A new look at Easter Island...or maybe not

 

DNA studies supposedly confirms the new take on Easter Island, a kind of best blend of post-colonial political correctness and crypto-Hancockite pre-Columbian contact. 

Or maybe not. 

Note the critical remarks hidden away in the two last paragraphs! Did they test the wrong skeletons (all 15 of them)? Something tells me this controversy will continue for another seven decades or so... 

Easter Island population never collapsed, but it did have contacts with Native Americans

Mystery or mystification?

 

“Easter Island Origins” is a very recent documentary about the mysterious Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the Pacific Ocean. The island is almost isolated from the rest of the world but famous due to its large stone statues (“moai”), remnants of a vanished high culture. But perhaps Easter Island isn´t really that mysterious. Maybe its people and culture have simply been mystified by outsiders? Judging by this documentary, the answer is “yes”…but some of the new research on the island have led to sensational results anyhow.

Controversially, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl claimed that Easter Island had been inhabited by migrants from South America. While this is disproven (the earliest settlers on Rapa Nui were certainly from other parts of Polynesia), DNA research suggests that there actually might be a connection between the island and the South American mainland. The documentary is somewhat unclear on this point, but if I understand it correctly, the idea is that the *Polynesians* sailed to South America, rather than the other way around. 

Genetic markers typical of the Zenú people in Colombia have been found among the peoples of the Tuamotu Islands, the Marquesas Islands, Mangareva and Easter Island. The idea seems to be that the Polynesians first colonized the two former, then reached the South American mainland, only to return home (presumably with Zenú wives and/or mixed race children). Some of these people with mixed descent participated in the somewhat later discovery and settlement of Mangareva and Easter Island, explaining why the Zenú marker is found there too. The sculptures in “medieval” Colombia had a strong resemblance to those found in the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, Mangareva and Rapa Nui (although the moai at Easter Island are much larger in size).

The usual Western picture of Easter Island is that of a downright irrational population who cut down all trees and used up all rock (which could be used as fertilizer) in a vain and manic pursuit of building larger and larger statues. War and civilizational collapse promptly followed, and when the Europeans arrived, the native Polynesians had already forgot their great traditions, lived in caves and drank sea water. 

“Easter Island Origins” contain interviews with archeologists who deny this traditional picture. They believe that the population of the island was always relatively small (and hence couldn´t dramatically “collapse” in the first place), that there is no evidence of warfare, nor of settlements being abandoned by people taking to the hills. There *is* evidence of wide-spread deforestation, but this was due to rats, which lacked natural enemies and hence proliferated en masse, consuming the seeds of the trees in the process. 

The real (human) population collapse took place after the arrival of the European colonists, when various diseases to which the natives lacked immunity killed off most of the population. *This* led to the great statues being abandoned or destroyed during the 19^th century. Easter Island was also attacked by slave-raiders from Peru. The handful of survivors who were able to return to the island carried smallpox with them and infected the rest of the population. At its lowest, the native population was only 40 people! Today, it´s back around 3000, approximately the same number as before Western colonialism. The island has been controlled by Chile since 1888.

It´s a tragic story of a people that actually reached the American mainland centuries before Columbus made a landfall in the Caribbean…

And no, no evidence of Lemuria!

America Before

 

Do we finally have evidence that the Polynesians reached the New World long before the conquistadors showed up? Analyses of plant remains from Easter Island (Rapa Nui) suggest that the Polynesian settlers visited South America and took back food plants only found there. Which means they had contacts with some Native people growing them. 

I´m not particularly surprised that the Polynesian connection have been proven. Or proven first? The Polynesian landfall was around 1000 AD, hence later than the "Viking" journey to Vinland, but still pre-Columbian. Sure wonder what else lurks out there...

The second link goes to an article arguing that the mysterious rongorongo script was developed independently by the Polynesians at Easter Island.     

Polynesians at Rapa Nui had contacts with South America 1000 years ago

Rongorongo script developed independently

Where giants walked

"Easter Island: Where Giants Walked" is a combined pod cast and visual documentary available on YouTube. It was posted there in 2020. 

