparent population at the system’s height.  It is this decline in activity that collapse theorists seek to explain when they look at Chaco as a case study.

So what happened?  There are various theories out there.  Many point to a prolonged period of drought from around 1130 to 1180, which coincides suspiciously closely with the end of major activity at Chaco, as having somehow led to the collapse, although this explanation is somewhat problematic given that earlier droughts, especially a short but severe one in the 1090s, didn’t have nearly the same effects on the system.  Others argue that political, social, or economic instability within the Chaco system itself, whatever its nature, was the main cause of the collapse, with drought perhaps playing a subsidiary role.  Most people agree, however, that Chaco is indeed an example of societal collapse.

But is it?  Let’s look at some of the criteria for defining collapse, using Diamond’s list:

1. Collapse involves a major loss of population.
2. Collapse involves a loss of complexity.
3. Collapse occurs over a large geographic area.
4. The changes brought about by collapse persist for a long time.

Measuring the population of Chaco at any time is surprisingly difficult, but given the much lower level of activity after 1130 I think it’s safe to say that there was a major decline of some sort.  The extent to which Chaco was a complex society at all is disputed, but I find the arguments for complexity more convincing than the arguments against it, so let’s take relative complexity as a starting point and see if there’s evidence for a loss of it.  Recall Ben Nelson’s definition of complexity:

Social systems are considered complex if they are comparatively large demographically and spatially, encompass multiple settlements in an integrated political structure, and exhibit horizontal and vertical social differentiation. Other properties associated with complexity are hereditary ranking, production of surplus and its appropriation by an elite, craft specialization, and long-distance exchange.

Large demographic scale is basically the same as population, so that one’s covered.  We’ll get back to spatial scale and settlement pattern later.  There isn’t much evidence for horizontal social differentiation at any point in the Chacoan archaeological record, but the vertical differentiation implies by the elaborate burials in Pueblo Bonito does seem to end around 1130.  Ranking goes along with vertical differentiation, and surplus and its appropriation are controversial and hard to find in the archaeological record, as is craft specialization.  That leaves us with long-distance exchange, which does continue to go on at Chaco, but at a much lower level than before.  So yes, I think it’s fair to say that Chaco became less complex according to most of the criteria that can be used to assess complexity there.

That brings us back to spatial scale, and here’s where things get tricky.  It turns out that the evidence for reduced activity at Chaco Canyon after 1130 doesn’t correspond to a similar reduction in activity in most other parts of the Chaco system at the same time.  Indeed, some areas, such as Aztec Ruins on the Animas River to the north, see a marked increase in activity after 1130, and both Aztec and the Mesa Verde area further north see continued activity on a large scale, indicative of a large population, until the depopulation of the whole area in the late 1200s.  The area to the west doesn’t see such dramatic growth, but it does seem to keep on going without much change after 1130.  Similarly, while the area immediately south of Chaco seems to have been largely depopulated even earlier than the canyon itself, the area further south continued to see activity long after, indeed up to the present day at Zuni Pueblo.  And in many of these areas, especially at Aztec and at the northern and southern extremes of the original Chaco system, the outlying Chacoan great houses seem to have continued to be used, though perhaps not the same way as they were originally intended to be used, long after the cessation of great house construction in Chaco itself.

So it seems that the Chaco “collapse” really only applies to a single location, Chaco Canyon itself, and not to the society as a whole.  Indeed, some archaeologists have interpreted these data as showing not so much the collapse of the system centered on Chaco but a series of changes in it, possibly including a shift in emphasis away from Chaco itself toward Aztec, which replaced it as the center of the system.  Whether or not some form of the system that developed at Chaco continued at Aztec, it’s clear that there were a lot of changes going on in the region during the 1100s, including an apparent movement of population away from Chaco, probably at least in part to Aztec and Mesa Verde.  The lack of continued construction on the scale seen from 1030 to 1130 and the reduced level of trade do seem to suggest that the Chacoan system declined in power and influence after 1130 whether or not it moved to Aztec, but there turns out to be very little evidence of a “collapse” occurring over a large spatial scale, although the changes do seem to persist for a long time.

