The Collapse of Complex Societies
New Studies in Archaeology
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The Collapse of Complex Societies
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Narrated by:
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Brian Arens
About this listen
Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and future. Dr. Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2,000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan, and Chacoan collapses.
©1988 Cambridge University Press. Produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©1988 Joseph A. Tainter (P)2024 Echo Point Books & Media, LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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Story4 out of 5 stars 6
The Fate of Empires analyzes many of the commonly held traits of the world’s historic empires and demonstrates how the presence or absence of these can determine the outcome of these societies. The author isolates two main forces operating in advanced civilizations: the urge to reproduce as well as competition among members of society.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Rambling
- By Alex Odom on 11-20-24
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Assyria
- The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire
- By: Eckart Frahm
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 15 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 119
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 103
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 102
At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. Here, historian Eckart Frahm tells the epic story of Assyria and its formative role in global history. Assyria’s wide-ranging conquests have long been known from the Hebrew Bible and later Greek accounts. But nearly two centuries of research now permit a rich picture of the Assyrians and their empire beyond the battlefield.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding Historical Book
- By Okahead on 05-15-23
By: Eckart Frahm
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Limits to Growth
- The 30-Year Update
- By: Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows
- Narrated by: Tia Rider
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 2
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2
Over the past three decades, population growth and global warming have forged on with a striking semblance to the scenarios laid out by the World3 computer model in the original Limits to Growth. While Meadows, Randers, and Meadows do not make a practice of predicting future environmental degradation, they offer an analysis of present and future trends in resource use, and assess a variety of possible outcomes.
By: Jorgen Randers, and others
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The Invention of Prehistory
- Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
- By: Stefanos Geroulanos
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 14 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 24
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 19
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Story4 out of 5 stars 19
Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Too much judgement
- By Historic Philosopher on 04-23-24
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The Conservative Mind
- From Burke to Eliot
- By: Russell Kirk
- Narrated by: Phillip Davidson
- Length: 19 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 270
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 206
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 204
Kirk defines "the conservative mind" by examining such brilliant men as Edmund Burke, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Quincy Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, George Santayana, and finally, T.S. Eliot. Vigorously written, the book represents conservatism as an ideology born of sound intellectual traditions.
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4 out of 5 stars
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An interim review
- By James on 09-18-09
By: Russell Kirk
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Overshoot
- The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
- By: William R. Catton
- Narrated by: MJ McGalliard
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story5 out of 5 stars 40
Our day-to-day experiences over the past decade have taught us that there must be limits to our tremendous appetite for energy, natural resources, and consumer goods. Even utility and oil companies now promote conservation in the face of demands for dwindling energy reserves. And for years some biologists have warned us of the direct correlation between scarcity and population growth.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Five Star Book... In Print Form.
- By Joshua on 11-04-20
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The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
- By: Christopher Lasch
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 231
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 197
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 192
In this challenging work, Christopher Lasch makes an accessible critique of what is wrong with the values and beliefs of America's professional and managerial elites. The distinguished historian argues that democracy today is threatened not by the masses, as Jose Ortega y Gasset ( The Revolt of the Masses) had said, but by the elites. These elites - mobile and increasingly global in outlook - refuse to accept limits or ties to nation and place.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The last twenty years proves the author right
- By Del Lewis-Chia on 08-08-20
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Fall of Civilizations
- Stories of Greatness and Decline
- By: Paul Cooper
- Narrated by: Paul Cooper
- Length: 19 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 146
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 132
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 132
Across the centuries, we journey from the great empires of Mesopotamia to those of Khmer and Vijayanagara in Asia and Songhai in West Africa; from Byzantium to the Maya, Inca and Aztecs of Central America; from Roman Britain to Rapa Nui. With meticulous research, breathtaking insight and dazzling, empathic storytelling, historian and novelist Paul Cooper evokes the majesty and jeopardy of these ancient civilizations, and asks what it might have felt like for a person alive at the time to witness the end of their world.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great audiobook
- By EquineBallet on 08-03-24
By: Paul Cooper
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Women's Work
- The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
- By: Elizabeth Wayland Barber
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 213
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 182
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Story5 out of 5 stars 181
Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Respectful treatment of the archeological record.
- By fiberflair on 02-23-21
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The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
- How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
- By: David W. Anthony
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 18 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 706
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 594
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 588
Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent
- By Anthony on 08-09-19
By: David W. Anthony
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1177 B.C. (Revised and Updated)
- The Year Civilization Collapsed
- By: Eric H. Cline
- Narrated by: Eric H. Cline
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 684
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 594
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 593
This audiobook narrated by acclaimed archaeologist and best-selling author Eric Cline offers a breathtaking account of how the collapse of an ancient civilized world ushered in the first Dark Ages.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Look past the one-star reviews: this is an enlightening and engaging read.
- By Alonzo Nightjar on 03-07-22
By: Eric H. Cline
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
- By: Shoshana Zuboff
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 24 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,657
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,405
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,398
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the 21st century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Book Editors failed to trim the word count
- By Todd B on 07-14-19
By: Shoshana Zuboff
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Seeing Like a State
- By: James C. Scott
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 479
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 391
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 387
Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? Author James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not - and cannot - be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Beats a dead horse and then beats it again
- By Nathan Parker on 10-29-20
By: James C. Scott
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Simulacra and Simulation
- Understanding Our World of Copies
- By: A. S. Aurelius
- Narrated by: Virtual Voice
- Length: 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall2.5 out of 5 stars 19
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Performance2.5 out of 5 stars 19
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Story2.5 out of 5 stars 19
Discover the world of simulacra and simulations in this insightful, brief and thought-provoking book based on the research of Jean Baudrillard. In straightforward and concise language, this short yet powerful exploration delves into topics such as the copycat world, the power of simulations, the loss of meaning, and the emergence of the hyperreal society. Navigating the Simulacra offers a critical examination of our contemporary digital landscape, challenging readers to question the influence of simulations on their perception of reality. This book provides a simple overview of ...
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2 out of 5 stars
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A brief simulation
- By Ivan Munchy on 04-17-24
By: A. S. Aurelius
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The Fourth Turning Is Here
- What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End
- By: Neil Howe
- Narrated by: Neil Howe
- Length: 20 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 475
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 405
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 404
Twenty-five years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly 80 to 100 years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about 25 years. The last of these eras—the fourth turning—was always the most perilous, a period of civic upheaval and national mobilization.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A little baffled
- By John Coleman on 07-18-23
By: Neil Howe
What listeners say about The Collapse of Complex Societies
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Nancy LaPlaca
- 04-06-25
Overly academic
Although I found the book overly academic, and even pedantic and hard to listen to because it was like reading a textbook, the information is excellent and Dr. Tainter really knows his stuff.
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