Joseph A. Tainter

Joseph Tainter studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1975. As of 2012 he holds a professorship in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University. His previous positions include Project Leader of Cultural Heritage Research, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.

Tainter has written or edited many articles and monographs. His arguably best-known work, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), examines the collapse of Maya and Chacoan civilizations, and of the Western Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics and complexity th

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Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

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Ahmet T. Kuru is the director of Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies and Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University. His recent book, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019) co-won the American Political Science Association's International History and Politics Section Award, received honorable mention of SSSR’s Award, and was included in Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year. He is also the author of Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which received Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR)’s Book Award. He is the co-editor (with Alfred Stepan
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