Are We Close to Collapse? The Bronze Age Clues: Andreas Kluth

Did people in the late Bronze Age know their civilization was collapsing? There’s another half to that thought. If we — in the United States and the world — were ourselves in the early stages of collapse, would we even be aware of it? And what would we do about it?

The collapse of societies has fascinated historians, archeologists and anthropologists from Polybius in ancient times to Edward Gibbon in the 18th century and a growing interdisciplinary field of scholars today (besides spawning an entire genre of “Mad Max”-style apocalyptic dystopia in Hollywood).

The scholarly question, never definitively answered, is whether we could ...