[The_Reader_David]

Evidently historical education, at least among those who specialize in the sciences, is as far eroded in the British Isles as it is here.

And if you don't care about the Roman Empire, then you are ignoring the counter-example which shows the analysis which links the tree-rings and accounts of portents in the sky and bad harvests to civilizational failure to be false.

Civilization collapsed in Western Europe, but did not in the Roman Empire--indeed the article cites Procopius, the court historian to Justinian, who wrote both the official histories and the scandal-ridden "Secret History". Neither bad harvests nor plagues nor cold summers collapsed the civilization whose center had shifted from Rome to New Rome (a.k.a. Constantinople) with the removal of the capital there by Constantine in the 4th century.

You may not care about the Empire, but the author of the article and Baillie (whose name seems misspelled at one point) evently do:

In their book "The Origin Of Comets", Bailey, Clube, and Napier write : "the destruction and chaos accompanying the fate of the Roman empire [midway through the First Millennium] was all but total, the almost complete breakdown of the old order leading to a loss of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of antiquity which was far from temporary."

The old order hardly broke down, except in the areas which had been subjected to barbarian invasion, and accumulated knowledge and wisdom were not lost, except in those areas. Classical knowledge was continuously available in the Empire--it is from the conquered monophysite provinces that the Muslims acquired Greek learning, and notable works of literature containing classical allusions were written throughout the life of the Empire (St. Photius in the 9th century was a notable humanist; Anna Comnena's 11th century biography of her father is rife with references to Homer.) Nor did Roman engineering suffer during the period: one of the great architectural masterpieces of the world and a triumph of engineering with its soaring semidomes supporting the central dome, with numerous windows surrounding the dome and piercing the semidomes, the Hagia Sophia, was build during the very period in question (and its engineers wrote treatises on solid geometry), the walls of Constantinople, which until the gunpowder era only fell to treachery at the time of the 4th Crusade were also built in the 'Dark Ages'.

I am criticizing the link between the claimed global catastrophe and the local conditions in Western Europe. Bad harvests or no, comets and meteors in the sky or no, skinny tree rings or no, the Western provinces had been detached from Imperial rule by the barbarian invasions in practice, though at first not in theory. The barbarians were not assimilated fast enough, and thus brough illiteracy (and indeed an attitude which held that literacy was not a fit pursuit for 'noble' warriors) with them.

Where Imperial rule was maintained, the dire civilizational effects Baillie et al. attribute to planetary bombardment simply didn't happen.

[blam]

My interests are anthropology and archaeology, not history. The Roman Empire to me is like current events.

"The barbarians were not assimilated fast enough, and thus brough illiteracy (and indeed an attitude which held that literacy was not a fit pursuit for 'noble' warriors) with them."

The barbarians were probably streaming south to get away from the increasing cold in the north due to the dust veil around the earth that was blocking the sunlight.

And, the Bailey mentioned in the article is an astronomer and a different person than Mike Baillie.

[rkellie]

Actually, the Romans were no more civilized than their neighbors. Their culture for the most part was absorbed from the civilizations they conquered, especially the Greek. The suggestion that the Muslims acquired Greek "learning" shows a Eurocentric view mirrored by the actual name of the Mediterranean (Middle Earth) Sea. The earliest "civilizations" actually arose in the East and much of Greek thought had evolved under that influence. There is as much give as there is take. Romans were as much, if not more, barbaric, in comparison to the Empires they conquered.

The dark ages arose because the Roman Empire drained her subject states of men (through war and enslavement) and natural resources. The resource base was consumed to create an illusion of Pax Romanus and wealth at the core of the Empire, while at the edges, Rome took what she needed by the edge of the sword. The tension built by this stress snapped like an elastic band after the vassal states threw off the yoke of the Roman aggressors. A similar situation can be seen today in the decimated infrastructure in Iraq.

The east remained within the Empire, as the societies there had already established a bureaucracy that could be used to control the masses.

The impact of meteorites can only have exacerbated and accelerated this situation. Less light = lower yields, unless of course we are speaking of mushrooms.