Kim Bowes: belief

Transcript context

…How does the plague hypothesis fit into your view? I don’t think it’s plague. I think plague is working on a population that’s already declining, or rather, it’s not the plague that we think. The Justinianic plague is too late. That ship is sailed by the early to mid-sixth century when the Justinianic plague gets going. Of course, remember, there’s at least two other major plagues that we know about and probably a whole bunch of ones that we don’t. Which, if you think about it, and I’m right, that the population is unusually high, are in an inevitability. In a world which—circling back to your earlier question about sanitation—in a world which is hyper-dense, hyper-urbanized, and yet still never really managed to solve the urban sanitation problem. Endemic disease, obsidies, cholera, dysentery, all the real killers are really important and very high. The possibility for a bigger event to cause a demographic shock is high. Why those population numbers then would have stayed low is something that I still have to figure out. If you want my early forecast, inflation and population, those are the two culprits behind what happened to the Roman Empire. A few questions about method. Just tell us, what is landscape archaeology?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.