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in the Pacific Ocean is mostly known for its mysterious stone statues (moai). For centuries, Europeans have speculated about their origins, often refusing to believe that the native Easter Islanders themselves (who are of Polynesian stock) could have raised them. One example is Thor Heyerdahl´s somewhat wild idea (mentioned in passing in the docu) that the moai must have been built by White-skinned people from South America! Another (not mentioned) is the speculation about a connection to Mu or Lemuria (a kind of Pacific Atlantis). "Where Giants Walked" isn´t particularly interested in these alternative ideas, however. Rather, it´s main target is the "official" narrative, popularized by Jared Diamond in his bestselling book "Collapse", according to which the islanders destroyed their own complex society long before the arrival of Europeans by a combination of ecocide, warfare and rampant cannibalism. The narrator, Paul M M Cooper, believes that there is essentially no real evidence for this standard narrative, and that it really represents a projection of our own modern fears of environmental destruction. One obvious example is the claim that the natives cut down all the island´s trees in order to transport the gigantic stone statues from the quarries to the coast (perhaps by using the logs as rollers or to build sledges), and that this project in turn was completely irrational in nature, being essentially a status-driven conflict between different tribal war chiefs. This, of course, is how a certain kind of moralist sees *our own* present predicament...

So what actually happened, then? 

First, even Cooper has to admit that the Polynesian settlement on the island (which recent research estimates at around 1200 AD, much later than hitherto believed) wasn´t a particularly "harmonious" affair, ecologically speaking. Polynesian settlers introduced their own favored flora and fauna at the islands they settled. At Easter Island, rats were introduced quite deliberately, since they were eaten by the common people! (I always assumed the rats were accidental stove aways rather than an inplanted food source.) The rats - which bred exponentially -  probably destroyed the palm tree forests, by simply eating the palm nuts. Also, slash and burn agriculture was practiced, with similar devastating results. So yes, there really was an "ecocide" of sorts on Easter Island, although the narrator doesn´t want to use that term. However, since humans are resourceful creatures, the loss of forest vegetation didn´t kill their society. The Easter Islanders simply adapted to the new conditions, building a vast network of "rock gardens" across the island, which prevented the loss of top soil and captured rain water. When the first Europeans arrived on the island, they spotted large fruit orchards, and the natives even gave them food to eat, which doesn´t exactly sound like a starving remnant population. As for the moai, they could be transported to their intended locations on the coast by rocking them forward in standing position with the help of ropes, so no trees were needed. (This is why the islanders said that the statues "walked".) As for warfare, no real archeological evidence for such seems to exist: no hill forts, weapons, skeletons with spear marks, and so on (such evidence can be found on other Polynesian islands). This, obviously, suggests that no war took place. The obsidian "spear points" (mata´a) found all over the island probably weren´t used for war, according to recent research, but mostly for agriculture. 

Thus, the real "pre-contact" history of Rapa Nui is a story of a devastating human impact on the local environment - quite similar to that on many other islands, or indeed mainlands, around the world already before modern civilization - but also of human ingenuity and resilience in the face of adversity (whether or not it´s caused by humans). What makes Easter Island fairly unique is that it seems to have been relatively peaceful. Cooper suggests that there were two reasons for this peacefulness. One was that the islanders may have been closely related, being descended from a relatively small group of original settlers (note the socio-biologic slant of this explanation). Another is ingenious ways to "blow off steam" and let people (mostly males, by the look of it) compete against each other in other ways than through warfare. The carving, transportation and raising of the moai might have been a peaceful way of gaining status. Another was the curious "birdman cult", an annual ritual during which the young men were supposed to swim to a small island off the coast and steal eggs from the nests of terns. 

So why did the Easter Island society eventually collapse, then? The story turns out to be an over-familiar one: yes, it was European (and Euro-South American) colonization, more specifically a combination of introduced diseases and slave-raiding. The most devastating slave raid took place in 1862, when 1,500 natives were forced into slavery in Peru. This triggered a chain of events that destroyed the last remnants of the old Rapa Nui culture. For instance, the entire priestly class was wiped out, and with them the only people who could read the unique Rongorongo script, the only writing system developed by Polynesians. When the island came under Chilean control, most of it was turned into a gigantic sheep farm. The bizarre semi-barren landscape characteristic of Easter Island today is the result of relatively recent sheep grazing, not some ancient ecocide. The surviving natives were forced to live in a town cordoned off from the rest of the island, and work for the capitalist agri-business that had taken over their homeland...

Cooper ends by pointing out that if Easter Island´s fate has some kind of lesson to teach us, or warning to convey, maybe we should be very careful about what that warning might be! 

I admit that he has a point there... 

The collapse of Jared Diamond?

