when those rulers were definitively gone, people would begin descending back into the valleys, but this time in communities organized on very different principles: small towns of a few hundred people, or at most 1,000 or 2,000, with egalitarian clan structures and communal council houses. Today historians seem inclined to see these developments as in large part a reaction to the shock of war, slavery, conquest and disease introduced by European settlers. However, they appear to have been the logical culmination of processes that had been going on for centuries before that.
