History, people often say, repeats itself. And looking at the historical records of the ancient civilizations, some things do seem to happen again and again. Civilizations expand, get overextended, and then collapse as in the cases of Rome, which went under in 476 AD, and the British Empire, which fell apart more than a thousand years later in the post‐World War II era. But is this always the case? If so, archaeology would be pretty boring; one thing would happen again and again. But that's not what archaeologists see. Some civilizations end suddenly, like the Aztec and Inca, conquered by invaders in the 1520s AD. Those empires never had the chance to collapse as a result of overexpansion. So in the case of civilizations, 'history repeats itself' seems to be an oversimplification.