The rise and fall of cultures and civilizations is a central theme of archaeology throughout the world. Collapse is the sequel to Jared Diamond’s best-selling and Pulitzer Prize- winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (Guns), which tackles the difficult question of how and why some cultures developed faster than others. More specifically it tries to explain why European civilization developed technologies and immunities and allowed them to dominate the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
A professor of geography at UCLA, Diamond draws heavily on archaeological research to tackle the corollary question of why some cultures fail, but others do not. Taken together the two books examine some of the most fundamental questions of human development in ways that are both original and challenging. Diamond is primarily an environmental determinist who looks closely at the most fundamental elements of human existence—food and fuel. This work is limited to those collapses with a significant environmental dynamic, though he freely admits that factors other than the environment can lead to collapse, as in the case of the Soviet Union.
In Collapse as in Guns, Diamond examines case studies to draw universal conclusions, and two of his case studies are of particular interest to American archaeologists: the Maya and Chaco Canyon. Easter Island and Greenland are closely related. Diamond narrows the cause of cultural collapse to five reasons—environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trading partners, and society’s response to environmental problems. More than one of these central causes is often a factor, and collapse can come very quickly—even near the peak of development. Diamond finds that each society’s political, social, and economic institutions determine what response, if any, is made to these problems.
It would be easy to criticize this study as simplistic, but that would be unfair. In Collapse, as in Guns, Diamond challenges the reader to examine fundamental questions of human development that lead to fundamental truths that may be general, but make the point nonetheless.
