The collapse of civilisation

Aims

This course aims to:

• acknowledge today's leading ideas about 'collapse of civilisation'

• provide frameworks for further study of Late Antiquity in the West and the Maya Classic and Post-Classic periods

• introduce the method of comparison

Content

Is decay inevitable? Do all ways of life bear the seeds of their own destruction or is it only enemy action or changing physical environment that brings them down?

Is change of tradition necessarily bad? How is continuity or deterioration to be defined? 'Collapse of civilisation' does seem a topical issue today …

Comparing unrelated cases may suggest whether generalisation (and prediction) is feasible. We shall assess the two most famous historical cases of culture change or collapse.

The West has long been haunted by images of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It is said to have ended in 476, as a mercenary seized control of Italy. Civilian administration had long been strained and the army had been retreating for 70 years. Population had evidently been falling despite immigration from Central Europe. There is growing evidence too for longer-term shift of the climatic conditions. Were these developments necessarily deleterious, though; and were there not continuities into the Middle Ages?

Where the Roman evidence is mostly documentary, data for the Maya 'collapse', four centuries later, in Central America, are almost exclusively archaeological. No doubt that helps to explain the air of mystery commonly cultivated around the ancient Maya but the past 40 years have produced a plethora of fresh evidence, both direct and indirect. Some of it does raise fresh problems but, on balance, it is encouraging a new interpretation of what happened, both more complicated than previous ideas and more convincing.

Presentation of the course 

Each meeting will be based on an illustrated lecture designed to encourage discussion of the issues raised.

Course sessions

1. Cases
'civilization'; historical summaries of the Western Roman Empire and the Classic period Maya

2. Causes
systems and units; variables, processes and events; factors external or internal, sustainability and resilience

3. Environments
climate; invasion; microbes

4. Culture
society; beliefs and attitudes; organization and administration; data and competence; technology

5. Method and assessment
formulating questions, designing investigation and recognizing answers; world history's lessons?

Learning outcomes

You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.

The learning outcomes intended for this course are:

• awareness of the range of factors in continuity or decline of complex society

• awareness of the principal theories about decline of social complexity

• familiarity with unrelated historical cases and ability to compare them

• enhanced competence and confidence in the development of argument and handling of evidence for argument