A Brief Response

I’d like to begin my very brief response by thanking the editors of the journal and all of the respondents, especially those whose comments went beyond the article and addressed the book as a whole.

After reading through the thoughtful responses, and noting many of the overlapping points, what came first to my mind is something that Norman Yoffee said about a decade ago, when he and Patricia McAnany compared studying societal collapse to viewing a low-resolution digital photograph: “It’s fine when small, compact, and viewed at a distance but dissolves into disconnected parts when examined up close” (McAnany and Yoffee 2010: 5) I would agree but prefer to use the analogy of looking at an Impressionist painting when specifically considering the Bronze Age Collapse and its aftermath, as I will say in the sequel, which I am currently in the process of completing. From far away, the picture of what happened is very clear: the world system as they had known it for several centuries by that point came to an end, and there was a measurable change or transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age; there is no question about that. But when we get up close, things become more granular; the individual dots (or societies) become more obvious or apparent to the eye; objections and exceptions begin to surface (as Aren Maeir and several other respondents note); and the overall picture becomes less clear, especially since some societies, or even specific subregions (as Guy Middleton and Raphael Greenberg point out), were able to transform and survive while others did not. Thus, while there was an overall collapse of the interconnected world in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age, there were also instances of resilience and transition at the regional level—we could perhaps co-opt the phrase “Nevertheless, they persisted” for such cases.

I would urge those interested to read the entire revised version of my book, in order to get the full picture of which only a small portion has been presented here, for there it will become obvious that I am in complete agreement that there is in fact no obvious answer as to why any of this happened, as Middleton and others note; otherwise, it would have been “solved” long ago. And, no, it did not happen in a single year, as both Greenberg and Maeir correctly point out, and as I make perfectly clear at great length in the actual book, but instead did take about a century, so 1230–1130 BCE fits my suggested scenario to a tee.

The various other suggestions by the respondents are spot on as well, and I do hope that a laser focus remains trained on this extremely interesting period and the centuries that followed. I remain astonished at the groundswell of interest shown in this period by members of the general public who profess (on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media) never to have previously heard of the Bronze Age Collapse. I hope that similar examinations of other periods, areas, and/or specific peoples will be written for the general public by other scholars. But I am also hopeful that there will indeed be additional collaborative research building within the scholarly community, perhaps along the lines of the solid and interesting recommendations made by Louise Hitchcock.