quoting Rhetorica:

(It has been done.)

When I decided to criticize the paper for that, I meant to suggest specifically that other things can cause the collapse of a civilization—surely, for example, the Eastern Roman Empire is generally regarded as a victim of invasion and political decay rather than resource exhaustion.

that only makes sense if you look at very proximate causes and stop there. the roman empire *had* seen significant deurbanization which might indeed have been due to soil exhaustion, for example. the empire had seen armed conflicts with the various 'barbarians' in the region since way before the empire was an empire, and it did okay for the most part, and the late roman barbarian invasions were part of broader, global displacements which may have been associated with chinese campaigns against xiongnu polities in a domino migration effect... further, 535 was a terrible year with crop failures around the world that might well have had something to do with people abandoning Teotihuacán... i'm not saying, necessarily, that economic factors are necessarily the key to any civilizational collapse, but i'm saying that, well, we are not separate from the earth and climate and resource depletion will necessarily shape history.

quoting Rhetorica:

Indeed it is—but it is nowhere nearly as useful for conworlding.

i again disagree... making a conworld from a world-system perspective influenced by like cardoso y faletto and the recent "global history" trend in historiography instead of the more classical nationalistic toynbee-school-of-historiography perspective sounds interesting. if i ever go back into being productive at conworlding i might try to in future.