Concepts of collapse, resilience and mobility in prehistoric archaeology

The topic of societal collapse was introduced to archaeological and anthropological sciences from different directions in the late 1980ies. In the same measure as societies of the early 21st century got aware of global change the concept of past societal collapse was popularized. This can be shown exemplarily through the hype around books of Jared Diamond, reaching extremely large readership. Archaeology – and mainly prehistoric archaeology – is a science, which is used to work with large times scales. Contributions to climate change research therefore offer chances to get involved in research topics of societal relevance. If archaeologists can show that during long periods of the Holocene human societies have been vulnerable and were forced to be adaptive to new environmental situations this may also change the view of our own, comparable quite static societies of the 21st century