Do Collapses help Technology?

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Anders

According to my extensive research on Google (30 seconds), there's no such proverb or curse.

But this is a rabbit hole.

Well, I did use quote marks, so I was acknowledging the doubt of authenticity.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

Bronze Age Collapse
TL 1 to TL2 followed
Fall of Rome
TL 2 to TL 3
Black Death
TL 3 to TL 4
Coincidence or pattern?

I would say coincidence as past TL4 the pattern is less clear.

TL1-2

The cause of the Bronze Age Collapse is all over the place. Some what it was Iron weapons (TL2) that caused it, others point to environmental changes that effectively destroyed the trade networks needed to make bronze, while others point to those along side other factors as the cause.

TL2-3

While GUPRS puts TL3 at c. 600 CE if you look at the Basic Set and Low Tech you see some TL3 innovations before Rome went kaput in 476 CE:
*Steel (1st century BCE),
*Books (Codex, described 1st century CE),
*Oceangoing sailing ships (on paper the Greeks at TL1 could have built ships on "equals of early modern ships of trade and exploration")
*Crude prosthetics; anatomical science: thanks to battles and the Colosseum the Romans actual were at TL3-4 for this as much of their work would be found thanks to the conquests of El Cid

TL3-4
This is one of those weird ones. The Black Death pushed for a cheap way to make written material as half the clarks were dead which was the printing press. The movable type printing press is what really kicked off progress into TL4.

[Pursuivant]

Regional collapses usually cause local regression in TL, potentially followed by eventual increases in TL 2-3 generations later as old social structures and assumptions are swept away by history.

This isn't always the case, however. Sometimes, technological regression is just that, particularly if there is massive population loss or permanent loss of some critical resource.

For example, the collapse of the Easter Island civilization due to loss of seafaring boats just caused starvation and massive population declines without any subsequent renaissance.

As another example, hemisphere-wide New World indigenous populations dropped massively after 1492 due to exposure to Old World diseases. Even in areas where there was limited European conquest/genocide, there was no renaissance in native culture even centuries later. (Arguably, the one big cultural change to indigenous culture was the reintroduction of the horse to North America, but it only had a major impact on Plains Indians culture and only after about ~1800.)

My guess is that the tipping point for collapse and eventual renaissance is 10-50% population loss with associated major social revolution. Greater population loss and/or permanent resource loss just results in regression.

Against this possibility, consider Chinese civilization which, despite periods of terrible turmoil, survived relatively culturally unchanged from ~1250 B.C.E. to ~1700 C.E., advancing from TL2 to TL4, before stagnating due to cultural conservatism.

[Tom Mazanec]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

Unless you can show:
<Collapse>
TL4 to TL5
<Collapse>
TL 5 to TL6
<Collapse>
TL6 to TL7
<Collapse>
TL 7 to TL8
you don't have a pattern (and we should by your suggestion see a collapse responsible for TL0 to TL1).

The cause for the Bronze Age Collapse is disputed.

Going by the effects of your three postulated collapses, the pattern is more: the collapse of international trade and diplomacy isolates and disrupts the expected order of things for the societies of the known world. This gives leeway for new methods to be in effect when those societies reconnect. Not for the new methods to be present of necessity, but simply for it to be possible that new methods exist.

Absent the pattern, I'd say coincidence, maybe even happenstance.

Maybe TL 4 to TL 8 is just one huge revolution?
And I read somewhere that Azilian culture was a collapse from more advanced Magdelanian culture at the end of the Stone Age.

[Opellulo]

I stumbled in a public scholarship project held by a renown historian from the University of North Carolina. Among the many interesting posts he wrote there is a 3 part series about the fall of the Roman Empire: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collec...-part-i-words/

The debate about the fall of the Roman Empire is also an academic one (with historians siding either for "continuing and evolution" or "fall and collapse") its view is a bit more nuanced according to the aspects you see but yet, no basis to claim a "technological advance".

It's really informative and entertaining blog to read because his starting points often comes from pop culture: he uses videogames, movies and books as hooks to explain how the things were going and in the end you learn a lot about history using your nerd interests... wow

The whole blog is a precious resource for any story based campaign.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

Bronze Age Collapse
TL 1 to TL2 followed
Fall of Rome
TL 2 to TL 3
Black Death
TL 3 to TL 4
Coincidence or pattern?

While an interesting idea I would say coincidence. First the Tech levels are arbitrary

Second the dates only work with the West.

Third, if you take the information provided in the basic set and (blank) Tech books (combined for your connivence on the GURPS wiki) it becomes that many periods were split TLs

Finally, except for Bronze Age Collapse the somewhat arbitrary start dates are off:

Bronze Age Collapse: c.1200 and 1150 BCE
*TL2: c.1200 BCE (some theories say it was the appearance of iron that left to the Collapse)
Fall of Rome: 476 CE
*TL3: 800+ CE (nearly 400 years later)
Black Death: 1346 to 1353 CE
*TL4: 1450+ (The muslims had saved a lot of Greek and Roman texts which helped kick TL4 off)

[Michael Thayne]

I've spent a bunch of time trying to read up on the Bronze Age for fantasy world-building purposes, and one of the main things I learned is there's a lot of questions we just don't know the answers to, because the written record is so sparse. So untangling cause and effect regarding the Bronze Age collapse is impossible to do with certainty. On the other hand, the bronze age / iron age distinction certainly isn't arbitrary, and there's at least a plausible story you can tell where the collapse of trade routes led to the development of iron working.

With the fall of Rome, on the other hand, basically you have a devastating series of wars leading to massively lower standards of living in Western Europe, something that took centuries to recover from. While the eventual recovery did coincide with some improvements in agricultural techniques (a key factor in determining standards of living for agrarian societies), it's much harder to tell a story where those improvements wouldn't have happened, or would have happened much later, absent the collapse.

The Black Death is probably an in-between case in terms of plausibility. You can argue the population decline provided a powerful motive for finding less labor-intensive ways of doing things, but it's hard to point to one decisive development that led to that would serve as an analogue of iron-working.

[Lovewyrm]

It probably just looks like that.
It's not like that during peace time noone invents anything.
Just looks like the upwind afterwards is more meaningful in comparison.

Could also be that during a collapse things aren't chronicled properly or are known to the general population easily.