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• W4281639562 abstract "My title refers to the observation that when something is important in a culture, we find many words for it.1 It could also allude to our contemporary fascination with the collapse of the Bronze Age and the numerous works that have tried to account for the mechanisms underpinning it. However, the importance of Eric Cline’s 1177 BC (Cline 2014, 2021) does not simply lie in its treatment of the Bronze Age collapse.I was lucky to read an advance copy of 1177 BC prior to its 2014 publication, and what I liked most about it was that it provided a historical and archaeological overview of many of the cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East. I loved the book, and thought others would either also love it or possibly hate it because of its sweeping scope in a region known for scholarly emphasis on particularism. Fortunately, it has been loved enough that there is now an updated edition, and a sequel is imminent.The type of overview presented in 1177 BC is absent in other introductory texts. In designing a course on the ancient Mediterranean earlier in my career, I could only rely on cobbled-together articles for a reader and two different textbooks. Before I develop a new subject, I often begin with an internet search to see what others are doing. What I found at the time was that Mediterranean archaeology was code for Mycenaean archaeology. A holistic approach to the region was absent, which is not surprising given that Egypt and the Near East are often separated from the Aegean and Italy by disciplinary boundaries, training, and biases.As a result of this separation, most Aegean scholars begin as classicists and study Greek and Latin rather than Bronze Age languages such as Hittite, Akkadian, Egyptian, or the many others. Most Aegean scholars have not studied the history and archaeology of Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, or Cyprus and the Levant, excavated there, or even visited these regions. The message sent to graduate students is that they need to absorb the vast amount of data in the classical world to get a job, presumably in a classics program. Only a very small number of scholars have worked across these regions. Eric Cline is one of them and this comes out in his published work and his research.The primary significance of 1177 BC, however, lies in clearly laying out the issues connected with the collapse. A reviewer of a piece of my own work recently remarked that I should write a book about the Philistines. However, with the large quantity of articles on the period of the transition appearing on Philistine sites on a yearly basis, there is the issue of writing a book that is still relevant after publication. The existence of the 2014 edition of 1177 BC made updating the chapters on collapse easier, contributing to a book that remains relevant, despite the concern expressed by Cline about it being already dated in his essay here.One of the main messages of 1177 BC for understanding the collapse is that rather than one event, the collapse was caused by a perfect storm of events. This perfect storm could involve one or more catastrophic events including drought, famine, earthquakes, plague, invaders, such as pirates or others. Cline expresses the perfect storm as a multiplier affect, whereas I have conceived it as an example of self-organized criticality. Self-organized criticality is a model developed in the late 1980s (Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld 1987) to understand the interaction between equilibrium and catastrophe in self-organizing systems. It was initially applied in physics and has since been applied in numerous other fields, including archaeology. It can metaphorically be visualized by the ­sandpile, which continues to grow as more sand is added. The pile might undergo tiny avalanches at seemingly random stages, which might be seen as preventing the likelihood of catastrophe, just as small foreshocks may be seen as relieving the geological stresses that eventually lead to a major earthquake (Bak and Chen 1991). However, at an unpredictable moment the addition of sand might result in cascading avalanches. This is the critical state. Arriving at a critical state as modeled by the sandpile in self-organized criticality forms a useful way of understanding social and cultural collapse. When change flows smoothly throughout a network, large-scale differences tend not to accumulate, so that small avalanches prevent the likelihood of catastrophe affecting a system. When the system reaches a critical state, avalanches occur at all scales, and the system collapses. Although the critical state may be seen as analogous to Cline’s suggestion that a perfect storm of catastrophic events characterizes the collapse that ended the Late Bronze Age, it suggests a series of events happening over time rather than a simultaneous series of events.In his essay here, Cline emphasizes the importance of drought, yet remains sufficiently skeptical that this was the driving force in collapse. After all, it seems likely fish were still available, and starving people cannot cause a wave of destruction. Covid-19 and supply chain issues are thrown into the essay for good measure, but they require more than a casual explanation. While plagues are a potential cause of distress, it is not clear that they can cause a collapse. The prevalence of plague deities such as Nergal/Erra in the ancient world, and the fact that plague was documented in Amarna tablet EA 35 for fourteenth-century Cyprus, only to be followed by a proliferation of monumental centers in the thirteenth century BCE at Alassa-Palaiotaverna, Kalavassos-Ayios Dhimitreos, and Maroni-Vournes, indicates that viral illness was a periodic occurrence and was not necessarily enough to trigger a collapse (Hitchcock, forthcoming).Collaborative research building on the accomplishments of 1177 BC can be a way forward as Cline hints toward the end of his essay. This could take the form of a panel at an international conference followed by a handbook on 1177 BC. Such a book would need to be carefully curated, emphasizing substantive contributions of those with something important to say, rather than emphasizing senior scholars chiming in for no other reason than they are senior scholars. Sections could include: teaching 1177 BC, an archaeological treatment of remains from the twelfth century of the cultures following the collapse, specialist contributions on different potential catastrophes, a section on different periods of later collapse or even just the effects of catastrophe as detailed in the work by Walter Scheidel (2017), and concluding with a synthesis written by Cline.Something missing from the current debate is the role of Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia, a region that has “flown under the radar” and which will need to be incorporated into the next iteration of 1177 BC. A short summary of some of the important features bringing Italy and the islands into the debate on collapse in the Mediterranean include: the local manufacture of Late Helladic IIIA style pottery, termed Italo-Mycenaean in Italy (Jones et al. 2021); early piracy in Italy as discussed by Jung (2009); the Italic origin of the Naue II sword and new grooming implements in the Aegean (Kanta and Kontopodi 2011; Vitale, Blackwell, and McNamee 2017); the possible presence of Italian guest workers or slaves in Mycenaean Greece as hinted in the Linear B texts and in the presence of Handmade Burnished Ware (Bankoff, Meyer, and Stefanovich 1996); trade between Sardinia and Cyprus in the eleventh century BCE (Crielaard 1998); Cypriot artifacts such as a tripod stand and notched scapula in Sardinia and Sicily (Hitchcock, Pisanu, and Maeir 2021); the presence of Sardinian ceramics at Hala Sultan Tekke Cyprus where Fischer (2021) has published a Mycenaean-style krater with a possible depiction of a Sardinian elite; the similarity of the “Ingot God” from Enkomi2 to Sardinian bronzetti in terms of stance and panoply; architectural changes in Sardinia and Sicily at the end of the Mediterranean Bronze Age (Hitchcock et al. 2021).A few things make the present very different from the past. Despite the knife’s edge of supply chain trading networks, the presence of a mass media, global alliances, advanced military industrial complexes, and global-aid agencies make it possible to ameliorate the effects of famine, drought, and plague. We may not be able to get a new sofa in Australia because of the global foam shortage, but we can still produce all of the food we need. Meanwhile, high speed Internet networks make it possible for epidemiologists throughout the world to collaborate in real time on scientific breakthroughs on vaccines and therapeutics. If anything, certain recurring features associated with collapse in the present era may help us better understand some of the activities going on in the past, when they can be correlated to possible past behaviors. Some of these activities are the crowded living or working conditions that contribute to the spread of illness among frontline workers, worker shortages, the superstition that seems as prevalent today as in preliterate societies, the scapegoating of migrants—frequently including an anti-Semitic component, and the role of business and transportation hubs in spreading disease (Hitchcock 2021, forthcoming)." @default.
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• W4281639562 title "“There Really Are 50 Eskimo Words For ‘Snow’”: 1177, Big Data, and the Perfect Storm of Collapse" @default.
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