“The Dark Ages” (a civilizational propaganda campaign)

What evidence do we really have of life between “great civilizations”?

Most of what we know about (recent) past human activity comes from civilizations…they wrote the texts, built the monuments, and taxed the scribes. Between empires, and especially after collapses, the trail goes quiet. Still, there are important windows…

Archaeological evidence tells us that after collapses (like the Late Bronze Age, ~1200 BCE), urban centers empty out and people scatter into villages, hill forts, and rural hamlets. It also tells us that nutrition improves after collapses…less dental decay, taller average height, fewer stress markers, etc. Peasants eat more varied local food when they’re free from (elite) grain monocultures. And they live in simpler dwellings with more egalitarian layouts (vs. palaces and temples), and engage in more local craftmanship (potter, textiles) when centralized trade breaks down.

Some examples…

Elite historians call the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire a “Dark Age,” but isotope and skeletal data show rural populations ate better when imperial taxation and grain export systems collapsed. Commoners gained land access (while the people at the top cried, “Barbarism!”).

When (classic) Mayan civilization collapses around 900 CE, monumental building stops, but villages persist…there’s plenty of evidence of crop diversification and local resilience. People didn’t vanish, in other words…they just stopped paying for the fucking pyramids.

In the Andes, after Spanish conquest destroyed centralized (Inca) systems, Indigenous ayllu (kindship networks) reasserted themselves as the real basis of survival.

Anthropology also helps fill in these “dark” gaps by studying groups who lived outside or on the margins of states. Foragers like the Hadza, San, and Inuit show what lifeways look like without taxation, markets, and state coercion…and, again, what we see are rich social bonds, leisure, and diverse diets. In The Art of Not Being Governed, James Scott argues that much of Southeast Asia’s highlands were deliberately outside of state control, and people chose to exit civilization (they didn’t “fail to develop”).

Skeletal trauma indicates that gaps between civilizations are marked by less mass warfare, and stress markers decrease in periods between states (life is much less of a chronic grind).

Basically, the evidence we have suggests that during “dark ages,” ordinary people lived better. They were healthier, freer, less taxed, and more autonomous. They engaged in local culture and kinship that is probably invisible to historians.

I think that what we call collapse now only looked catastrophic at the time to the few…scribes and kings. For most of the people we would relate to, it meant relief.