New research explores how technological civilizations grow, collapse, and recover, and what this means for detecting ...

Human history is littered with expired civilizations, and scholars and archaeologists have made a determined effort to understand why and how civilizations collapse. They've found that symptoms like a ...

History is filled with powerful empires that seemed invincible until they weren't. Between roughly 1250 and 1150 BCE, major cities were destroyed, whole civilizations fell, diplomatic and trade ...

The mysterious collapse of the Maya civilization may not have been driven solely by drought after all. New evidence from lake sediments in Guatemala reveals that one key city, Itzan, enjoyed a stable ...

Successive major droughts, each lasting longer than 85 years, were likely a key factor in the eventual fall of the Indus Valley Civilization, according to a paper in Communications Earth & Environment ...

External enemies expose weakness, but internal division and inaction are what ultimately bring civilizations down.

It is one of the most famous questions in science, and it was asked, as legend has it, over lunch. Enrico Fermi, the physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and whose name graces a unit ...

In “Goliath’s Curse,” Luke Kemp crunches the numbers to see exactly how far we are from the fate of once-great empires. A detail from Samuel Colman’s “The Edge of Doom” (1836-38).Credit...Samuel ...

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