2200 BC-A climatic breakdown as a cause for the collapse of the Old World?

identity politics through engagement with common material objects. Third is warfare, long identified with state formation, whereby physical intimidation establishes an unstable regional political order. Fourth is the actual building of an institutional apparatus of governance that involves the development of systems of distancing (what Richard Blanton calls ‘exclusionary’ strategies) and of legitimacy. Smith also introduces a series of processes, which he labels sensibility (flows, transubstantiation), sense (metamorphosis, transfiguration) and sentiment. Although I rather like the literary reference to Jane Austen, the use of such terminology would seem more appropriate to theology than to materialist studies in archaeology.