Societal Collapse and Reorganization

Abstract

This book investigates how state collapse and social reorganization impacts human bodies, from the level of individual molecules, up to the scale of entire archaeological populations. One only has to observe contemporary studies of "state failure" to intuit that the disaggregation of complex societies can have signifi cant biological, social, and cultural implications for the people who emerge from such transformations. As society is reconfi gured, communities, groups of people therein, and individual human bodies are both conceptually and physically altered. Using the collapse of an archaic Andean empire and the societies that emerged post-collapse as a case study, this research comprehensively evaluates the nature of shifts in several key domains that would have been profoundly affected by the fragmentation of a once expansive and seemingly timeless empire. Osteological, ethnohistoric, archaeological, and bio-geochemical methods are employed to test hypotheses related to mortuary practices and community organization, ethno-social identity, violence, technical innovations, migration, health, and diet. Perhaps most notably, state collapse can dramatically alter how people physically interact with one another. Social science scholarship across disciplines, from anthropology to sociology and political science, has observed that those who experience state disintergration fi rst hand bear witness to persistent, recurring violence, ranging from interpersonal brawls to outright war (see McAnany and Yoffee 2010 ; Schwartz 2006 ; Tainter 1988). So too, state collapse can also spur striking yet stalwart reformulations of group identity; that is, how people conceive of and represent themselves and others. Finally, tempestuous times are known to generate novel migratory practices, new types of social inequality, dietary and health shifts, and pioneering technical procedures to cope with new, unique challenges. Be they migrations across the landscape, specialized innovations, experiences of violence, or the embodiment of reformulated identities, the attendant phenomena of state collapse may be experienced differently by different groups of people.