How Systems Collapse
Societal collapse is the fall of a complex human society. Such a disintegration may be relatively abrupt, as in the case of Maya civilization, or gradual, as in the case of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The subject of societal collapse is of interest in such fields as history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and, more recently, cliodynamics and complex-systems science. Common contributing factors are economical, environmental, social and cultural, and disruptions in one domain sometimes cascade into another. In some cases a natural disaster may precipitate a collapse.