Some recent research on the collapse of the Rapa Nui or Easter Island culture suggests that the collapse never really happen - or rather, that it didn´t happen before the arrival of European colonialists. 

Jared Diamond´s scenario in "Collapse" was always hard to believe, since it entails that the Polynesian inhabitants of the island were too stupid to realize that the trees on the relatively small island were disappearing due to the islanders´ own activities (as in actually cutting them down faster than they could grow back), and that they couldn´t predict that this would destroy all their chances to build boats and leave the rock. Cannibalism promptly followed. Humans can be remarkably silly, but can they really be *this* silly? That seems unlikely, since humanity has survived for hundreds of thousand of years in a wide variety of habitats.

Unless, of course, Diamond was projecting *our own* stupidity on the Easter Islanders...

A case could be made!

New evidence: Easter Island civilization wasn´t destroyed by war

Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets totally wrong

The Keystone Species

 

"The Archeology of Global Change: The Impact of Humans on Their Environment" is a book published in 2004 by the Smithsonian Institution. Yes, folks, it´s time for the Ashtar Command to bash the myth of the noble savage again! So far, I´ve "only" read the first part of the volume, which contains a somewhat eclectic blend of articles about Polynesia, the US Southwest and the Pacific Northwest. 

Humans have never lived in fundamental "harmony" with Nature, nor have they been "natural conservationists". The first evidence for overexploitation of natural resources comes from "archaic Homo sapiens". The size of tortoise shells and shellfish gradually decrease with time at Neanderthal sites around the Mediterranean, suggesting that our evolutionary siblings gathered (and consumed) the larger species or varieties first, making them go extinct! This also confirms the "optimum foraging" model, according to which humans should always harvest the most nutritious and easily accesible specimens first, and only then proceed to smaller, less nutritious and/or less accesible individuals. This pattern shows up again and again in the archeological record. In plain English, if forced to chose between eating and cultural ideology, most humans most of the time chose to eat. 

The contributors to this volume believe that humans were also responsible for the Pleistocene extinctions of "charismatic megafauna" in Eurasia, Australia and the Americas. I admit that I have no idea whodunnit, and the issue is only mentioned in passing, but some suggestive facts could be cited. For instance, that only a few species of megafauna went extinct in Africa, where humans and other animals presumably co-evolved for millions of years. By contrast, most megafaunal species went extinct in Australia and the Americas, where humans arrived comparatively late, and the animals hadn´t evolved any defenses against human predation. However, this assumes that received paleontological wisdom about human migrations is correct. What if humans arrived much earlier? An alternative hypothesis is that the megafauna went extinct due to climate change at the end of the Pleistocene. Of course, none of this has any impact on the conclusions of this book, which deals mostly with the Holocene (the present time period).

Patrick V Kirch´s article "Oceanic Islands: Microcosms of `Global Change´" deals with human impact on two Polynesian islands (Easter Island and Mangaia) and one ditto archipelago (Hawaii). The humans in question are the "Natives", the Polynesians, who colonized the islands long before the arrival of White Europeans or Americans. If pre-modern "Natives" are natural conservationists, islands should still be teeming with endemics (including flightless birds) and in general have the same biotopes as before colonization (except in cases of severe climate change). Unless, of course, evil Whites upset the balance! In reality, the Polynesians radically altered the island environments they encountered during their migrations in the Pacific. Nor is this surprising: the Polynesians practiced slash-and-burn agriculture and irrigation, introduced new food crops, and carried with them dogs, pigs and chicken. They were also followed by invasive species such as the Pacific rat or garden snails. And yes, they did hunt the animals already living on the islands...

Easter Island (Rapanui) was originally covered by parklandlike forests, with a canopy of palm trees. About 25 different species of seabird nested on the island. Rapanui was in effect a gigantic seabird rookery. There were also seven species of endemic landbirds. After 1,500 years of human habitation, Easter Island had changed completely: the forests had been cut down and replaced by grassland, the endemics were extinct, and most seabird species left the island, only a few remaining at small islets that are virtually unaccesible to humans. The Natives were fighting constant wars, which may have included cannibalism. 

The story of Mangaia (one of the Cook Islands) is similar. Probably colonized by Polynesians about 2000 years ago, the island´s environment had completely changed about 400 years ago. The interior of the island is covered by pyrophytic ferns and other fire-resistant plants, presumably in response to slash-and-burn agriculture. Of 17 documented landbird taxa in the archeological record, only four remained 600 years later. Some seabird species also left the island. Fish and gastropods found at archeological sites became progressively smaller over time, suggesting heavy exploitation of these particular resources. Mangaian society developed in a way similar to Rapanui, with constant tribal wars, widespread cannibalism, human sacrifice, and so on. (I won´t bother you with Hawaii.) 

