{"id":90312,"date":"2025-07-06T01:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-06T05:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=90312"},"modified":"2025-07-05T10:06:29","modified_gmt":"2025-07-05T14:06:29","slug":"qotd-after-the-bronze-age-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/07\/06\/qotd-after-the-bronze-age-collapse\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: After the Bronze Age Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The collapse itself has a certain drama \u2014 the tumbled ruins of monumental architecture, the skeletons and arrowheads amidst the rubble, the panicked requests for aid preserved in the archives of a society that lasted a few decades longer \u2014 but any sufficiently thorough collapse will leave few archaeological or historical traces of its aftermath. Civilization is in some sense defined<\/em> as “stuff that leaves records”: monumental architecture, literacy, large-scale trade, specialist craft production, and so on. It’s much harder for us to know what was going on during an era when people are building with wood (instead of stone), or making pots at home out of lousy local clay (instead of in centralized and semi-industrial production centers), or relying on the oral tradition (instead of carving dynastic propaganda into the living cliff-face in friezes a thousand feet high). When we call these periods “Dark Ages”, we mean you can’t see anything when you look in.<\/p>\n

But what surprised me most about After 1177 B.C.<\/em> is how short<\/em> this era was. In some places, anyway.<\/p>\n

We have a vague picture of what happens after a civilizational collapse, but it’s been disproportionately influenced by two particularly dramatic examples: sub-Roman Britain and the Greek Dark Ages. This was perfectly sensible coming from the Anglo historians and archaeologists who have dominated the public conception of the field \u2014 after all, the only thing more interesting than the history of your own island is that of the classical world you’ve been studying since you got your first Latin grammar at age six \u2014 but it turns out that neither of these are the general rule. Foggy, faraway Britain, so reliant on imported goods and troops, was far more seriously impacted by the withdrawal of Rome than was most of the Empire and saw a longer and more significant reduction in cultural complexity, standards of living, average stature<\/a>, and of course population. (Imagine what would happen to a Mars colony if the connections to the home planet stopped working.)<\/p>\n

Greece after the fall of the Mycenaeans suffered an even more striking decline. As Austrian archaeologist Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy summarizes:<\/p>\n