Dark Age

Reflections on Civilizations’ Endings and How to Have Fun Along the Way

Dark Age Britain as a model for the collapse of a civilization

I’m a student of history, and have even written my own history book, The Pike Expedition and the Strange Anglo-American Entrada to the Spanish Southwest. Histories that are of particular interest to me concern the rise of Islam and the Islamic conquests of the seventh through ninth centuries, the Byzantine empire of the fifth through thirteenth centuries, and Britain in the Dark Age of the fifth through early seventh centuries (about 407-625 AD). My interest is in times and places of great changes, and I am fascinated by the ways in which people drive changes and changes affect people.

Foreshadowing of the Dark Age

Focussing on Dark Age Britain, this was not only a time and place of momentous change. It was also a time and place of changes that are shrouded in mystery due to scant historical and archaeological records, and which is thus a challenge to reconstruct as to what happened and why. Broadly, we do know some things. Persistent barbarian raids, especially by Saxons and Angles and Jutes (collectively just called Saxons) had become a fact of life in the south and east of Britain by the mid t0 late 200’s. The Romano-Britons coped by fortifying their towns (a foreshadowing of medieval times to come) and the Roman army became increasingly mobile. It gradually changed from a garrison force to groups of fast-moving, hard-hitting, heavy cavalry units. Roman units themselves took on an increasingly barbarian flavor through the 300’s. Despite the efforts of the Roman armed forces, Roman towns and villas went into a long, slow downhill slide beginning at least in the 350’s.

Withdrawal of the Roman Army and Economic Collapse

Roman coin of 307 AD from the reign of Constantine I. (He was proclaimed Emperor at York by his soldiers, went on to win the rest of the Empire, declared Christianity legal, founded Constantinople as a new Christian capital to compete with pagan Rome for authority, and chaired the Council of Nicea in 325.) Coins like this paid the soldiers in Britain, sometimes minted locally when imperial control faltered. The soldiers’ pay in turn supported the economy. The coming Dark Age was foreshadowed in the late fourth century by the increasing use of payments in kind in lieu of the use of continually debased late imperial coinage. The Romano-British economy never recovered from the loss of legionnaires’ pay when most of them were recalled to the Continent between 380-407. Constantine I bronze folis from the collection of Frank Sanders.

Most of the already minimally numbered Roman soldiers in Britain were withdrawn by 407 to fight for (and over) the shreds of the imploding western Empire. With the soldiers gone, the Roman coins that had paid them stopped coming into the country. The Romano-British economy ground to a halt beyond the local subsistence level and transactions were reduced to barter. Without any money to pay anyone to do anything, without soldiers to enforce orders from bailiffs and magistrates, and with travel having become dangerous due to increasingly frequent and ferocious barbarian raids and general lawlessness, the already-decaying Roman infrastructure collapsed almost completely. With the infrastructure went the few remaining scraps of Roman civilization and culture on the island. I suspect that any number of people who had been oppressed by Roman officials and landowners took the opportunity to pay back their erstwhile masters, if they could track them down.

The breakdown of Roman civilization didn’t necessarily mean much to the peasants who had always been preyed upon by their own landlords (who in turn had been responsible for keeping the Roman system fueled by relentlessly “shearing their sheep” right to the skin). If anything, the peasants were free for once of the onerous burdens that they had heretofore borne (at least they were more or less free of their overlordship burdens between about 407-450). On the other hand, everyone in the south and east of the island was increasingly subject to Saxon raids. In the west and the north people were attacked again and again by Scots from Ireland and Picts from what is now Scotland. These barbarian raiders started out looking for loot and slaves, but as time went on they began to realize that they could try settling and farming with their families in the rich and somewhat depopulated lands where they had only raided before.

Breakdown of Town Life in the Dark Age

For the towns, and town life, the years after 407 were cataclysmic. Heavily fortified to stave off repeated raids by Saxons, Picts, and Scotti over the previous century and a half, the towns had been losing momentum and had already been rotting out inch by inch for a hundred years (since about 300) as the Roman army presence and its pay coffers had gradually dried up. Towns represent economies; when an economy runs down, so too do its people’s towns. I’ve been observing this sad and evolving situation in a town in Utah for over a decade. There is now literally grass growing along what had been busy areas on the main street. Really--it’s weird to see the decay progress relentlessly year after year. Bits and pieces of the town are still alive and some parts, those that cater to strangers passing through, are thriving (relatively speaking). But the overall trend is downhill. Nobody new ever moves in, and the younger people who are growing up there tend to drift away.

