page_title: Societal collapse
hierarchical_section_title: Societal collapse
context_page_description: Societal collapse is the fall of a complex human society. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, and depopulation. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.
  Various models and theories explaining societal collapse have been proposed, involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of resources, unsustainable complexity, decay of social cohesion, rising inequality, and loss of creativity. A disintegration may be relatively abrupt, as for Maya civilization, or gradual, as in the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
  Societal collapse is studied by academic disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and more recently cliodynamics and complex-systems science.
context_section_description: Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, and depopulation. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.
  Various models and theories explaining societal collapse have been proposed, involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of resources, unsustainable complexity, decay of social cohesion, rising inequality,  and loss of creativity. A disintegration may be relatively abrupt, as for Maya civilization, or gradual, as in the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
  Societal collapse is studied by academic disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and more recently cliodynamics and complex-systems science.
caption: Destruction, Course of Empire, by Thomas Cole (1836).
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