The study of societal collapse, collapsology, is a topic for specialists of history, anthropology, sociology, and political science. Moreover, the influence of a collapsed society, such as the Western Roman Empire, may linger on long after its death. However, complete extinction of a culture is not inevitable, and in some cases, the new societies that arise from the ashes of the old one are evidently its offspring, despite a dramatic reduction in sophistication. Īnthropologists, (quantitative) historians, and sociologists have proposed a variety of explanations for the collapse of civilizations involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of resources, unsustainable complexity, invasion, disease, decay of social cohesion, rising inequality, long-term decline of cognitive abilities, loss of creativity, and misfortune. Societal collapse is generally quick but rarely abrupt. However, others never recovered, such as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, the Maya civilization, and the Easter Island civilization. Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless of their size or complexity, but some of them later revived and transformed, such as China, India, and Egypt. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse, population decline or overshoot, mass migration, and sabotage by rival civilizations. Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Desolation, from The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole (1836)
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