In another east-central Utah town, called Thompson, the collapse process has been completed. Thompson is now deserted except for a few hangers-on with nowhere else to go, squatters who can take advantage of the disused buildings. I suspect that a similar process is now overtaking significant parts of what used to be New Orleans. It is what happens when the people who care don’t have money and the people who have money (if there are any) don’t care.

Now imagine this process of urban rot overtaking an entire civilization across an area the size of a medium-size state in the USA. That’s what happened across southern Britain between about 390-425 AD. The towns, even London itself, ended up looking as if they had been hit by atomic bombs. Here’s what things probably looked like in a typical town: Inside the formidable but nearly unmanned circuit of the defensive wall, watched by a couple of old sentries at the main gate tower, a few substantially constructed old townhouses and an old pagan temple or two remained standing but roofless, their terra cotta roof tiles having long since plunged down and shattered on the once-beautifully finished and mosaiced floors. The last chunks of once-beautiful painted plastering was peeling off the walls. These forlornly crumbling monuments to the people who had once lived in these places might include the local administrative basilical complex and the bath complex. The old baths were now fetid with algae (produced by the sunlight streaming in through the holes in the roof), if the water ran at all. Amphitheaters and theaters were filled with garbage because nobody was taking any refuse out of the town anymore. (No-one was paid to remove trash from the town or to burn it, and besides it was extremely dangerous to venture about.) The old aqueduct was choked with sediment that nobody dredged out, and lead and terra cotta pipes were not repaired when they cracked and sprang leaks. The water system had stopped working. Freshwater might be found in local wells or a creek if the inhabitants were lucky. Don’t even ask what was happening to the sewage--but rest assured that it wasn’t flowing out of the town anymore in any consistent way, and nobody was bothering to dig out latrines.

Out-of-control vegetation rapidly chokes disused towns. Trees and bushes and weeds had rapidly overtaken large parts of our town, including the old forum. As all of the vegetative turnover, collapsing building material, garbage and sewage accumulated, the town would gradually subside into a sort of gooey morass (nowadays discovered in archaeological excavations as dark earth) that is ubiquitously found at the archaeological top (that is the end) of the Roman period in the towns. Some (many) towns finally died entirely. They are now archaeological sites that preserve the old Roman street plans and building traces. Lucky others, like London (Londinium), York (Eboracum), Lincoln (Lindum Colonia), Canterbury (Cantiacorum) and St. Albans (Verulamium), just barely managed to hang on through the tough times of 410-625. Enough Britons remained in these places to preserve the memory of the old town names for us.

And What of the People?

And what of the people? Some people always hang on. Sometimes they are emotionally attached to the times and places of their youth. Sometimes they take advantage of the opportunities brought on by the crisis. (One of my favorite lines from an old episode of The Simpsons: “How many times have you driven past a fire and thought, ‘How could this benefit me’?”) Sometimes the hangers-on are determined to fight back against the tide. And sometimes they just don’t have anywhere else to go. Those who are still living in our prototypical early Dark Age town are either living in wattle-and-daub huts or as squatters inside the husks of the once-grand but now crumbling old buildings. They kindle fires on open hearths inside their huts or in the old buildings to cook and stay warm. They garden and sometimes even farm inside the old residential areas. They keep cows and maybe some sheep in the confines of the old forum. They are running a blacksmith forge inside one of the old government buildings, a holdover from the time when there was an actual government that provided for armed security forces. They forge and repair their weapons and armor there, for the men who go about armed and who are trying to guard the town wall.

The townspeople are undernourished and scared. They are dreading the next raid by disbanded soldiers or some gang of thugs and criminals, or some Saxon chieftain and his followers. Death and slavery are always in the air. Barbarian invaders would tend to kill adult men because they are too dangerous to keep around, as well as children who were too small to work, but some of the women and older children would end up as slaves. Sometimes people didn’t even have to be captured to become slaves. There are accounts from this late-Roman time of people who sold themselves and/or their families into slavery so that they could eat.

