Eric Cline

American archaeologist; Professor of Classics and Anthropology at The George Washington University. Author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton UP, 2014; revised 2021) and its sequel After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations (Princeton UP, 2024). Editor of BASOR (the Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research). Central popularizer of the multi-stressor "perfect storm" framing for the late-bronze-age-collapse.

Said

• On the multi-causal "perfect storm" framing — From 2026-05-13-autoresearch-bronze-age-collapse-causes-scholarly-consensus: "there must have been a 'perfect storm' of calamitous events at that turning point in order to cause the Late Bronze Age civilizations to collapse shortly after 1200 BCE."
• On factor ranking, in 2015 — From 2026-05-13-autoresearch-bronze-age-collapse-causes-scholarly-consensus: he would "rank them in that specific order of importance: climate change; drought and famine; earthquakes; invaders; and internal rebellions."
• On single-cause explanations — From 2026-05-13-autoresearch-bronze-age-collapse-causes-scholarly-consensus: "The urge to find a single explanation as the cause for such calamitous events seems to come from a modern human need for an easy explanation as often as possible."
• On the Sea Peoples, writing in 2016 — From 2026-05-13-autoresearch-bronze-age-collapse-causes-scholarly-consensus: characterizes the sea-peoples as a "motley crew" and "as much victims as oppressors"; a symptom of broader collapse rather than primary cause.
• On the 2024 sequel framework — From 2026-05-13-autoresearch-bronze-age-collapse-causes-scholarly-consensus: the post-collapse transition was "both a time of collapse and a time of adaptation and/or transformation, depending on where one looks in the region"; uses an "adaptive cycle" / "omega followed by alpha" framework.
• On modern interconnection lessons — From 2026-05-13-autoresearch-bronze-age-collapse-causes-scholarly-consensus: "The potential for concatenated global impacts of extreme events continues to grow as the world's economy becomes more interconnected."

Related

• late-bronze-age-collapse — the event he is best known for analyzing
• sea-peoples — the group whose role he reframed
• lba-multi-stressor-collapse-chain — the causal chain he popularized
• jesse-millek — fellow LBA archaeologist on the scale-of-destruction question