1008 social collapse and abandonment: The Americas THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE Augustine of Hippo (354–430 C.E.) and Jerome (ca 347–419 or 420 C.E.) were the last two masters of the classical Roman literary tradition Both of these writers, while writing on Christian topics, were steeped in the Latin of Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.), Virgil (70–19 B.C.E.), and other writers of classical Latin As early as the fifth century C.E., however, the Latin language had begun to split apart In some quarters people tried to preserve the classical language by continuing to write in an elaborate style; works such as those of Martianus Capella (fourth to fifth century C.E.), a Vandal writing in Carthage around 470, are full of allusions to classical literature In other quarters, local dialects became more pronounced, beginning as early as the fourth century C.E Egeria, a woman who made a pilgrimage from Spain to Jerusalem in 384 C.E., left a diary that shows a version of Latin that would have been hard for a classical Roman to understand The elaborate system of Latin grammar became simplified, and its verbs became more regular By the seventh century the language of Italy resembled medieval Italian more than classical Latin In the eighth century in formerly Roman parts of France, the definite article (the) first appears as lo, la, lis, moving toward modern French’s le, la, les In the western part of the former empire Latin survived as a tool that allowed scholars and church officials to communicate with each other As a means for communicating with the common people, it died by the ninth century when, in 813 C.E., a decree from the bishop of Tours forbade sermons in Latin, which the common people could no longer understand rulers, while considering themselves Roman, were more likely to be Gothic or Germanic in ethnicity and culture For ordinary people, the Roman Empire was no longer the organizing institution, upholder of laws, or guarantor of security Ecclesiastical institutions (churches and monasteries) and ecclesiastical officers (priests, monks, abbots, and bishops) were more likely to take over local government and play central roles in local economies So, for example, Apollinaris Sidonius (ca 430–487 or 488 c.e.), from Lugdunum in Gaul, grew up in an aristocratic Roman family and married a Roman woman whose father, Avitus (r 455–456 c.e.), would eventually become a Roman emperor But his political career ended when Avitus was killed and Apollinaris Sidonius became bishop of Auvergne There he dedicated his life to writing histories of Roman emperors His numerous letters reveal, however, that he was not, in fact, preserving a corner of Rome (as he believed) but governing a small, independent fragment of a collapsed empire THE AMERICAS BY KEITH JORDAN Several episodes of cultural and political change in the ancient Americas fit modern definitions of social collapse—the breaking down of a complex (by modern Western standards) sociopolitical arrangement into what look like simpler or more chaotic systems We must be careful, however Collapse carries a negative connotation, but ancient peoples may not necessarily have experienced these changes as negative or as forced upon them Nor can we cling to discredited theories of cultural evolution, claiming that societies develop toward greater complexity (often defined in Western terms) and that a change in the opposite direction constitutes disaster Finally, since we lack written records for any of these developments in the ancient Americas, our reconstructions from archaeological data are always speculative and tentative and may be invalidated when the next major find is unearthed In the North American Midwest the Hopewell culture (200 b.c.e.–400 c.e.)—more accurately described as a ritual and burial complex linked by trade networks—seems to have vanished by 400 c.e No more Hopewell burial mounds or ceremonial centers were constructed, and the trade networks linking areas as distant as the Rocky Mountains and the Gulf Coast ceased to bring exotic materials to Ohio and Illinois sites Pottery decoration became less elaborate and objects included in graves simpler and scantier Societies seem to have become more egalitarian: No longer burials include a very few with especially rich items, suggesting the existence of an elite Some archaeologists once believed that a shift toward cooler weather in the Midwest around 300 c.e spurred the decline of the Hopewell phenomenon by making it difficult to grow the corn on which the culture supposedly relied for food However, we now know that Native Americans in the Hopewell areas did not start growing corn on a large scale until five centuries after Hopewell culture disappeared, and there is no firm evidence for the alleged climate shift On the contrary, in the centuries following the Hopewell “collapse” the peoples of eastern North America became more dependent on corn agriculture, leading to growing populations, bigger settlements, and ultimately the rise of the complex Mississippian cultures (900–1600 c.e.) with their huge towns, massive mounds, and powerful chiefs Other proposed reasons for the disappearance of the Hopewell include economic factors In one theory trade networks collapsed because Native Americans in the southeast started to work local copper deposits instead of relying on copper mined in the Lake Superior region But the archaeological evidence indicates that Lake Superior copper was mined and widely traded up to the European invasion in the