A broader view of collapse: Using palaeoecological techniques to reconstruct occupation dynamics across a networked society undergoing transformation

Abstract

Societies increase in complexity via the growth and fragmentation of networks. City networks, for example, increasingly comprise our globalised landscape, and most social, political and economic systems operate across these spatial frameworks. The organisational structure that these city networks develop reveals much about the way these networks function and their susceptibility to undergo change in the face of significant environmental or political stress. When disruption in these networks occurs, the way these networks transform in time and space can also expose the nature of the relationships that operate between primary and secondary cities. During the Angkor period (9th-15th centuries CE), the Khmer kingdom extended across the majority of Southeast Asia, and comprised a capital (Angkor) connected to a network of secondary cities. By the mid-15th century however, severe climate stress befell the region, and Angkor was abandoned by the political and elite in favour of smaller centres on the kingdom’s southern periphery. Supposedly, this event coincided with the abandonment of several other key secondary cities, and the unravelling of the Angkor-period city network. Palaeoecological analysis (sedimentary, pollen and charcoal) provides an innovative approach to reconstructing the occupation dynamics, and thus the timing of abandonment, of two key secondary cities during this transformation period. Results suggest that both cities maintained intensive land uses through much of the Angkor period, before land use attenuated and Angkor-period water management techniques ceased prior to the presumed abandonment of Angkor, as power in the capital waned. These results suggest a high degree of integration and interdependence between Angkor and its network of secondary cities had been reached by the end of the Angkor period.