The most fascinating contribution in the first section is titled "Revising the `Wild´ West: Big Game Meets the Ultimate Keystone Species" by Paul S Martin and Christine R Szuter. It meticulously analyzes the journals of the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803-1806) to Montana and the Pacific Northwest. In Montana, the expedition encountered enormous flocks of bison and other game animals, one bison flock estimated to be 10,000 animals strong! The bison, elk, wolves and grizzly bears were also extremely tame. Clark managed to kill a wolf with his spontoon, suggesting that he managed to get very close to it (a spontoon is apparently a weapon about 2 meters long). The wolf was eating a drowned bison and seems not to have cared much about the human hunter, before it was too late! Lewis, Clark and their "Corps of Discovery" had no problem finding and killing animals for food east of the Rocky Mountains. West of the Rockies was a different story. There, game was virtually non-existent. At first, the expedition was forced to live on dried fish and roots provided by the Natives, something that made them sick. Later, they bought horses and dogs from various Native groups, with the intention of killing and eating them. Nor were the animals in the Pacific Northwest particularly docile. Killing a grizzly was considered an extremely heroic and manly act by the Natives, since these animals were so extremely aggressive. 

What could account for the peculiar difference between the two areas explored by the Lewis and Clark expedition? The two explorers themselves had no explanation, and many historians don´t give one either. However, the answer is right there, in the journals.

It´s the Natives, stupid.

The Native population was abundant *west* of the Rockies, where the game was most scarce. This would indeed suggest some kind of connection. The situation in Montana was more complex. An aggressive Native group known as the Blackfoot had virtually cleansed large areas of competing tribes by systematic attacks. Thus, the overall population density of Montana was probably lower than the areas further west. Of course, Blackfoot raiding had led other tribes to take defensive measures. Vast stretches of "no mans land" separated the various tribal territories from each other. In these areas, hunting was deemed difficult, due to the risk of being spotted and killed by scouts from the enemy tribe. Martin and Szuter believe that the abundant wildlife described by Lewis and Clark lived in these "DMZs". There is some later evidence for the same phenomenon, for instance Colorado circa 1820-1840, when the bison disappeared from the territory *when the Indian tribes made peace with one another*. A more recent example would be the border between North and South Korea, where wildlife is thriving.

These facts (plus the later disappearence of many Native groups) make it problematic to argue that current conservation efforts are about "restoring" an original, pristine wilderness. There simply isn´t such a thing. There hasn´t been a pristine wilderness sensu stricto since humans first arrived in North America 12,000 years ago. Animal numbers have been controlled by humans ever since. Humans are "the ultimate keystone species". The "balance" (if that´s the right word for it) between Native hunters and prey animals was disturbed when Natives aquired horses, but also when European diseases severly decimated the Native population. This led to all kinds of anomalous situations, often misreported as some kind of "Eden" where animals are super-abundant and tame. Something that is really the result of an atypical absence of human hunters, something seldom seen since the Pleistocene...

I will certainly continue reading this book with considerable interest. 

Hade Heyerdahl rätt, trots allt?

Nya rön kan ge Heyerdahl rätt om Påskön 

Nya forskarrön tyder på att Polynesien (inklusive Påskön) hade kontakter med Sydamerikas fastland under 1200- och 1300-talen. Om jag har förstått saken rätt så handlar det antagligen om en polynesisk befolkning som blandade sig med "indianer" i nuvarande Colombia, för att sedan migrera vidare till Påskön. 

Jag är inte förvånad över dessa resultat. Polynesierna har länge varit den starkaste kandidaten till "andra än vikingar" som nådde Nya Världen före Columbus. 

I nästa nummer av Nature förväntar vi oss en diskussion om varför vissa "indianer" i Amazonas har samma gener som Australiens aboriginer... 

Eller nej?

The real tiki

This is the original “Kon-Tiki” documentary from 1950. It was released in the United States in 1951, and won an Academy Award the same year. Most of the documentary is shot onboard the Kon-Tiki itself, and I have to say that the quality of the footage is surprisingly good, considering that it was made under somewhat unusual circumstances over 70 years ago!