The State of Faith During the Dark Age

The Dark Age was a tough time to have faith in much of anything. Christianity had been legalized over a century before (ca. 300) by Constantine I, but in Britain it had tended to to be an upper-class, trendy religion. In our prototypical town, the local Christians had trashed the local temples of Jupiter and Mithras years ago, maybe in the 370s and 380s, but that whole thing had been seen by the majority of the population as a conflict between nutty religious minorities. Throughout the Roman period the bulk of the common people in Britain had tended to stick to their old, traditional Earth-goddess and their woodland fairies and sprites. Despite three centuries of Roman presence and administration, the commoners had never even spoken Latin for the most part, except for what little they had needed to know to get through official transactions. There were a few churches dotted about the countryside and towns, but by 450 there were not many Christians left in the country. (The few who did survive into the 400’s left us a clue by using Christian practices to bury their dead.) In our hypothetical little Dark Age town there is an old, small Christian chapel and a baptismal font, but there hasn’t been a priest in the district in over a decade. Most of the district’s Christians packed up and tried to move away with their bishop to the other side of the Channel, to what is now called Brittany.

Many of them didn’t make it far as the port. This little town’s congregation was caught out on the road by some Saxons as they tried to scuttle to the seaport a few miles away. They had hurriedly buried their church vestments, silver plate and coins, as they were overtaken by the tribesmen, but the Saxons killed the men anyway and took the women and young children for slaves, along with the group’s horses and carts. No one knows where the silver was buried because the men who put it in the ground are all dead. The hoard will not be found until a hobbyist with a metal detector comes across it six hundred years later, in the late twentieth century.

The few Christians who were left in this Dark Age time and place popularly subscribed to the ideas of a classically educated native Briton who had converted to Christianity as a young man in Rome: Pelagius. The Pelagian philosophy opposed the Augustinian concepts that were (and still are) considered orthodox in the Roman church. Pelagius said that it’s not what you say but what you do that counts toward your spiritual salvation: don’t just talk the talk, but also walk the walk. It was a sort of liberation theology. Pelagian ideas have always scared the daylights out of the official Church, partly because they seem to minimize the role of faith and partly because they imply that it might be possible to be Christian and to achieve spiritual salvation without needing the big hierarchy, the administrative overhead as it were, to stand around absolving sinners. Pelagius’ ideas were popular in Dark Age Britain because the people in that time and place needed a self-help type of philosophy to help them get through their troubles. In 429 the mainland Roman Church actually went to the trouble to send a bishop, Germanus, all the way to Saxon-infested England to fight this heresy. That’s how much this philosophy concerned the Augustinian Roman Church--they sent a bishop into a war zone to try to suppress it, never mind all of the other problems that people were facing in that time and place. Despite this effort, the Continental Roman Church pretty much cut the British Church loose after 400. Nobody seems to have tried to minister to the pagan Saxons for the next two hundred years. Eventually, when the Roman Church tried to re-involve itself in British affairs around 600, it found itself confronted by a tough, resilient, home-grown Celtic Christian Church. (The members of the Celtic Church, who had toughed it out in Britain through the lean centuries of 400-600 AD without outside assistance, were probably none too happy about a bunch of Roman Johnny-come-latelies arriving in 597-603 and telling them that they had done it all wrong for the last 200 years, but hey old boy, thanks for having minded the store during the Dark Age until we could get back across the Channel and take over the management of this operation.)

Breakdown of Government and Society

But I digress. In the midst of this post-nuclear-apocalyptic breakdown, the people who had been rich and powerful discovered that civilization is a thin veneer on human affairs indeed. The rich and privileged often buried their wealth of coins and silverware while awaiting a shift in the winds, but often they did not manage to recover their hoards. We can speculate about what happened to these people. Perhaps sometimes their former slaves killed them. The men may also have been variously killed and their highborn wives and children turned into enslaved chattels (or worse) by barbarian chieftains, disbanded soldiers and highway robbers and criminal gangs. Or sometimes they may have fled their home districts for new lives overseas in Brittany or Gaul and never came back because conditions remained too dangerous.

The government, such as it was in our hypothetical town of about 410-420 AD, was largely local in scope. It was definitely not Roman anymore. With no soldiers being paid by Rome, and with barbarians literally hammering at the gates all over the island, there was a revolution or at least a coup in which local Romano-Britons had bumped off the last Roman administrators and had taken over the island’s affairs themselves. The overthrow of the Roman administration is attested by historical sources.

