[Prospero]

Everywhere the Bronze Age's end is heralded by flight and fire, recorded in written lamentations of crisis and collapse in Sumer, Asia Minor and Egypt, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean with ash and depopulation.

Then silence for a lingering century, though usually more, with necessity stimulating one of the most inventive periods in human history.

Does anyone speculate on the timing, how it might coordinate with the spread of the Sea People (that model of diversity unequaled until the prison and punk street gang anti-culture of our day)?

Most experts, if I remember correctly, trace their origins to the western Mediterranean, so this depredation might place a whole new spin on the beginning of that ancient dark age.

[SunkenCiv]

This appears to have been a village built on piers over a swampy or riverine area, like Lake-town in "The Hobbit", but consistent with a longstanding practice common in prehistoric Europe. The Sea People were mentioned a couple of times in Egyptian records of the New Kingdom; they didn't have the grandiose existence posited for them by alleged scholars. They are a curious group -- they had no homeland, left no settlements, left no characteristic burials, weapons, language, DNA -- and yet they are used as a kludge to account for a dark age that never happened.