GOLIATH’S CURSE: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp
During the height of the ancient silver mining industry, when metal was pulled from the earth in southwestern Spain for the Greek drachmas and Phoenician coins that connected the wealthy ports of the Mediterranean, some three million tons of excess rock waste was produced before the Common Era.
The clay furnaces throughout the Iberian Pyrite Belt that separated the precious metal from other elements expelled a fine mist of lead dust that permeated Europe. In the glaciers of Greenland there exists a record of this production, ice-cores revealing strata discolored by the fine lead particulate that settled in this northern climate.
But as the Bronze Age transitioned into the Iron, the lead stratification in those glaciers dropped to literally nothing for a period of nearly three centuries. Evidence of the Bronze Age collapse is inscribed into the very rocks: We’ve been here before.
Luke Kemp’s new book, “Goliath’s Curse,” considers the calamity that occurred nearly two millenniums before the fall of Rome, as well as similar occurrences in the Yucatán and Han China, on the Pacific island of Rapa Nui and among the Cahokia people of the Mississippian plain.
A scholar at Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk who has worked as an adviser for the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, Kemp has been referred to in the media as “Dr. Doom.” By methodically observing the factors responsible for societal collapse, he attempts to mine the commonalities and complexities in disparate cultures.
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