Collapse of society ?

[Lyceum]

Well being an expert isn't a binary state, it is quite possible to be an expert in the literal sense (trained, educated, experienced) and be in the wrong or in the minority on something, so bear that in mind. As for said scholar I've read some of his popular work (which...is what it is, and what all such work tends to be) and some of his academic work which is pretty good but oh my god can someone teach these guys what oral theory means and what its implications actually are? He's not an eye-roller, which most BAA guys tend to be, if that's what your asking. I recently re-read a paper of his on Mycenaean/Egyptian trade contacts. Very solid IMO. Just read and form your own opinion since you already have it. If you want a truly great rec though: Oliver Dickinson's "The Aegean Bronze Age".

@Nathan Ross. "Momento Mori" concept, totally stealing that for a tedious thing I'm working on re: intellectual history. Employing that enabled me to cut a huge paragraph more or less.

And we absolutely can talk about the collapse of society in the 5th century Roman West. The Roman state and, more importantly, culture by any meaningful rubric does indeed collapse. There is a marked different character emerging around this time. There's a lot of hippy dippy "scholarship" dealing in "transformation" - and while there isn't a clean break it is important not to overestimate things (on this see Wickham in particular who is much more eloquent than I). Influence does not = direct culture in any meaningful sense. When I use the word "pita" to mean bread I'm not a part of ancient Mesopotamian culture, just using a word (bitah which has survived the succession of languages and culture for millennia. Of course the Romans exerted extreme influence over the barbarian successors, that doesn't make them Roman.

[Creon01]

When you say, "culture by any meaningful rubric does indeed collapse" what solid evidence is there that the life and culture of the majority of the common people in the Western Empire suddenly changed? Culture is a persistent thing that is not easily discarded, more so when religion is involved.

A lot the "hippy dippy "scholarship" looks at the artifact record and sees little change in the countryside aside from the disappearance of large estates full of slave labor. The Roman urban centers in many instances do depopulate as the people are not getting regular supplies of food. Literacy declines, but the vast majority of people were illiterate so no major change there. High art transforms as the buyers taste for art changes.

I suppose a lot depends on what you mean by "culture."

[aligern]

I'm with Lyceum. Culture does indeed collapse. People move from building in stone to building in wood. In Italy they move to repairing old buildings because the decreased status of their times means that there is more building asset than population. In Britain they go from tiled roofs to straw. Well there are areas of the world with straw roofs today and I wouldn't swop them for my nice , weatherproof, tiles.
The West Roman areas move from literacy to the only writers being monks , they move from living safe in the country to hiding in the towns and later, once the Arabs arrive, to moving the towns to hilltops to avoid raids. They move from rational enquiry to a religion of superstitious faith. They move from relatively sophisticated salaried military to part timers who have to be directly supported by land and who have to be assembled every spring. They move from garrisoned frontier defences to every area having to have its own leader and warband. Of course this is a patchy picture, but looked at overall it is the facts about the collapse of Western Roman Society.
The archeologists who want to tell us that because someone living as a dirt poor colonus in 300 AD has the same standard of living as a dirt poor serf in 800AD nothing has really changed have it quite wrong. The level of civilisation has gone way way down because urban culture has collapsed and that is the culture that matters. Nowadays there is a tendency to equate cultures in a way that is apologetic about Western success. Thus Beethoven can be equated with Peruvian pan pipes music. This attitude is then projected back to the Roman Empire to say that it did not fall, it just morphed into a more countryfied living style, along with arrant nonsense such as that invading barbarians are really just Roman armies in revolt. Sadly many youngsters have been through an education that pushes those theories, happily the facts of decline are still facts and get rediscovered. And yes, societies are fragile and there is no guarantee the good guys win.
Oh God, beginning to sound like Victor Davis Hanson!
Roy

[Lyceum]

Well I really don't agree with the Hanson-esque rant below, but I shan't address that, sorry. Anyway, Joe:

When you say, "culture by any meaningful rubric does indeed collapse" what solid evidence is there that the life and culture of the majority of the common people in the Western Empire suddenly changed? Culture is a persistent thing that is not easily discarded, more so when religion is involved.

A lot the "hippy dippy "scholarship" looks at the artifact record and sees little change in the countryside aside from the disappearance of large estates full of slave labor. The Roman urban centers in many instances do depopulate as the people are not getting regular supplies of food. Literacy declines, but the vast majority of people were illiterate so no major change there. High art transforms as the buyers taste for art changes.

