Megadrought and Collapse: From Early Agriculture to Angkor ed. by Harvey Weiss (review)

Behind this rhetorical flourish lies a resolutely embraced methodological imperative, which runs throughout the volume and links its geographically, chronologically, and disciplinarily diffuse contributions together: the search for quantifi-able data of sufficient temporal and spatial granularity to support arguments for causation that rest on observed instances of correlation or coincidence between instances of extreme, protracted aridity and the sudden or slow subsidence of states. While the present volume is rhetorically arrayed around the consideration of drought, it is in fact the unpredictability of this variability—between aridity and humidity, between rainfall maxima and rainfall minima, between monsoon and desiccation—that appears most challenging for the states under discussion here. [...]in their analysis of the irrigation system of Angkor, Fletcher et al. remark upon the irony of an infrastructure exceptionally well adapted to insuring against drought being irreparably damaged by a small number of extreme flooding events (295-304). While few, if any, of the contributors steadfastly embrace megadrought as the sole factor causing the demise of the states they explore, they nonetheless assign a pivotal role to climate change in the significant reductions in infrastructural and political complexity that they observe.