Amazing article I have included the video as well as a little excerpt that got me thinking. Enjoy The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies By Chris Hedges We are cons…

From the Euphrates Valley to the southern Peruvian Andes, early complex societies have risen and fallen, but in some cases they have also been reborn. Prior archaeological investigation of these societies has focused primarily on emergence and collapse. This is the first book-length work to examine the question of how and why early complex urban societies have reappeared after periods of decentralization and collapse. Ranging widely across the Near East, the Aegean, East Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, these cross-cultural studies expand our understanding of social evolution by examining how societies were transformed during the period of radical change now termed \"collapse.\" They seek to discover how societal complexity reemerged, how second-generation states formed, and how these re-emergent states resembled or differed from the complex societies that preceded them. The contributors draw on material culture as well as textual and ethnohistoric data to consider such factors as preexistent institutions, structures, and ideologies that are influential in regeneration; economic and political resilience; the role of social mobility, marginal groups, and peripheries; and ethnic change. In addition to presenting a number of theoretical viewpoints, the contributors also propose reasons why regeneration sometimes does not occur after collapse. A concluding contribution by Norman Yoffee provides a critical exegesis of \"collapse\" and highlights important patterns found in the case histories related to peripheral regions and secondary elites, and to the ideology of statecraft. After Collapse blazes new research trails in both archaeology and the study of social change, demonstrating that the archaeological record often offers more clues to the \"dark ages\" that precede regeneration than do text-based studies. It opens up a new window on the past by shifting the focus away from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to their often more telling fall and rise. CONTRIBUTORS Bennet Bronson Arlen F. Chase Diane Z. Chase Christina A. Conlee Lisa Cooper Timothy S. Hare Alan L. Kolata Marilyn A. Masson Gordon F. McEwan Ellen Morris Ian Morris Carlos Peraza Lope Kenny Sims Miriam T. Stark Jill A. Weber Norman Yoffee

Resources Books Finite and infinite Games – James P. Carce Gödel, Escher, Bach – Douglas R. Hofstadter The Collapse of Complex Societies – Joseph A. Tainter Synergetics – Buckminster FUller More Books Videos The Story of Stuff From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home … RESOURCES Read More »

CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS—Thomas E. Emerson and Kristin M. Hedman of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey-Prairie Research […]

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Chris Hedges: The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”…

In 1988, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter published a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. In it, he described the rise and fall of great civilizations such as the Romans, the Mayans, an…

Too much inequality and too few natural resources could leave the West vulnerable to a Roman Empire-style fall.