I suppose a lot depends on what you mean by "culture."[/quote]

It does depend on what you mean by culture, here I'm literally talking about anything recognisably Roman. I'm glad someone brought up the artefact record, this is actually quite fallacious as I'll now go on to explain. Having china in my cupboard does not necessitate a cultural continuity with China, or that it is used in the same manner as they did. We may infer that such objects come originally from China but as you see the situation quickly gets complicated. Point of origin may be different from point of manufacture, are we reproducing exactly or mimicking? what are the changes? what began the china craze? do we use it in the same way as its home? did we change or they? and so on and on. Artefacts actually don't tell you us as much as we want, in isolation they're worse than useless.

Greek religion is a perfect example where archaeological accounts differ so much from what Plato and friends tell us one wonders if they're looking at the same evidence, they're not, they're interpreting blindly. Also Greek religion is interesting due to the remarkable proliferation of eastern artefacts, deities and cultic practice which happily differ and diverge. So while we may say elements of Greek cult go back to the hoary past of Mesopotamia, this certainly isn't the same thing.

Moreover there ARE large scale changes, before we even get to complex stuff. Change in settlement patterns? pretty huge. Change in slavery? again huge. The decentralisation, that occurs with landowners suddenly becoming powerful almost baronial, is a world apart from what the papyrus record tells us about Roman Egypt. You claim literature was only for a small section, sure, but it was a) for the most important section and b) "literature" in Rome WAS a complex social phenomenon! It was predicated on having a large amount of individuals educated in a particular manner. For those people to receive that education required a highly mobile international elite (and all that entails, slaves, copying houses etc) and an extensive and complex patronage system.

Literature was society for a huge section of the population due to the trickle down effects. Yes btw we can discern Roman and non-Roman use of Roman material. When the literature becomes theology and biblical canon, the copying and education done locally and by churchmen...well these aren't "little changes" but the collapse and replacement of a whole system. Do let us take Fortunatus whose poems are available here: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/venantius.html He is using Latin (albeit in a bad metre) and is ensconced in classical imagery...but it's decidedly non-Roman. If anything he's playing the role of a skald or a filid rather than a poeta in any meaningful sense. This is in marked contrast to, say, Prokopios or Nikolaos Byrennios who are still very much writing in a Roman context.

Again, I'm not arguing for a dichotomy between Roman and Christian. Prokopios and Byrennios were Christian, as was Macrobius in the West (most likely) but there are other important parameters to consider.

Basically to re-iterate. That these places were formerly Roman in some manner and benefited from continual Roman influence is not in doubt, but there was a gradual "collapse" of Roman culture and society in those areas.

[Creon01]

Didn't mean to sound like a rant - sorry if it sounded so.

[aligern]

I think he was being rude to me Joe, not you:-))
Roy

[markusaurelius]

I like your take in it Roy.

[Creon01]

"People move from building in stone to building in wood."

What needs to be defined is who the "People" are, Roman colonist or native or slave. Who built in stone and stopped and who always built in wood and continued to build in wood. The vastness of the Western Empire also must be considered as some places probably never built many personal dwellings in stone.

Let's not always associate how the elites and their retainers lived and how the vast masses of common people lived. That gap only grew larger as the Western Empire entered it's final years and was a factor in it's collapse. Rome had managed to recover from military disasters in the past and create new armies as so many common people could see how it benefited them to be part of the Roman system.

There is a tendency for those who seriously study late Roman history to lament its passing. One always assumes that he/she would have been part of the elites, or one of their retainers, hence able to benefit from all the "culture" that being "Roman" would entail. This pov can prevent one from seeing other points of view and how the end of the centralized Roman system in the West would be a great lifting of burdens to some, if not many people living within the control of the central government.

I do agree that urban culture is important, I live in a major city myself, but it is not the ONLY metric of the condition of a civilization for sure. In fact history often reports than highly urbanized societies become fragmented and the people weak and dependent upon the charity of the state, and then get conquered by more hardy rural groups of people.

[Creon01]

Has anyone read "The Romano-British Peasant: Towards a Study of People, Landscapes and Work during the Roman Occupation of Britain" by Mike McCarthy?

[i][i]"For a long time medievalists have been examining a wide range of topics, from kings and queens, castles, the church, to the common people, how they made a living, living conditions, landscapes and a host of other topics. As a generalisation the approaches of medievalists appear to be relatively balanced, although such a view might not command universal approval. By contrast, however, Romano-British studies have tended to concentrate rather more narrowly on the military, conquest and the army, whilst the civilian population is represented by studies of villas, towns, monumental buildings and fine artefacts. In recent years landscapes and hinterlands have attracted more attention, but rarely has the ordinary man in the street been seriously considered.

