Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #441

Text 1 Historians have traditionally attributed the Late Bronze Age collapse (c. 1200 BCE) to a sudden, catastrophic series of environmental cataclysms, primarily tectonic activity and multi-year droughts. This hypothesis is heavily bolstered by the archaeological record, which reveals a distinct, geographically widespread stratum of simultaneous destruction layers—cities burned and abandoned at precisely the same time—spanning the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, suggesting a sudden, unavoidable, and civilization-ending event. Text 2 Recent advancements in high-resolution radiocarbon dating and the deciphering of late Mycenaean economic palatial archives have prompted a fundamental reassessment of the 12th century BCE. While environmental stressors undeniably existed, the archaeological destruction layers once thought to be perfectly synchronous actually span a staggered period of roughly eighty years. Consequently, the collapse is now better understood not as a sudden cataclysm, but as a cascading systems failure, wherein the initial disruption of highly interconnected maritime trade networks precipitated a slow, localized, and sequential domino effect of economic unraveling. Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the specific archaeological evidence of "simultaneous destruction layers" cited in Text 1?