james on collapse ness

from james c scott‘s against the grain:

114

6. Fragility of the Early State: Collapse as Disassembly

115

What might “collapse” mean, anyway—as in the phrases “the collapse of Ur III,” around 2,000 BCE; “the collapse of the Old Kingdom Egypt,” around 2,100 BCE; “the collapse of the Minoan Palatial Regime” on Crete, around 1,450 BCE? At the very least it means the abandonment and/or destruction of the monumental court center. This is usually interpreted not merely as a redistribution of population but as a substantial, not to say catastrophic, loss of social complexity. If the population remains, it is likely to have dispersed to smaller settlements and villages. Higher-order elites disappear; monumental building activity ceases; use of literacy for administrative and religious purposes is likely to evaporate; larger-scale trade and redistribution is sharply reduced; and specialist craft production for elite consumption and trade is diminished or absent. Taken together, such changes are often understood to be a deplorable regression away from a more civilized culture. In this respect, it is just as essential to emphasize what such events do not necessarily mean. They do not necessarily mean a decline in regional population.

They do not necessarily mean a decline in human health, well-being, or nutrition, and, as we shall see, may represent an improvement.

Finally, a “collapse” at the center is less likely to mean a dissolution of a culture than its reformulation and decentralization.

The history of the term “collapse” and the melancholic associations it evokes are worth reflecting on. Our initial knowledge of and wonder at the archaic state come from what might be called the heroic period of archaeology, .. the prevailing standard images of these early states have become icons: the pyramids and mummies of Egypt, the Athenian Parthenon, Angkor Wat, the warrior tombs at Xian.

So when these archaeological superstars evaporated, it seemed as if it were the end of an entire world. What in fact was lost were the beloved objects of classical archaeology: the concentrated ruins of the relatively rare centralized kingdoms, along with their written record and luxuries.

When the apex disappears, one is particularly grateful for the increasingly large fraction of archaeologists whose attention was focused not on the apex but on the base and its constituent units. Their cumulative knowledge of shifting settlement patterns, structures of trade and exchange, rainfall, soil structure, and changing mixes of livelihood strategies allows us to see a great deal more than the apparently gravity-defying apex. .. While “collapse” represents a reduction in social complexity, it is these smaller nuclei of power—a compact small settlement on the alluvium, for example—that are likely to persist far longer than the brief miracles of statecraft that lash them together into a substantial kingdom or empire. Yoffee and Cowgill have aptly borrowed from the administrative theorist Herbert Simon the term “modularity”: a condition wherein the units of a larger aggregation are generally independent and detachable—in Simon’s terms, “nearly decomposable.” 

In such cases the disappearance of the apical center need not imply much in the way of disorder, let alone trauma, for the more durable, self-sufficient elementary units.

Echoing Yoffee and Cowgill, Hans Nissen cautions us against mistaking “the end of a period of centralization as a ‘collapse’ and regarding the phase during which a once unified area was split up into smaller parts as a politically troubled period.”

116

it is essential to acknowledge the fundamental structural vulnerability of the grain complex on which all early states rested. Sedentism arose in very special and circumscribed ecological niches, particularly in alluvial or loess soils. Later—much later—the first centralized states arose in even more circumscribed ecological settings where there was a large core of rich, well-watered soils and navigable waterways, capable of sustaining a good number of cereal-growing subjects. Outside these rare and favorable sites for state creation, foraging, hunting, and pastoral people continued to flourish.

State-making sites were above all structurally vulnerable to subsistence failures that had little to do with how adept or incompetent their rulers were. First and foremost of these structural vulnerabilities was the fact that they depended overwhelmingly on a single annual harvest of one or two cereal staples. If that harvest failed because of drought, flood, pests, storm damage, or crop diseases, the population was in mortal danger—as were their rulers who depended on the surplus they produced. These populations were also, as we have seen, in far greater danger from the infectious diseases that affected them and their livestock because of crowding than were dispersed foragers. And finally, as we shall explore, the reliance of elites on a surplus, together with the logic of transportation, meant that the state relied far more heavily on the population and resources located closest to the core, a reliance that could undermine its stability.

117

The first pristine states in the Middle East, China, and the New World were operating in totally uncharted territory. There was no way that their founders and subjects could anticipate the ecological, political, and epidemiological perils that awaited them. Since the problems were without precedent, they were hard to fathom. Once in a while, especially when there are written sources, the reason for a state’s demise is fairly clear: a successful invasion by another culture that replaces its enemy, for example, a destructive war between states, or a civil war or insurrection within the state. More commonly, however, the reasons behind the state’s disappearance are more obscure and insidious, or else are catastrophic events, such as flood, drought, or crop failure, which may have deeper, cumulative causes. Such causes, I believe, are of particular interest to us for at least three reasons. First, unlike more contingent events like an invasion, they have a systematic character that may be linked directly to state processes. As such, they afford us a unique window on the structural contradictions of the ancient state. Second, such causes are likely to be slighted by most historical analyses, as they appear to have no direct, proximate human agent behind them and often leave no obvious archaeological signature behind to identify themselves. Evidence for their role in state mortality is speculative as well as circumstantial, but there is reason to believe their importance has been greatly underestimated.

118

States themselves required resources on a far grander scale than early sedentary communities, and resources of a different order. The result was an explosion of overland and, especially, waterborne trade. Students of early trade Guillermo Algaze and David Wengrow go so far as to refer to the “Uruk world system” around 3,500 to 3,200 BCE as an integrated world of trade and exchange.. Uruk and its competitors required resources from afar that were not available in the alluvium: copper and tin for tools, weapons, armor, and both decorative and utilitarian objects; timber and charcoal; limestone and quarried rock for building; silver, gold, and gems for sumptuary display. In exchange for these goods the statelets of the alluvium dispatched textiles, grain, pottery, and artisanal products to their trading partners. The effect, for our purposes, of this vast enlargement of the commercial sphere is that it similarly enlarged the sphere of transmitted diseases, bringing hitherto separate pools of diseases into contact for the first time.

123

That the issue of “collapse” should arise at all is essentially an artifact of the rise of walled settlements with monumental centers, and the common mistaken assumption that such central places are “civilization” itself. There are any number of occasions, as we have noted, when prestate sedentary communities are, for one reason or another, abandoned temporarily or permanently. Such events, noted by archaeologists, may involve substantial numbers of people, but they are unlikely to be “historical news” so long as the community is not a walled state center. The stones and rubble matter; they provide both an impressive site of excavation, museum artifacts, and often an iconic lineage for a nation’s glorious past. Civilizations that, like Srivijaya on Sumatra, built with perishable materials and now are all but vanished hardly appear in the history book, while Angkor Wat and Borobudur live on as luminous centers.

_______

________

_________

_______

_______

________