Which ancient apocalypse is most like ours?
The answer might scare you—but it shouldn’t
After the preorder hawking, and the pub day imploring, I’ve entered the third and most advanced phase of book begging: Please leave APOCALYPSE an Amazon review! As much as we all wish it were different, Amazon reviews make a huge difference to The Algorithm and, therefore, a book’s ability to reach a wide audience. It’s one of the best things you can do to support a book (and an author!), and I promise it’s quick and painless. You don’t even have to have purchased the book from Amazon. Just click here and scroll down to Customer Reviews, then click on “Write a customer review” button on the left. I would never tell you what to say, but remember The Algorithm loves five stars!
One of my guiding stars when writing about archaeology—and especially while writing my book—is that past societies are not parables. Each society, culture, and person within them existed on its own terms. They made decisions that made sense to them, in their own contexts and within their own histories. They didn’t set out to teach us anything, and their stories deserve to be told without constantly drawing parallels to ours. Reducing past societies to simplistic lessons about success and failure (ahem, Jared Diamond) disrespects their complexity as well as our imaginations.
But you don’t get through writing 90,000 words or so about past apocalypses without developing a few opinions on which ones are most like ours and therefore—ugh, sorry—what we can learn from them. The Black Death parallels to COVID are indeed haunting, and only get more so as the years go on. Global sea level rise at the end of the last ice age is literally repeating itself. But the apocalypse I ended up thinking most resembles what’s in store for us is the Classic Maya collapse.
Although we tend to talk about the Classic Maya collapse as just one thing—the sudden abandonment of grand cities during an unprecedented drought—it was actually much more like what today’s academics and activists have taken to calling a “polycrisis.” Political and environmental shocks amplified each other, and their effects rippled unpredictably through an interconnected and interdependent world. Archaeologists emphasize that abandoned cities are not signs of mass death, but rather mass migration away from faltering political and economic centers—another term for which could be “refugee crisis,” especially when seen from the places those people moved to. The collapse took 300 years to play out, meaning that many generations lived their entire lives in the “so far” of not quite being sure if the apocalypse they were waiting for had already arrived. It’s only when looking back from a remove of centuries that we can say definitively that it had.
This might not seem like a very optimistic take. If we’re at the beginning of something like the Classic Maya collapse, is the end necessarily, well, collapse? Maybe—and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Because another term for collapse in this story is “revolution.” I’m convinced that if the Classic Maya collapse had happened anywhere else in the world—somewhere without the artificial break in history imposed by colonialism and the opening that left for swashbuckling foreign explorers (and yes, archaeologists) to claim the story for themselves—we would see it not as a terrifying catastrophe but as a thrilling and much needed liberation.
For more, you don’t even need to pick up a copy of APOCALYPSE (although I would love it if you did). You can head over to Smithsonian to read an excerpt from one of my favorite (and most swashbuckling) chapters. I’m so happy they gave the chance to impart some lessons from a past apocalypse—just this once.
And for more takeaways from APOCALYPSE, head over to the Next Big Idea Club, where you can read or listen to me talking about five key insights from the book!