The Break with Rome and the Rise of Local Defense Commands

The Britons no longer looked to Rome for their well-being. Instead they formed their own military affairs command, based on the old Roman command structure. The main military nerve center would inevitably have been embattled Londinium. The new rulers elected (or selected) the few remaining, capable military officers to run such mobile field units of cavalry as still existed. I speculate that these units of now Germano-Roman officers and enlisted men, equipped with splendidly decorated barbaric armor and beautiful pattern-welded swords, may have been fed intelligence on enemy movements from people manning the old Roman watch stations and way-points. These cavalry could have worked successfully for a time, intercepting and killing invaders and common criminals alike. The new people who were in charge of Britain seem to have been go-getters from the lower rungs of society and the military, rather than the upper-crust Romano-Britons who had heretofore been running the show. We see here the natural fit between this rather capable revolutionary government and the popular Pelagian philosophy.

The Rise of Dark Age Warlords

By 450 at the latest power had shifted into the hands of ruthless British and Saxon warlords who had grown up in a country perpetually at peril from Saxon invaders who were now themselves becoming settlers. Some of the warlords were descended from the old Romano-British ruling class. Others were Saxons, Picts, and Scots. The Saxons in particular carved out kingdoms (about the sizes of Texas counties) for themselves (Wessex, etc.) in the south and east, and also eventually in the northeast in Northumbria. Sometimes they exterminated the local native populations and sometimes they merely enslaved them. The locals’ fates would always have depended on the calculus of whether they were worth more dead (but safely out of the way) than alive (and productively working the land for their new Saxon masters). Their fates probably often depended upon the capricious whims of individual Saxon war-chiefs. By 600 the countryside of England was largely in the hands of the Saxons but archaeology shows that Britons still lived in some numbers with their Saxon neighbors in the squalid remains of the old towns like London and Canterbury.

A major pitched battle for control of what was becoming England (Angle-land) was fought in about 490-500 between two armies, one Romano-British and led by a Roman-descended officer, Ambrosius Aurelianus, and the other comprised of Saxons. It was a siege of an old hill-fort such as people were by then occupying for safety (the prototype for the mythical Camelot), the towns being extremely exposed and vulnerable by this time. The Romano-British won the battle and held the Saxons back in a stalemate that lasted another fifty years, but beginning in about 550 the Saxons won a series of hard-fought engagements that left them in control of what is now England by about Raedwald’s time (ca. 600-624).

Rebuilding Out of Civilization’s Ashes

By the early 600’s the country was beginning to revive. Some coins began to be minted in England again after a 200-year hiatus, a sign that local economies were reviving and growing. Local chieftains and warlords developed sufficiently large and stable territories to bring some order to the chaos of the previous two centuries. The towns recovered slightly, although most Anglo-Saxons just wanted some land to farm and did not relate much to town life.

An English-Saxon silver penny or sceat in the mysterious, so-called porcupine style. It was minted about AD 700 as the post-Roman Dark Age was finally drawing to a close in England. Production of these coins in England and across the Channel marked the sputtering revival of the economy after a hiatus of several centuries. From the collection of Frank Sanders with a Lincoln penny for scale.

Offa’s reign (757-796) marks the beginning of a relatively coherent Saxon period of rule, with coins finally minted again and a regular royal court of sorts being established. Offa even went to the trouble of building his famous wall, or dyke (modeled on Hadrian’s Wall) between his domain and that of the Welsh (the wealsh, or foreigners, as the Saxons ironically called the island’s natives) who were themselves Celtic-descended and who had preserved some small aspects of Romano-British culture.

These players, the Celts, the Welsh, the throwback semi-barbaric Romano-British cavalry units and their Saxon opponents (who preferred to fight on foot) were awful, but they were also admittedly sort of cool. They were apocalyptic-era, Dark Age road warriors. They wore chain maille and barbaric, late-Roman style helmets riveted together from multiple prices of iron-steel. The Saxons wore small boar-head sculptures and amulets on their helmets. They used magnificent swords made by a special (and now nearly lost) blacksmithing art called pattern welding. (I would like to have a pattern-welded sword of my own someday.) Arthur never lived as such, but 410-625 AD was the Arthurian Dark Age. The Britons and the Saxons surely spent as much time fighting among themselves as they did fighting each other. They drank mead in great halls (if they were rich or warriors). These were guys like King Raedwald of East Anglia (ca. 600-624) and the mythical but prototypically real Beowulf (probably based on the memory of a Swedish Dark Age king, a member of the Scylding or Wulfinga (Wolf) clan).

