Re: Social Collapse in History [SCIENCE mag]

Thanx to Peter for posting this very useful -at least to some of us
-article from SCIENCE.
All of what it says sounds correct or at least plausible to me. 
I have two further comments.

1. though the author says all , and it is probably true of these,   events
were climactic>social; there were however also social> environmental ones
already in those times; eg. Harappa [also Maya]. Moreover they are  not
mutually exclusive, for instance with prior socially caused environmental
degredation, a smaller climactic shock is enough to push people over the
abyss. It has also been demonstrated, or at least argued, that the more
complex a society, them more suseptible it is to lesser climactic shock,
while less complex ones can be more resistant/adaptible, unless/untill the
shock becomes so great that they also succumb.

2. The societal declines registered in that article, except for the first
one which predates my [so far?] investigations [happen to?] conincide
temporally with the long periods of contraction/crisis registered in my
"Bronze Age World System Cycles" in CURRENT ANTRHOPOLOGY Aug-Oct 1993,
which registers the temporal 200-300 year  up/200-300 year down 'cycles'
back to 3,000 BC, although it alos looks a bit father back, and I keep
wanting to search for them more seriously at least through the 4th and if
possible 5th millennium BC. [Not] Incidentally for W-Sites[with hypen!]
these near simultaneous cycles were recorded over ALL of a WS [without
hyphen!] that ranged from and included at least North Africa, Anatolia,
Levant, Mesopotamia, India, Central Asia, and Inner Asia as far as
Mongolia or beyond. 
  
P.S. I hope that none of this [of mine for today only!] posting contains
any terminology that might be picked up by Arno Tausch's search
engine for rightly tabooed [and should be auto-tabooed] words.
agf


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