“In both cases, the late and early Bronze Age collapses, a dominance hierarchy was established which was so strong that it was more difficult to topple from within. However, it could be brought to fall by outside pressures and like with our earlier examples of collapse on smaller scales, our archeological evidence points to the fact that for most people this collapse was good actually, as their height and health improved after the collapse”
I think it is less obvious than it might seem that height alone or even health in a slightly broader sense is a good measure of whether people’s lives improved or got worse after collapses, or that the only plausible reason height would improve after a collapse is that less stuff is expropriated by oppressive states. Here’s a Roman historian claiming on his blog that probably people got taller and healthier after the collapse of Western Roman governance, but many other reasonable indicators of well-being got much worse, and the most probable cause of the lower height at the peak of Roman power was greater levels of disease from denser population and more long distance trade that also faciliated higher consumption, not expropriation by extractive elites:
“Post-publication note: It turns out the evidence for biological health is a lot more complex. For those looking to see the latest on that, check out W.M. Jongman, J.P.A.M. Jacobs, and G.M. Klein Goldewijk, “Health and wealth in the Roman Empire” in Economics and Human Biology (2019). The upshot is that with a larger dataset and a more sophisticated approach to it, they show that in fact the ‘biological standard of living’ in the Roman Empire does seem to have declined as the population grew and then improved as the population declined, the reverse of the pattern of the data above. That said, they note that this is despite all of the other indicators of well-being, including diet indicators, moving the other way, meaning that even as diet improved, height fell. They attribute the shift to a ‘health cost’ mostly due to disease prevalence from the denser population and greater degree of trade, a direct tradeoff for the greater material wealth of the Roman world. One factor they consider but dismiss is the possibility that the data is being shaped by changing burial customs, because elite Romans tended to cremate (which would remove their bones from the sample) but that pre-Roman populations and later Christians, including elites, inhumed. That might mean that our Roman period sample is depressed because the wealthier parts of society have been systematically removed. They dismiss this on the grounds that it would require assuming that the impact of social class was greater than that of period, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t have been given that we’re talking about baseline nutrition impacts and the basic math of subsistence doesn’t change that much over time. I’d assume that a wealthy Roman elite or 9th century noble probably ate more meat than a peasant at any point in pre-modern history, so the possibility that elite burials have been systematically excluded from the same is a serious one and potentially confounds the entire dataset.” (https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/ The whole blog post is worth reading, this is not a summary of its overall argument by any means. Overall, he claims that the Kemp-style “collapse actually good” view is not implausible for the Fall of Rome a priori, and has some scholarly support, but seems to him to be mostly contradicted by the available archeological evidence.)
I should say, I’m not actually accusing your or Kemp (whose book I haven’t read; it sounds interesting and challenging) of actually having the oversimplified view on height as an indicator here, I just thought it was worth flagging some of the complexities just in case.
EDIT: I should add: even if average material standards of living were improved by the Roman (or any other) Empire, that does not necessarily outweigh the harm of making slavery more widespread or more brutal for a large minority (assuming slavery was indeed worse/more widespread under Roman than before/after, something I don’t actually have an opinion on.)
“In both cases, the late and early Bronze Age collapses, a dominance hierarchy was established which was so strong that it was more difficult to topple from within. However, it could be brought to fall by outside pressures and like with our earlier examples of collapse on smaller scales, our archeological evidence points to the fact that for most people this collapse was good actually, as their height and health improved after the collapse”
I think it is less obvious than it might seem that height alone or even health in a slightly broader sense is a good measure of whether people’s lives improved or got worse after collapses, or that the only plausible reason height would improve after a collapse is that less stuff is expropriated by oppressive states. Here’s a Roman historian claiming on his blog that probably people got taller and healthier after the collapse of Western Roman governance, but many other reasonable indicators of well-being got much worse, and the most probable cause of the lower height at the peak of Roman power was greater levels of disease from denser population and more long distance trade that also faciliated higher consumption, not expropriation by extractive elites:
“Post-publication note: It turns out the evidence for biological health is a lot more complex. For those looking to see the latest on that, check out W.M. Jongman, J.P.A.M. Jacobs, and G.M. Klein Goldewijk, “Health and wealth in the Roman Empire” in Economics and Human Biology (2019). The upshot is that with a larger dataset and a more sophisticated approach to it, they show that in fact the ‘biological standard of living’ in the Roman Empire does seem to have declined as the population grew and then improved as the population declined, the reverse of the pattern of the data above. That said, they note that this is despite all of the other indicators of well-being, including diet indicators, moving the other way, meaning that even as diet improved, height fell. They attribute the shift to a ‘health cost’ mostly due to disease prevalence from the denser population and greater degree of trade, a direct tradeoff for the greater material wealth of the Roman world. One factor they consider but dismiss is the possibility that the data is being shaped by changing burial customs, because elite Romans tended to cremate (which would remove their bones from the sample) but that pre-Roman populations and later Christians, including elites, inhumed. That might mean that our Roman period sample is depressed because the wealthier parts of society have been systematically removed. They dismiss this on the grounds that it would require assuming that the impact of social class was greater than that of period, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t have been given that we’re talking about baseline nutrition impacts and the basic math of subsistence doesn’t change that much over time. I’d assume that a wealthy Roman elite or 9th century noble probably ate more meat than a peasant at any point in pre-modern history, so the possibility that elite burials have been systematically excluded from the same is a serious one and potentially confounds the entire dataset.” (https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/ The whole blog post is worth reading, this is not a summary of its overall argument by any means. Overall, he claims that the Kemp-style “collapse actually good” view is not implausible for the Fall of Rome a priori, and has some scholarly support, but seems to him to be mostly contradicted by the available archeological evidence.)
I should say, I’m not actually accusing your or Kemp (whose book I haven’t read; it sounds interesting and challenging) of actually having the oversimplified view on height as an indicator here, I just thought it was worth flagging some of the complexities just in case.
EDIT: I should add: even if average material standards of living were improved by the Roman (or any other) Empire, that does not necessarily outweigh the harm of making slavery more widespread or more brutal for a large minority (assuming slavery was indeed worse/more widespread under Roman than before/after, something I don’t actually have an opinion on.)