Moral of the Story

Wupatki Pueblo ruins at San Francisco Peaks National Monument, Arizona.

Every civilization thinks it’s going to last forever. None ever do. Every civilization, like every person, finally dies. Ours will, too, eventually. The only question is when and how the end will come and how the survivors will make their way. A good place to think about this is at the Wupatki Pueblo ruins at San Francisco Peaks National Monument in Arizona. Those ruins were left behind by people who would seem to have done everything right: They lived in a close harmony with nature; they seem to have been relatively peaceful among themselves and with their neighbors; they were hard-working; they had strong spiritual beliefs. None of those things saved them. Nature is not cruel, but she is indifferent. Their civilization was destroyed by a decades-long drought in the thirteenth century, a twist of fate that they could neither forsee nor understand, and with which they could not cope. Eventually the last survivors fled for greener pastures. Their descendants probably were living further east and south when the Spanish arrived in the Southwest in the sixteenth century.

Making a Combat-Grade Dark Age Ensemble

So when it comes down to it, it’s probably always a good idea to have a suit of chain maille and a helmet and a sword handy, because you never know when civilization is going to end and you may need to be ready to make your move. It’s a fun and relatively harmless romantic notion. OK, realistically I know that one wouldn’t have wanted to live in the time and place of England in the fifth and sixth centuries, nor in other comparable places where civilizations have recently collapsed. But I think it might have been fun to visit for a while. It is sort of a romantic notion to imagine living as a wild, armored warrior society amidst the crumbling ruins of a once-great civilization. So that’s a romantic fantasy of mine.

A few years ago I commissioned a combat-grade suit of chain maille from a very talented artist in Missouri, Charles Gragg. He made me a gorgeous hauberk that is like the type described in Beowulf and depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. To achieve a combat-grade product, Mr. Gragg made it out of stainless steel (a better, stronger material than even King Raedwald could have had). It weighs 28 pounds. It is surprisingly comfortable, if a bit heavy to wear all day long. I also have a set of authentically blacksmithed Dark Age helmets made with the same design as archaeologically recovered helmets, a nice hammered-and-folded sword, and some other accessories such as an over-the-shoulder baldric and a terrific pair of custom-tailored leather boots that I’m told do a nice job of showing off my legs. I wear a heavy quilted coat and a padded arming cap underneath the armor and the helmet. Here’s the ensemble at the top of this page, in pictures. You know, everyone seems to look good in chain maille.

Frank Sanders’ Recommended Late Roman and Dark Age Bibliography

When I visit the UK I look for good books on the late Roman and Dark Age periods. The English are so good at writing well-reasoned and informative books, typically better than the stuff that American publishers are willing to produce. Here are some books that I can recommend:

Ken Dark and Petra Dark, The Landscape of Roman Britain, Sutton Publishing, 1977. A good introduction to current archaeological knowledge and reconstruction of Roman Britain before the Dark Age.

David J. Breeze, Roman Scotland, B.T. Batsford, Ltd., and Historic Scotland, 1996. A good look at what went on in northern Britain and Scotland in the Roman period.

Barry Cunliffe, The Roman Baths at Bath Authorised Guide Book. This book introduces the reader to life at the premier Roman bath complex and its cult of Sulis (collaterally identified with Roman Minerva). Obviously you’ll get the most out of this if you visit Bath.

Barry Cunliffe, Fishbourne Roman Palace: A Guide to the Site, Sussex Archaeological Society, 1977, revised 2000. A fascinating and well-written guide to one of the best-preserved and most extensive Roman-era villas in Britain. Fishbourne Palace is a must-see if you are in southern England and are interested in this sort of thing.

Stephen Johnson, Later Roman Britain, Paladin, 1982. Slightly dated now, but still containing a wealth of useful information and excellent illustrations. Most of Johnson’s descriptions and conclusions are still upheld by current work.

Ken Dark, Britain and the End of the Roman Empire, Tempus, 2000. Excellent descriptions of archaeological knowledge of late Roman and early Dark Age Britain.

