fucking fascist WESTOIDS love their silly gay little romane boys in their foolish fucking garb and their daft protofascist customs but cannote fathom writing interesting his-fi about da fucking bronze age collapse which is INFINITELY cooler

TO CLARIFY: i do not want anyone to the political right of Stalin to write fuck nor shit about the Bronze Age Collapse lest they focus entirely on da scary migrant Sea Peoples

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    "singular" is doing tons of work here though— there were plenty of catastrophic city razings and local collapses but they happened over many decades.

    there's a whole chapter in 1177 by Eric Cline about how the title year is somewhat arbitrarily chosen and the collapse took over a hundred years. according to him the economic decline included a lot of sharp discontinuities like with tin but otherwise pretty consistent with that book

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      The post seems to mainly be a critique of 1177, and includes more recent work:

      This means that some of the basic facts on which ‘Collapse’ narratives have been written no longer stand. Recent work by Shannon Hogue [Hogue (2016) ‘New Evidence of Post-Destruction Re-Use at the Palace of Pylos’, American Journal of Archaeology 120.1, p151-157] has found, for instance, that the palace of Pylos was not abandoned after the fire that destroyed the site: people either moved into or carried on using whatever was still usable almost immediately afterwards, cleaning up the debris of the fire and disposing of it in an orderly manner. Recent work at Knossos is going the same way - it now looks like there were a lot more people there than previously thought, and that their society was a lot richer and more sophisticated than previously realised. We need not take the destruction of a site by fire as evidence of a complete, civilisation-ending disaster – it was undoubtedly horrific to live through, but major fires were facts of life in urban centres even into the modern period, the Great Fires of Rome and London being only the most obvious examples.

      That's part of a section arguing that there just isn't evidence that civilizations collapsed at all: the broader populace remained in the same places and kept living fundamentally the same lives as before, and that what disappeared were specific aristocratic systems which generally lost power for more mundane economic and social reasons (and that the continuity of the civilizations was previously overlooked in older literature because the luxury goods were very noticeable and easy to date in a way that more mundane and functional goods were not, along with classist things like seeing the end of nice murals and fancy art as the end of a civilization in its entirety rather than just the end of people paying to have those things made).

      • emizeko [they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        thanks, sorry for not investigating more myself but I'm on a "not visiting reddit" streak that I don't feel like breaking yet

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
          ·
          1 year ago

          I will say that I don't know how mainstream this view is now, but the materialism of the new narrative and the way it emphasizes the class character of what disappeared vs what persisted is particularly appealing imo.