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Notes on Regeneration NormanYoffee It’s been eighteen years since the anno mirabile of 1988,when Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies and George Cowgill’s and my edited volume, The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, appeared.These studies have resonated in archaeological theory,since they emphasized that social change was not simply a process of mutually supportive interactions that produced an irreversible succession of levels of holistic integration. They challenged views that human social systems inherently tend to persist or expand and requiredthatlevelsbebrokendownintosocialgroupingsof partlyoverlapping and partly opposing fields of action that lend the possibility of instability as well as stability to overarching social institutions. Collapse studies also call attention to what happens after collapse, since collapse seldom connotes the death of a civilization as opposed to the end of a particular form of government .Thestudiesof“regeneration”inthisvolumeexplicitlyexploreissuesof what happens beyond collapse. Of course, what happens beyond collapse depends on what it was that underwent the collapsing, why collapse occurred, and what institutions were left in place after collapse. Although the term collapse usually implies a downward change from something more complex and larger to something else that is less complex and smaller, one might also consider collapse as a movement from a relatively more stable condition to one that is less stable. For example, Steven Falconer and Stephen Savage (1995) have argued that Syria/Palestine in the Middle Bronze Age was a “heartland of villages,” and Lisa Cooper in this volume (chapter 2) presents the variations on this theme. Thus, if stability connotes village life, then the appearance of urban sites in the region—which were based, in part, on connections with outsiders and were unstable—could be called a collapse! Of course, such unstable urbanism itself collapsed into the village life from which it sprang. Archaeologists (and others) are not used to talking about the rise of more complex 14 Notes on Regeneration 223 social systems as a collapse, and I’m not saying that they should begin to do so. I do wish to point out, however, that trends toward less-complex social organizations need not be thought of as failures of those more-complex organizations, and there is an important example of this principle in one of the chapters in this volume (by Kenny Sims). I also must note that if collapse can be multidirectional, resulting in both more- and less-complex societies, it is simply a species of social change that must be investigated in its appropriate larger temporal and spatial sequences. Logically, then, regeneration—meaning the return to a condition (albeit with significant adjustments) after a collapse—is not necessarily a new category of research or theory, but a more focused attention on a kind of social change. Comparative studies of social phenomena need to ensure that the comparisons , especially the scale of the social units being compared, are useful. There is no point in comparing the rise, abandonment or partial abandonment , and rise again of particular sites with whole regions or states or civilizations . That having been said, I turn to brief notes on the chapters in this volume. One of the most interesting points about regeneration that was stressed in many chapters is that new opportunities were presented to peripheral regions and secondary elites in the aftermath of the collapse of ancient states. Ellen Morris (chapter 4) shows that the collapse of Old Kingdom Egypt—accompanied by diminished flood levels of the Nile, famine, and political chaos—led to trends toward increased social mobility in the succeeding First Intermediate Period. Although there were always local power structures, craftspeople, and avenues of resistance to the central state in Egypt, these were effectively suppressed in the heyday of the Old Kingdom. In the decentralized environment of the First Intermediate Period, however, and into the Middle Kingdom, rich tombs of nonofficials were erected, and social competition became a topic in literature.Eventually,the ideology of statecraft in Egypt provided the model for the regeneration of the centralized state, but changes in that ideology took into account the experience of the First Intermediate Period. In the chapters by Diane and Arlen Chase (chapter 11) and by Marilyn Masson, Timothy Hare, and Carlos Peraza Lope (chapter 12), the regeneration of Maya cities and states depended on more than the reassertion of the ideology of Classic Maya statecraft. Although the major sites of the Classic Maya in the Petén had been progressively abandoned in the ninth and tenth centuries and reoccupied only by “squatters” (Webster...

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