Middle Bronze Age Collapse (Afraid of a Shadow)

The Middle Bronze Age Collapse refers to an event, or alternatively an archaeological layer, related to the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) around the year 2000 BC. As a historical event, it refers to a moment around 2000 BC in which a multitude of states centered around modern-day Merv inexplicably collapsed almost overnight, resulting in significant reduction of population and radical alteration of culture. Referred to as the archaeological layer of MB-b, this layer exists about 20 ft underground in tels within 100 km of Merv, including Mary, Murgap, and Yoloten. Artifacts from this layer are typified by large quantities of burnt ash and human remains. It is unknown how this event occurred, but several theories have emerged as more study in the region comes to light.

History of the site
The first description of the region came from the renowned Russian explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky, after his expedition in Turkmenistan in 1877. He mainly took his observations from nearby artifacts used by locals in Merv, and surveyed the general outline of sites both within and without the affected zone. He also took samples of the region around Merv and compared against the sites at Kulanly. Not being an archaeologist himself, Nikolay concluded from his survey the ancient site was the result of a meteor strike, although that theory is not in vogue today. The next expedition came from the British explorer Sir James Abbott, who spent several months between 1886 and 1888 extensively documenting and uncovering the entire affected zone. He was the first to describe the main sites of Mary and Murgap, and compared against the contemporary artifacts at Kulanly in fine detail. His publisihed work in 1891, Observations on the Oxys Civilization, vividly depicted the sheer carnage resulting depravity that resulted from the event, which he colorfully described as "a catastrophic spectactle of morbidity, raising such a palatte of blood and bone to leave the days of Noah to shame, as though one were taken with Dante to Hell and back". Abbott's career plummitted into obscurity subsequent to publishing Observations. Scathing reviews depicted the paper as feeding into some secret sadism. The Victorian-era scholars simply could not imagine the graphic details and rapid death in Observations to be physically possible for the ancient world, and so dismissed his arguments as pseudo-science. Abbott barely published anything else from that point onward, except for some local tabloids in Manchester at the turn of the century. Modern era of excavations began in 1932, when the American explorer Roy Andrews decided to revisit the sites described in the Observations. The main re-excavations from 1932-1936 confirmed most of the initial theories by Abbott, and proceeded to make further discoveries Abbott had overlooked, namely the third major site in the affected region known as Yoloten. The main body of literature used by scholars today related to the region was produced between 1945 and 1952.