By coincidence, I had just finished reading Max Adams' book In the Land of Giants, about Dark Age Britain. In it he describes how people in that era living in England literally thought of themselves as inhabiting a landscape which was full of things that giants had built - not least of which being Hadrian's Wall. Those people did not have an accurate understanding of their history. But they certainly knew that they had one - the stuff of it was all around them.
We have a lot of cultural baggage associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, which makes us think of this aspect of historical change in terms of collapse. A great civilization rises, then falls into ashes, and an age of barbarism ensures - from which, eventually, another great civilization then duly comes into being. James C Scott is persuasive in arguing that this is probably a mistake. What is thought of as "collapse" in most such circumstances was probably a period of comparative liberation and much better health for ordinary people, who were no longer oppressed by the drudgery of economic servitude or out-and-out slavery which they had likely previously been subject to, and had much healthier diets and lifestyles living as so-called "barbarians" than farmers in an early proto-State.
The Americas in the era after Columbus stand out as probably the most important exception to this rule - the Aztec and Inca empires may not have been pretty, but their collapse was most certainly that, in terms of population loss and cultural destruction. Be that as it may, a D&D campaign set amidst the detritus, the monuments, the ruins and the cities of old civilizations long-gone is one that makes perfect sense: it is the milieu in which our ancestors have lived since time immemorial (and one which of course we still live in today).
I think this taps into the appeal of the Heavy Metal, Gonzo, psychedelic kind of fantasy that I feel like was much more prominent up until around the 90's or so when fantasy as we know it today seemed to really get codified in the cultural consciousness.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that has always most appealed to me about many OSR settings, Numenera, Lovecraft / Howard / Smith, and many similar settings, is this idea of layered cultures and the possibilities they entail.
I do somewhat worry about (or at least try to be critical about) that historical re-examination about the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages. It's worth being mindful that it's more complex than a black and white "light/dark age" scenario, but it also comes close to the kind of anti-progressive (in the literal sense, not political sense) post-apocalypse fetishization that I think we've seen in culture. Fantasizing about "simpler times" can be argued to have its advantages, but I think it would be a mistake to uncritically idealize an anti-civilization.
I'm definitely not a historian, I'm sure if you think I'm full of shit that you can out-argue me with empirical evidence, but ya, I mean even if quality of life did in some ways improve for the "ordinary person", you need a Rome, or subsequent social-structural advancement, to get all the rest of the progress we've made.
Anyway, maybe all of that is besides the point, I'm not really trying to have a political argument here or anything, but I agree that thinking about these things critically is a good way to go about worldbuilding in tabletop RPGs. Oftentimes I go for a more gonzo approach to my settings, but actually in the setting for the campaign I'm currently running, the idea of the civilization living in the shadows of a former, greater civilization, and being reinforced with the idea that humanity will never reach that point again, is a major theme of the setting.
The tiny comment windows in blogger make long comments like this a huge pain, hope this comes out coherently.
Yep, it's an interesting conundrum. We got the civilizational advances we have now because of the State, I guess, but the early States were horribly oppressive regimes which were almost certainly backwards steps at the time for the people living in them. (To be fair to Scott, he isn't really talking about Rome so much as the very earliest States in Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, and Mesoamerica.)
DeleteBut then again - we don't know the counterfactual. What advances would "barbarians" have come up with, left unmolested?
I'd be inclined to think they'd just turn into the "state", right? I mean, all those other states started from something. I think if true "barbarian" anarchy could develop into something else, we would have seen it happen. Again, not a historian, but my impression of history is that either they become the State, they are absorbed by a State, or they occupy a relatively isolated or unique environment and remain effectively the same until/unless they encounter outside intervention.
DeleteI think from what I gather (and I am not a historian either) the early States could only exist in very special circumstances and were very fragile. So it's no inconcievable that if "barbarians" had been left alone in other areas of the world they would have come up with something very different to what eventually became, say, Rome or whatever. But who knows? It's pure conjecture, really!
DeleteThink I remember reading that the Greeks of the age of Athens and Sparta found things the regarded as the work of giants, but was in fact the work of their own ancestors from before the bronze age collapse.
ReplyDeleteI am sympathetic to Scotts argument that Empire and Cities are not necessarily that good and that their fall might *be* good for many people, but I do smell a degree of bullshit there. So far as I know, the levels of slavery remained pretty high in Europe during and after the fall of Rome, it just wasn't plantation slavery. Rome may have been cruel, and the Barbarian tribes may have been more 'free', and our vision of them from the Roman record could certainly be the most nightmarified version of them, but the Goths. Visigoths etc weren't *nice* and the Age of Migration looks like it was an absolute shitshow to live through. If anything the large population loss, massive economic drop and enormous instability makes it seem pretty bad compared to even the rubbish parts of Rome.
Freedom is nice but how much poverty, ignorance and generalised unpredictable fear is your freedom actually worth.
Or to put it another way, you are jammed in a Time machine with two settings and you have about five seconds to pick one before it starts up. One reads 'Age of Migration' the other reads 'Rome', which one would you pick?
Again, I think it's slightly unfair to Scott to use the example of Rome, because he is talking more about the much earlier States mostly in Mesopotamia. He makes a convincing case that they were pretty much reliant on slavery and even the non-slaves led lives of economic servitude and drudgery that were almost equivalent, and had horrible back-breaking lives of labour. Women also had it really bad because they were basically turned into breeding machines.
DeleteThat is to say, no, barbarian lifestyles weren't peaches and cream but their poverty, ignorance and unpredictable fear may have been much better than the poverty, ignorance and fear of being an ordinary person in ancient Uruk. Or even Rome - what's important to remember about the Roman Empire was that it was only really Romans who got to be citizens and most people were slaves and/or indentured servants. It was good for the aristocrats and rubbish for everybody else.
