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Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorStephanie L. BudinStephanie L. Budin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHello, Readers!Several years ago I was teaching a Western Civ. 1 class and a student asked me what caused the fall of the Bronze Age. (Hands up anyone who has ever had to deal with this question!) It is an issue that has required a lot of thought and spilled ink over the generations. In retrospect, I think my answer should have been: “Whatever we are suffering from now.” If we are suffering from climate change and drought, the current consensus will be that the Bronze Age fell because of climate change and drought. If we just experienced an economic crash, you can bet your remaining dollar (or Euro, or whatever) that the academic consensus will be that a breakdown of trade with resulting economic consequences brought about the end of the Bronze Age. If we are feeling concerned about immigration and refugees, you can be certain that the Bronze Age fell because of raiders and piracy. A chapter in one of the books on my shelf about the “Sea Peoples” even points out that the “Sea Peoples Hypothesis” emerged at the same time people in Western Europe and the United States were fretting over incursions by the Communist East. The Sea Peoples showed up hand-in-hand with “War of the Worlds” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”It’s not that there are no data to support such theories. There is overwhelming evidence for a massive drought in the Near East around about 1200 BCE. It’s just interesting that this information emerges right when we are all worried about global warming.And it isn’t just the ancient Near East. A recent documentary on the Neolithic henges of Western Europe—Stonehenge, for example—concluded that they were built by a local indigenous population to establish their claims to the territory in the face of an incursion of immigrants arriving from the east. The documentary was filmed while the peoples of Great Britain were contemplating Brexit in the face of an incursion of immigrants arriving mostly from the east. Humorously, a previous documentary I had seen about Stonehenge, done during the heydays of the EU, focused on the diverse backgrounds of the bodies buried there, looking at how dental DNA analysis indicated that some of those bodies came from as far away as Sardinia. The Neolithic was a lot more inclusive before Brexit, apparently.Or consider the Neanderthals. In the earlier twentieth century, back when “race” was a big deal (not to mention whose race was superior) we were all quite certain that the genetically superior homo sapiens sapiens (i.e. us) must have eradicated those inferior, boorish cavemen, which is why you see so few of them around anymore. When diversity became all the rage, suddenly we discovered that we didn’t kill the Neanderthals—we interbred with them. Many of us are walking around with Neanderthal genes. Just as birds are dinosaurs, so too are we cavemen.In all fairness, it isn’t that we are completely self-obsessed. Where we are looking now determines what sciences get advanced, and those sciences determine what data are found. Consider the dinosaurs (or, if you prefer: birds). It’s not that we hypothesized that most of them were wiped out by a meteor because we were worried about space invaders (“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” notwithstanding). We were just looking for oil, so we revved up our geological sciences, and lo and behold, we found a LOT of iridium right at that KT boundary. And it was MUCH easier to gauge genetic diversity at Stonehenge once we could extract dental DNA. So there is definitely a dynamic of Concern→Science→Data→Theory.But it isn’t all science, either. Trends get trendy, and suddenly whatever is popular now also starts to infest the past. Fertility was far more prevalent in ancient religions after Sir James Frazer than before, and women were more passive post-Freud than previously. Archaeologists spend a lot more time engaged with chromosomes and hegemonic gender than they were in the days before Judith Butler and Raewyn Connell. Sometimes it really is (about) us.What, then, caused the end of the Bronze Age? No doubt an insanely complicated concatenation of events best approached with Chaos Theory. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Near Eastern Archaeology Volume 85, Number 3September 2022 A journal of ASOR Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722280 Views: 170Total views on this site Copyright © 2022 by the American Society of Overseas ResearchPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.