The Evolution of Fragility: Setting the Terms. NORMAN YOFFEE, editor. 2019. MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge. x + 196 pp. Open access (https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.40692), ISBN 978-1-902937-88-5
Abstract
First-person accounts are especially harrowing: Since it started until today, the number of dead is always growing, from ten, twenty, from thirty to forty, from fifty to sixty, and to eighty, and from now going forward The scales of the two events are incomparable (in terms of both the numbers of fatalities and the geographical areas affected), but both sixteenth-century hemorrhagic fevers and a twenty-first-century coronavirus, along with the cases detailed in The Evolution of Fragility: Setting the Terms, raise key and imminently relevant questions about what makes states fragile, where in complex social and political hierarchies that fragility lies, and how it might be identified and analyzed The book itself reads almost as a transcript of the conference: a short introduction (under six pages), followed by a series of nine stand-alone, paradigmatic case studies: the Andes (Dillehay and Wernke), Bronze Age China (Li), the Classic Maya lowlands (McAnany), Egypt (Morris), Cahokia and Chaco (Pauketat), the Indus civilization (Petrie), sub-Saharan Africa (Robertshaw), Angkor (Stark), and Mesopotamia (Yoffee and Seri)
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