In preparing The Romano-British Peasant I set out not to write yet another book about Roman Britain, but to try and pull out some key themes that affected the lives of ordinary people. Why, when many of the key primary sources are missing? The answer is that we already have a plethora of books on Roman Britain – many purporting to be histories, some general in scope, some with a special focus on ‘daily life’. I concluded that we don’t need yet more of this stuff, at least not at present. This literature, and the media, concentrates heavily on elites who, however large or small the overall population may have been, can never have amounted to more than 5% of the total, and probably less than that. I decided to focus on the remaining 95%.

That aim was always going to be fraught with difficulties, not least because very little direct evidence survives for the labouring classes and farmers of Roman Britain in contrast to other parts of the Roman Empire or, indeed, later periods. Equally, I didn’t want to write a book that is largely descriptive. I wanted the freedom to speculate and suggest lines of thinking that may not be supported by ‘evidence’, but which ‘commonsense’ told me might, nevertheless, be plausible. For that reason I drew on material dating from other periods, especially Anglo-Saxon, medieval and post-medieval Britain." [/i][/i]

[Alanus]

This post goes back to Cline's so-called "global" scenario, "1177 BC, the Year Civilization Collapsed."... or whatever the book's title was.

I find simplified scenarios somewhat disturbing. especially when disasters are termed "global." Why didn't Bronze Age China collapse? Was it because the Iron Age arrived there later? Fact is, bronze was an archaic material, just as "Old Europe" was dying at the same time. The Minoans fell to the Mycenaeans at the same time Egypt was attacked; and what we are seeing is the new (Iron Age) replacing the old. That wasn't "global." It was a small area known sarcastically as the "frog pond."

We know where the "new age" started-- at Sintashta-- and long before this newer "tripart" civilization hit the West, we can find the same thing as Indo-Iranians overtook Harappa below the Hindu Kush. It was a LONG and complicated journey, as a new civilization replaced an old one. I've not read professor Clive's book, but it could have been written as a simplification. :unsure:

Civilization doesn't collapse. It shifts into a new one when a newer, better, culture arrives.

[Dan Howard]

Civilization doesn't collapse. It shifts into a new one when a newer, better, culture arrives.

This ties into another mantra: "the Bronze Age didn't end because they ran out of bronze." Society in general usually moves from one phase to another because something better comes along.

[Creon01]

Dan, why do you feel the Palace culture ended in most parts of Greece? I believe it did not end in Athens though.

[Titvs Statilivs Castvs]

Civilization doesn't collapse. It shifts into a new one when a newer, better, culture arrives.

This ties into another mantra: "the Bronze Age didn't end because they ran out of bronze." Society in general usually moves from one phase to another because something better comes along.

I find "better" a dangerous word to use in this context... Seems like the 19th-century idea of "progress of civilization" to me.

[Dan Howard]

Dan, why do you feel the Palace culture ended in most parts of Greece? I believe it did not end in Athens though.

As soon as there wasn't a dominant strongman like "Agamemnon" to hold them together there was civil war. You see the same thing happening today in Iraq without Saddam and Libya without Gaddafi. It's what happens in tribal socities - primary loyalty is to the tribe rather than the state.

All of the other arguments for the collapse have been pretty soundly discredited. Drews is probably the best source for this (except that his own proposed theory doesn't make much sense either).

[Alanus]

Civilization doesn't collapse. It shifts into a new one when a newer, better, culture arrives.

This ties into another mantra: "the Bronze Age didn't end because they ran out of bronze." Society in general usually moves from one phase to another because something better comes along.

I find "better" a dangerous word to use in this context... Seems like the 19th-century idea of "progress of civilization" to me.

I did use the word in blurry context. I was referring to iron as the LBA's downfall. A new group entered the Frog Pond using lighter, quicker, sharper, weapons. The singular female deity was replaced by a male-oriented pantheon, not actually "better" but we still live with it. The newcomers wound up being proto-Greeks and Philistines, and the Frog Pond changed forever. I'm with Dan on this one. ;-)

Your 19th-century idea of the "progress of civilization" actually started in the EBA, or perhaps the Eneolithic.. when some guy claimed that copper was better than bone. It was.