There is a lot of evidence that being a hunter-gatherer or sedentary pastoralist is much healthier and less dangerous than being an agricultural serf or even a member of the industrial proletariat. I recently read Junger's "Tribe", which makes the provocative claim that white settlers in America would often run away to join Indian tribes and captives would often refuse to come back to civilisation because the lifestyle among the Indians was better, whereas Indians would never give up their lifestyle voluntarily and had to be forced at the barrel of a gun or through starvation most of the time.
(Scott also makes the claim that "population decline" in eras of "collapse" probably reflected people just fleeing the city-state and going elsewhere rather than actual statistical decline. Not sure how true this is of the Rome case.)
A few years ago the classical scholar Bryan Ward Perkins launched an attack on the dominant paradigm of ‘Late Antiquity’. In The Fall of Rome, Perkins argued that Rome did collapse and that the collapse is immediately apparent in the archaeological record. His most memorable example was the emergence of aceramic societies: people who could not make pots. The debate rumbles on to this day: and the arguments read very similarly to those expressed by other commenters above. It seems that scholarly and gaming culture overlap. Or to think of it in another way: your opening was correct; Europeans struggle to break out of the Gibbonian narrative even when invited to discuss the ancient Near East.
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Interesting. The idea that not making pots = collapse (and hence a bad thing) is kind of interesting in itself.
Delete(Context for the remarks below: I have a PhD in late antique history/archaeology, and one of the courses I teach at University is a seminar on the historical problem of collapse). Ward-Perkins' book is an interesting read, though most definitely at one end of a spectrum - an end that has regained favor in recent years. The issue with the emergence of local communities unable to make pottery is not simply that being aceramic is inherently bad. Rather, it's the nature of the rapid, uncushioned transition to that state...an aceramic hunter-gatherer society that knows how to take care of itself might indeed be a very amiable setting for life. But the pottery-less communities in some limited parts of post-Roman Britain were not societies that simply now had a different way of taking care of themselves; they were groups who previously had become highly reliant on the 'proto-globalist' networks (if you will) of the Roman imperial order, and when that order unravelled...they 'weren't able to take care of themselves', so to speak, and fell back to pre-Neolithic technological levels by some indicators. By analogy, imagine what would happen in North America today if, for some reason, for the next 5 years no food shipments could travel more than 200 miles. Some people would still be just fine, but there are so many communities that are now so dependent on modern infrastructure to meet basic needs that they would experience really profound hardships, at least for a while. There is nothing wrong - indeed, much right - with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but try it out when the only life you've known involves getting supplies at WalMart, the gas station, and the grocery store; good luck.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the back-and-forth debates about collapse often occur because both the fairly positive and the grimly negative views are each correct, from a different perspective. When collapse happens there often are people who end up as 'winners' or who, at the very least, don't suffer as much as other people, or - in some cases - who find that their conditions are improved compared to earlier exploitation. But society as a whole may still be going through really terrible travails on its way to such 'liberation.' In some cases what we have labelled 'collapse' looks more like the failure of a specific ideological/political system (some aspects of 9th c. Maya collapse seem to fit this) so that disruption was very uneven, sparing those who moved on quickly to a new system (tho that sometimes also required relocating).
In post-Roman Europe, however, we can say pretty confidently that the entire known world was poorer, less well-connected, and less healthy around 700 than it had been in 350. Ironically, Britain - rather, many parts of Britain - seemed to fall harder than most places in the Roman world.
If I may put in a personal plug, my blog at gundobadgames.blogspot.com has a number of posts from earlier this year related to gaming in collapse or pre-collapse contexts, and my 'settings with strata' series is scheduled to include a hopefully robust discussion of gaming collapse dynamics later this summer.
This is a really good comment, will be checking out your blog!
DeleteThanks for this comment. What I got from the Scott book was that he believed that for most "ordinary people" it was fairly easy to shift back to sedentism or pastoral lifestyles - with the caveat that again he was talking about very early States, not Rome. Although I suspect even there that the bulk of the rural population wouldn't have found it too difficult to adapt to the new state of affairs after the collapse of central authority?
DeleteI'm more familiar with the later Bronze Age than with states of the early Bronze Age in Mesopotamia, but worth noting = agriculture was much, much older than 'states.' So a shift from farming to a pastoral lifestyle seems to me a note-worthy shift, as it involves some real skills and knowledge to do well. That being said, the collapse of a state certainly does not require abandonment of agriculture. In the case of the Roman empire, for example, much just continued. The loss of ceramic technology was real but RARE. More common would be a transition from wheel-thrown to much lower-quality, hand-shaped pottery; a reduction in qualities and capabilities but not necessarily in total way of life. Most of the rural population in the empire probably did just keep on going, though with caveats: lower security overall (albeit, again, not necessarily a problem for those who'd been beaten up by the old 'order') and a diminution in the access of even common folk to goods from afar - part of Ward-Perkins' point in his book is that the average peasant in the Roman period had access to commodities that would have been pretty swanky in the very early Middle Ages. Of course, other things were afoot, slow changes in social ordering of relationships in the countryside, etc.
DeleteAgain, though, I think it's really one of those cases where if we go looking for continuity and 'things weren't THAT bad" then we'll find it; if we go looking for devastation and sobering loss, we'll find that too. Life is complicated. :-)
...sorry, can't resist one last nerd-note: to illustrate the complexity of the picture, it's ALSO the case that some ceramic industries in the late Roman or post-Roman west STARTED and/or remained important in the period of imperial collapse and kept going. African Red Slip Ware, made near Carthage, was a staple good in the late Roman world; after the political collapse in the west, in fact even despite Vandal occupation of north Africa, the industry just kept going, although its overall distribution network around the Mediterranean shifted and shrank.
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