So what are the implications of this for studies of collapse in general?  It’s hard to say, but I think one lesson is that it’s important to look at these things on the societal level rather than on individual sites or localities, no matter how important or central they seem.  Some Southwestern archaeologists now prefer the term “reorganization” to “collapse” for situations like the changes at Chaco after 1130 and the contemporaneous events in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico.  It’s certainly quit different from the massive depopulation of the whole Four Corners region in the late 1200s, which however doesn’t fit well into “collapse” models either because there’s little evidence of a system on any level larger than the individual community during this period, with the possible exception of a rump Chacoan system operating on a small scale out of Aztec.  That event, which corresponds to another prolonged drought, is of interest in its own right, but this post is long enough already.

rapid loss of an established level of social, political, and/or economic complexity

Two ideas seem to be of primary importance in this definition:

1. Collapse happens rapidly.
2. Collapse means a shift from a higher to a lower level of complexity.

Note that population size is not explicitly included as a factor in this definition, although it could be argued that more “complex” societies necessarily involve more people.  By way of comparison, here’s the definition Jared Diamond uses in his book, as quoted by Tainter:

By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.

This is pretty similar to Tainter’s definition, but it involves more ideas.  The core criteria seem to be:

1. Collapse involves a major loss of population.
2. Collapse involves a loss of complexity.
3. Collapse occurs over a large geographic area.
4. The changes brought about by collapse persist for a long time.

Note that 1 and 2 here are apparently being offered as alternatives, so only one appears to be necessary to define a collapse.  This is presumably how Diamond manages to fit unsuccessful colonization attempts, which involve loss of population but not necessarily of complexity, into his set of case studies.  Tainter’s criteria clearly exclude such events, and his review is quite critical of Diamond’s inclusion of them.  Note also that Diamond explicitly refers to both spatial and temporal scale in defining collapse, which Tainter doesn’t do, although it’s possible that scale is folded into his concept of “complexity.”

Complexity is really the key to both of these definitions, but what does it mean?  Tainter doesn’t define it in his review article, which is understandable since it’s not necessarily relevant in that context.  In fact, defining “complexity” has been a longstanding issue in anthropology and archaeology, and debate over the best way to approach it has often been rancorous.  One important contribution to this debate came from Ben Nelson, an archaeologist at Arizona State University who specializes in northern Mexico, in an article from 1995 comparing Chaco Canyon to the northern Mexican site of La Quemada.  He says:

The term complexity, while easy enough to grasp intuitively, refers in archaeological practice to a web of properties whose interrelationships are poorly understood. Social systems are considered complex if they are comparatively large demographically and spatially, encompass multiple settlements in an integrated political structure, and exhibit horizontal and vertical social differentiation. Other properties associated with complexity are hereditary ranking, production of surplus and its appropriation by an elite, craft specialization, and long-distance exchange.

Under this definition, “collapse” would involve the loss of one or more of these characteristics in a society that previously had them.  Note that large population and geographic scale are considered aspects of complexity here, so if Tainter is using this definition his criteria for collapse are mostly the same as Diamond’s.  Nelson goes on to question this definition on theoretical grounds and to argue that these criteria should be considered separately.  He makes a good case for that, but given that the collapse literature tends to throw the term “complexity” around without examining it in depth, it’s probably best to interpret uses of the concept in that literature in terms of a unified theory of complexity.

That’s all I’ll say on this for now, but keep these definitions in mind.  They’ll be important later when I talk about the role Chaco plays in all this.

