Combining social sciences, geoscience and archaeology to understand societal collapse

Despite its apparently obvious conclusion that adverse environmental conditions must produce economic and institutional crises, the "collapse archaeology" literature has been criticized for its lack of a formal theory, a credible measurement strategy and a proper understanding of the roles of environmental shocks. To tackle this issue, we propose to combine a time inconsistency theory of state formation and evolutiondi.e., state-building, institutional proxies based on this model and highly granular simulated climate data. To clarify our proposal, we apply it to the study of state-building in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, and we show that moderate droughts shaped these economies directly via deteriorated production conditions as well as indirectly via institutional resilience.& COPY; 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).