Doug M. said:
Another relevant model here may be the Greek Dark Ages. The Mycenaens were a seagoing Bronze Age civilization scattered across islands and mainland, with a fair degree of specialized trade. They were in almost every respect more advanced then our *Arawaks (writing, domestic animals, better food package) and also had the benefit of proximity to other major civilizational centers. Yet they collapsed so fast and so completely that we're still not sure what happened, and it took three centuries before civilization even began to recover. Archeological evidence from the Greek Dark Ages suggests that population crashed dramatically; towns and cities disappeared off the map entirely, trade links vanished, literacy seems to have been completely lost. Even their pottery got simpler and more primitive.
Alright, that makes more sense to me. Thanks for explaining that. I do wish I knew more about the collapse of Mycenaean Greeks... and it looks like recent research has overturned many hypotheses on what caused the collapse and how bad it really got.
The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age:
Continuity and Change Between the Twelfth and Eighth Centuries B.C. by Oliver Dickinson looks like a good book to read about this new up-to-date research, it came out in 2006.
Mycenaean Greece collapsed most probably due to environmental catastrophes in the form of drought and famine, and pressures from hostile populations in the form of invasion and raiding. Iron-working was spreading rapidly, making weapons easier to make and mass produce, thus shaking up geopolitics between the haves and the have-nots... the Dorians and the Sea People were the haves in this situation, the Greeks on the other side, and who suffered? The Greeks. But they also lost their trade links during the collapse that gave them copper and tin, so they started forging iron themselves. During the "Greek Dark Ages" (a term being used less and less nowadays as it is shown to not be as bad as previously thought) ironworking flourished in Greece and changed their civilization for the better. Superior pottery appeared after a century of more simplified 'barbaric' examples, the Protogeometric, with better glazes and better potter's wheels. Technology continued to progress after a century of stagnation, and finally blossomed into a renaissance by the 9th century BCE. Large parts of the country was still devastated, but some places recovered rather quickly: Attica, Euboea, Central Crete. From these remnants, technology was remembered and built upon after a century, and eventually they were able to restart the Greek civilization into the new age.
It seems the *Arawaks will fall due to different pressures than the Mycenaeans, and you've already depicted these: soil exhaustion, deforestation, disease. These are the root causes, all created as a by-product of the increased technology, population, and civilization in the Caribbean basin. The soil is exhausted because cotton is cultivated extensively on the islands to provide sails and rigging for *Arawak ships. Also, as you've said before, *Arawak cities begin to depend on specializing in order to make up differences in trade, which leads to the development of monocultures, which is bad for the soil. Old-growth trees are found farther and farther away from river or coastline due to a tree being felled for every *Arawak ship, which decays faster than they grow (15-75 years compared to hundreds). More labor is required as the close old-growth trees are no more, because you need more men to scout for the trees, to roll the logs a longer distance, and to clear the land for log-rolling roads. The cost of dugout canoes increases, even as attempts are made to make smaller catamarans so that shorter trees can be cut down. Less trading ships means there are less bronze tools, which means the labor requirement of cutting down trees rapidly increases as slaves must now use stone axes instead of bronze ones. At the same time, less slaving ships (and less bronze weapons) leads to less slaves, which means that existing slaves must be forced to serve for longer periods, and work longer hours. The increasing demands of the *Arawak slave caste rapidly lead to slave revolts. And finally: disease. As population densities increase, and as exploration leads to more peoples coming into contact with one another, diseases can more easily find vectors and flourish in the host population when they get there.
As all of these pressures increase and multiply one another, there are resource wars and increased raiding... a collapse becomes inevitable as a society becomes unstable. I get that. But the devils in the details. When do the soils start becoming exhausted? Whenever we want them to? When does deforestation become enough of a problem that the vicious cycle I mentioned grows teeth? And when does tloggotl hit for the first time? For the third question, it makes sense that tloggotl would be the Third Wave, the last and largest, only appearing after the others have done their worst... because malnourishment, warfare and moving populations would allow for the perfect environment for it to strike. But it seems like we can accurately predict when the soils start becoming dangerously exhausted, when the close old-growth trees die out, when the population grows beyond its ability to feed itself. And when it happens, there will be massive depopulation, but might pockets survive better than the others, like Attica, Euboea, and Crete?
Think about it: the *Arawak civilization is built on outriggers and old-growth trees at first, then cotton, then slaves, then bronze. The bronze is taken away, there's no new source of slaves (though local populations could be used... who knows, maybe the former *Arawaks become slaves on some islands), there's still cotton though less of it can be grown and there's less labor to grow it, but there's no trees of suitable size on most islands. And outriggers? No reason why
everyone would forget that handy piece of tech. And about this quote of yours, Doug:
Doug M. said:
Finally, I note that there's no adjacent outside civilization to "rescue" the *Arawaks, or even to move in and pick up the pieces. So once civilization falls, it's likely to stay fallen for a while.
What about the Mesoamericans, the Maya, the Chesapeake, the Timucuan, and the Amazonian polities? It's been stated that the Tlon picked up the *Arawak navigational package, in a crude form, and started building catamarans on the Pacific. Why wouldn't they build boats in the Caribbean at some point and make the short 200-kilometer jaunt to Cuba to trade (perhaps raiding abandoned cities along the way)? Is there nothing of value in the Antilles in which the natives can trade for bronze? With bronze, everything else becomes easier. And within a hundred years, there could definitely be enough trees along the Venezuelan coastline and along the Orinoco to start building large catamarans again.