Neil Faulkner, The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain, Tempus, 2000 with an updated foreword in the 2004 edition. A well-reasoned analysis that links the inherent and integral corruptness and violence of the Roman system to the Empire’s original conquest and ultimate loss of Britain.

Thomas Charles-Edwards, After Rome, Oxford Press, 2003. Thorough background (if at points a bit tedious) on the classical underpinnings of Roman and early Dark Age Britain.

Sam Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia, D.S. Brewer, 1993. A very unique, well-reasoned and compelling analysis of the origins of the Beowulf poem and the important yet obscure connection between early England and Scandinavia. This book provides us with a window on the people who first raided and later settled in northeastern and southeastern Britain in the third through sixth centuries.

Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf: A Bilingual Translation, Norton, 2000. I know, they made you read Beowulf in school and you hated it and you never want to see it again. But try reading Sam Newton’s books and then read this excellent translation of Beowulf now that nobody is making you read it.

Martin Welch, Anglo-Saxon England, English Heritage, 2002. A little tedious in places but a good introduction to the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England.

Sam Newton, The Reckoning of King Raedwald: The Story of the King Linked to the Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, Red Bird Press, 2003. A unique and interesting description of the lives and times of the early, shadowy Anglo Saxons in England.

Medieval Sourcebook: Bede’s History of the English Nation I. A classic reference for anyone studying theRoman-to-saxon transition.

Medieval Sourcebook: Excidio of Gildas. Gildas is the only extant voice that we have from England in the years 400-600 AD. He tells us a lot, if we are willing to go to the trouble to read between the lines.

Medieval Sourcebook: Nennius’ History of the Britons. A lot of bogus information, but useful because it is the font of a number of classic Dark Age myths.

Simon MacDowall, Germanic Warrior 236-568 AD, Osprey 1996. This book contains excellent illustrations by Angus McBride. This is where you can get a glimpse of what warriors looked like in the late Roman period and early Dark Age.

David Nicolle, Arthur and the Anglo-Saxon Wars, Osprey Press, 1984. This book contains excellent illustrations by Angus McBride. Another excellent source if you want to know what warriors looked like in the late Roman period and the subsequent British Dark Age.

Michael Wood, In Search of the Dark Ages, Oxford Press, 1987. Written to accompany the BBC television series of the same name, it is informative and fun to read.

Peter Hunter Blair, Roman Britain and Early England, 55 BC-AD 871, Norton Library, 1963. A bit dated nowadays, but still an excellent source for basic background on the classical interpretation of the Roman-to-Saxon transition in Britain.

Anna Gannon, The Iconography of Early Anglo-Saxon Coinage: Sixth to Eighth Centuries, Oxford University Press, 2003. Gannon’s book provides unique insights into the art and psychology of the Anglo-Saxons.

Ryan Lavelle, Fortifications in Wessex c. 800-1066, Osprey Publishing, 2003. This book contains excellent illustrations by D. Spedaliere and S.S. Spedaliere. Read about how the English worked to repel sea-borne invaders who were very much like their own Saxon ancestors of 400 years before.

Go to the Using My Photos page on this site for instructions on how to obtain high-resolution versions of these images from me. I don’t charge money for my photos, but I do require a photo credit in your end-product in exchange for the use of my images.

Combat grade chain maille armor by Charles Gragg

Detail of chain maille made by Charles Gragg

Combat-grade Dark Age helmet

Frank in chain maille meets A-bomb

Examining sword

Sword drawn

Sheathing sword

Frank in chain maille

Sword detail showing hammered-and-welded layers that make it strong yet flexible.

Saxon Dark Age silver porcupine sceat or penny dated to circa 690-725

Desert Southwest ruins of Wupatki Pueblo: Every civilization thinks it will live forever, but eventually all die.

San Francisco Peaks National Monument: Wupatki Pueblo ruins near Flagstaff, Arizona abandoned in the 13th century

Radar antennas at an abandoned nuclear missile doomsday test site in a desert.

Abandoned missile launch site hatch in a desert, being swallowed by Nature like a Roman ruin.

Nuclear doomsday antiaircraft missile elevator. Arrays of nuclear missiles would have been fired above U.S. cities.

Interior of an abandoned nuclear antiaircraft missile bunker interior. A Dark Age missed or yet to come?