First, though, we need to understand what exactly we mean by “collapse.”  What does it mean for a society to collapse?  Intuitively it seems obvious, but there are actually a variety of processes that have been interpreted as “collapses” in both the scholarly and popular literature, and the term is often left undefined.  One place to start is with a 2006 review article by Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist now at Utah State University who, unlike many people who have been talking loudly about collapse in the past few years, is an actual expert on the subject who has been studying it for decades.  In the article Tainter discusses Diamond’s book at length, along with a variety of other primarily scholarly studies explaining various events in the archaeological record in terms of societal collapse.  More specifically, the works Tainter talks about here deal with one type of collapse, that attributed to “overshoot,” i.e., the overexploitation of natural resources through either population growth or increased per capita consumption.  This is the type of collapse that gets the most attention in a modern context, since the idea behind most predictions of doom for our own society is that we are on an unsustainable trajectory due to expanding population or overconsumption.  The overpopulation argument goes back to Thomas Malthus, of course, and its current form owes a lot to Paul Ehrlich‘s 1968 book The Population Bomb.  More recently this concept of overpopulation has been variously supplemented or replaced by the idea that it is per capita consumption, especially in wealthy nations like the US, that is on an unsustainable course that will lead to exhaustion of natural resources and, perhaps, societal collapse.  There are other ways societies can collapse, but this is the one people tend to be worried about today, and finding examples of it in the archaeological record has been a high priority for many people.

Tainter’s article goes through a variety of collapses that have been linked to overshoot, and finds most of them severely wanting in evidence.  He is particularly scathing about Diamond’s work, calling his discussion of the Anasazi “a confused muddle” and rejecting many of the case studies in the book as not even really being examples of collapse at all, but rather unsuccessful attempts to colonize areas unsuitable for the subsistence practices of the colonizers, who eventually died or left.  Tainter’s criteria for collapse rely heavily on a loss of complexity, with a “simpler” society succeeding a more “complex” one, and this notion is echoed in Diamond’s stated criteria for collapse as well, although Tainter argues that Diamond doesn’t actually apply these criteria rigorously and consistently.  Instead,

Diamond’s approach was seemingly to find cases where (a) bad things happened, and (b) he could construct a plausible environmental reason. The outcomes, however diverse their nature, are lumped into the category “collapse.”

The one case that Tainter does give some credence to is Easter Island, although even here he notes substantial criticism of the overshoot model of deforestation leading to the collapse of the complex society that developed there.  The cases he finds most convincing as examples of overshoot leading to collapse are the Third Dynasty of Ur and the Abbasid Caliphate, both in southern Mesopotamia though separated by thousands of years.  Even here, though, Tainter sees the collapse as being less a result of “pure” environmental degradation and more a matter of inadequate decision-making by elites in response to problems caused by overexploitation of natural resources, in these cases salinization caused by intensive irrigation agriculture.  In most of the other cases of collapse, the major problem seems to have been climatic or other uncontrollable changes that disrupted systems that had worked fine otherwise, in many cases probably combined with the same problems of poor decision-making.

Now, climate change and poor decision-making are obviously factors that are very relevant to modern-day problems, so in a sense Tainter’s dismissal of overshoot-based collapse theories in archaeology doesn’t matter too much for the relevance of case studies like Diamond’s to the present day.  Indeed, it seems like the overall negative tone of the review article is a function largely of its narrow focus on overshoot specifically rather than collapse in general.  Still, Tainter’s conclusion, surprising even to him, that there are very few documented cases of environmental degradation due to human exploitation leading to societal collapse is an important cautionary note in showing how important it is to carefully analyze the archaeological record before trying to apply its lessons to contemporary problems.

I do have my own blog, Gambler’s House, which focuses on Chaco but also discusses Southwestern archaeology more generally along with a wide variety of related subjects.  Most of the posts I do there are rather different from the sort of thing I’ll be doing here, so I doubt I’ll be doing much cross-posting this week, but if you’re interested in this stuff there’s plenty more to see over there.

Anyway, I’m glad to be here, and I thank Keith for the opportunity to expand my horizons a bit and engage with a different sort of audience than I’m used to.  It should be an interesting week.