The fall of Rome

What Hacker News says

1. KeyshAug 2019
   There's an excellent book on the subject called The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, by Bryan Ward-Perkins. It includes a detailed overview of the archeological evidence, which shows a very clear and dramatic decline in the economy and living standards -- and some areas of technology -- between circa 350 and 600 in the Western Empire. (And the recovery afterwards took centuries.) The Eastern Empire, interestingly, doesn't show any signs of a similar decline until the 7th Century.

   For example, peasant households in Italy at the height of the empire had a wide variety of well-made pottery, some of it originating from production centers hundreds of miles away, along with tiled roofs; after the collapse, the variety and quality of pottery was greatly reduced, and tiled roofs disappear. (Tiled roofs provide better protection against rain, are less flammable, and require less maintenance and rebuilding than wooden shingles or thatch; but they also require large kilns, lots of clay and fuel, and a good transportation network.)

   And ice cores from Greenland show extensive metalworking going on in Western Europe (in the form of copper and lead pollution carried through the air) during the Roman Empire; after the collapse of the Western Empire, the pollution levels don't return to Roman-era values until the 16th Century.

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2. jdminhbgApr 2019
   For an opposite perspective, Bryan Ward-Perkins' "The Fall Of Rome: And the End of Civilization" is a readable-by-the-layperson argument that the end of Roman authority in Western Europe resulted in significant falls in trade, health, literacy, cultural achievement, and more: https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807...
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3. bertr4ndFeb 2020
   I just read Bryan Ward-Perkins’s “The Fall of Rome” and it argues pretty persuasively that the era after the fall was materially worse off than during the Roman Empire. Specifically the quality and quantity of manufactured artifacts and dwellings in the archaeological record appears to fall off substantially. Not to mention there’s some evidence (eg graffiti fragments) that indicates literacy also declined in this period.
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4. clock_towerOct 2016
   "Dark Age" certainly doesn't mean the whole Middle Ages -- Petrarch was (a) an ass and (b) writing in what was still the Middle Ages -- but I think that modern historians try to minimize how much really was lost in late antiquity and the "Viking Age" after Charlemagne. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization discusses the first of these periods; A History of Private Life has some interesting discussion of the second, and there was a memorable discussion of the Viking Age in the Archdruid Report blog not long ago. The Archdruid Report's author put it this way, more or less: "a dark age is a time in which the memory of what was lost, is lost."

   As for slavery, I object to how Civ makes it almost inevitable; at least back in Civ 4, you underperform for the whole game if you don't work your people to death in the Classical period. Disease definitely needs a larger part in the game as well...

   I'd also argue for food insecurity and Malthusian limits (as in reaching the carrying capacity of an ecosystem -- or surpassing that carrying capacity, damaging the whole thing, and producing great mobs of the starving and desperate who'll eagerly listen to anyone who tells them who to kill to fix their problems) being conspicuous by their absence. Population growth wasn't all upside in the long ages that had neither the Haber process nor Norman Borlaug's hybrids...

   But then, I've heard that an early version of Civ 1 tried to depict the rise and fall of civilizations, but players hated the fall part, so they just made it rise and rise. The mass market doesn't pay to feel uncomfortable...

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5. pacofvfSep 2014
   Indeed, maybe there was no scientific dark age in the Middle ages, at least not globally, but It was a dark age in Europe, knowledge was lost, the (roman) world economy collapsed and entirely disappeared, economic throughput and population would not recover until the industrial revolution[1]. The dark age ended when the last remaining of the ancient Roman world was forcibly dispersed from Constantinople, most of it found a safe harbor in Italian cities that would become the center of the Renaissance.[2]

   [1] Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization

   [2] Brownworth, Lars. Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

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