Late Bronze Age Collapse

Collapse of the Late Bronze Age The earliest civilizations left behind many answers to how society worked and the development of complexity over time. Despite the many findings from various civilizations, there are also many questions left unanswered. Collapse, the reasons that lead to the end of a civilization, are theorized and contemplated, therefore highly debated between archeologists. Collapse is best described by Joseph Tainter as “a process of marked sociopolitical simplification unfolding on a timescale of no more than a few decades,” thereby replacing an unsustainably high level of complexity with a lower, more sustainable level. Tainter suggests that with every society that suffered from collapse typically occurred

It appears there are a few main theories prevailing to the collapse of the Late Bronze Age. These include: invasion, climate change, and the transition from the use of bronze to iron resulting in migration. At first, a large majority of researchers believed the invasion of the Dorian’s caused the collapse of this civilization. Many Mycenaean sites were abandoned, few escaped destruction, and some areas were seriously depopulated (Stiebing, 1980). The Dorian invasion supposedly over ran Greece without settlement, destroying Mycenaean civilization. However, this theory is under strict scrutiny now, and is not supported as well as originally thought (Stiebing, 1980). The Archeological remains found at the end of the Mycenaean period has failed to show any features left by the Dorians. For example, a new type of sword, originally credited to the Dorians for instance, was found in Mycenaean before any of the great disasters. There is also evidence in the langue spoke at this time that disputes their infiltration. The Dorians share common dialect from the East Greek language. Shared features indicate communication between the Dorians and East Greeks for a much longer period than the chaotic century during the supposed invasion (Stiebing, 1980). With the many holes in what used to be the prevailing theories for this civilization’s collapse, climate change has been suggested as the undoing of the Late Bronze Age. Brandon L. Drake proposes that the collapse of the Mycenaean’s had to do with climate change. Byson (1974) and Weiss (1982) first looked into drought/ climate change in relation to the Late Bronze Age collapse. At the site of Giala-Tell Tweini in Syria they identified the period between 1200 and 850 BCE as one of pro-longed drought through pollen and alluvial records (Drake, 2012). Archeologists can gather this evidence from deposits/