What if any progress has been made recently in our understanding of the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor regions? What are the most promising paths to progress for historians in this field today? Or do you think we're going to be stuck for some time with our fairly sketchy understanding until a monumental breakthrough occurs, if it ever does?
And what reading material would you recommend on the collapse to an advanced reader who is not a trained historian? I'm not afraid of long books or big words! I recently finished Gibbon's Decline and Fall (yes I know it's not all accepted as fact, and situated much later!) and I'm looking for more great ancient Mediterranean history reads.
I got a book recently by Eric H. Cline (noted Classical and Biblical historian) called 1177 B.C: The Year Civilization Collapsed. I haven't finished it yet, but what I've read so far is very interesting. He spent the first chapter detailing how interconnected the Eastern Mediterranean was, in terms of culture, politics, and trade networks. It's very fascinating so far. He also describes the Sea Peoples in better detail than anyone else I've read.
So far his thesis seems to be that the LBAC was due to the collapse of this trading network, which was caused PARTLY by the Sea Peoples, but most likely by a wide combination of sources (I.E. total systems collapse theory).
It's a collection of essays rather than a single book, but you may want to have a look at The Philistines and Other Sea Peoples in Texts and Archaeology, eds. Ann E. Killebrew and Gunnar Lehmann as the most general overview of recent research on the "Sea Peoples".