It was in 1947 that Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl and a small Norwegian-Swedish crew built a primitive raft, called Kon-Tiki after the Peruvian sun god Kon-Tiki Viracocha, and set sail from Peru with the goal of reaching Polynesia within 100 days. The raft traversed an enormous distance at open sea until finally running aground a reef at the Polynesian atoll of Raroia. The purpose of this daring, perhaps foolhardy, journey was to prove Heyerdahl´s speculations that Polynesia had been settled from South America rather than from lands to its west. Later, Heyerdahl would carry out similar spectacular journeys across the Atlantic and Indian oceans with the hope of demonstrating that ancient civilizations used the sea more often than mainstream archeology would allow for. A controversial aspect of Heyerdahl´s speculations was the idea that Kon-Tiki, the Peruvian sun god, was a real historical person…and that he had been a White European king. What a White man was doing in ancient Peru long before the Spanish conquista is, of course, an interesting question.

Personally, I consider Heyerdahl´s experiments inconclusive. However, I don´t think the matter of South American-Pacific contacts have been completely settled yet. For instance, Australian Aboriginal DNA was recently found in samples taken from a South American Native tribe. And what about those famed Peruvian mummies, which contained traces of a resin from New Guinea? There are also claims that Japanese Jomon pottery has been found in Ecuador. Note, however, that the trans-pacific contact in these cases must have gone in the *other* direction than the one postulated by Heyerdahl! The matter of trans-atlantic contact between the Old and the New Worlds probably haven´t been settled either (despite constant claims to the contrary by the All-Knowing Skeptics) and then there´s the entire Atlantis-Lemuria problem complex, reopened recently by the sensational finds at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. Heyerdahl may have been wrong about a White sun-god braving whale sharks and coral reefs to get to hula-hula dancers at Tahiti, but I think our prehistory really isn´t as well known as some people like to imagine…

Freely based on a true tiki

Watzinger (the real one)

“Kon-Tiki” is a 2012 Norwegian historical drama film about Thor Heyerdahl´s famous Kon-Tiki expedition, which took place in 1947. The film exists in two different versions, one with most of the dialogue in Norwegian, the other with dialogue in English.

Both Heyerdahl, the journey of Kon-Tiki and his later expeditions were world famous in their day, Heyerdahl becoming a virtual national hero in Norway. He was of course well known in Sweden, as well. I heard about the Kon-Tiki and Ra expeditions already as a kid. Ironically, Heyderdahl´s theories about trans-oceanic contact between ancient civilizations were rejected by the scientific community and remain so to this day. I also remember how Heyerdahl was dethroned a few years before his death when archeologists and others attacked his latest project, which was to prove that the Norse god Odin was a real historical person, hailing either from Azerbaijan or the Russian region around Azov (unless I´m mistaken, this is freely based on medieval Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson´s claim that Odin came from Troy in Asia Minor). Heyderdahl´s idea that some of the ancient navigators were White Europeans ruling over Natives doesn´t exactly chime with the present ideological climate, either. Interesting fact: Graham Hancock claims to have known Heyerdahl…

Heyderdahl set out to prove that Polynesia was settled from South America rather than from Asia. To this end, he built a raft christened Kon-Tiki and recruited a small crew. The primitive raft then sailed from Peru all the way to French Polynesia. In 1950, Heyerdahl released his own documentary about the Kon-Tiki journey, which went on to win an Academy Award. Ironically, this old documentary (available on YouTube) is actually more interesting, and in its own way, more dramatic than the quasi-Hollywood drama “Kon-Tiki” from 2012. Some of the real action isn´t even included in the 2012 film, while other details are simply wrong (as in made up). In the film, Heyerdahl´s second-in-command aboard the raft, Herman Watzinger, is depicted as a cowardly fool who constantly disobeys direct orders, something which led to protests from his family in Norway. In reality, Watzinger was a stereotypically Aryan-looking former elite soldier and athletics champion. (If Dolph Lundgren had been younger, he could have starred this man in a flick!) Another difference between the film and real life is that Heyerdahl had considerably more support IRL.

While “Kon-Tiki” (2012 flick version) does have its dramatic moments, most of the film feels dragging, and it also has that slightly annoying low comedy factor typical of American releases (which the Norwegian film-makers clearly mimicked). By all means, watch it if crazy exploration is your thing, but then, turn to Heyerdahl´s own “Kon-Tiki” from 1950/51. As for the ancient Polynesians or All-Father Odin, who knows…?

Another world

“Wild Pacific” (also called “South Pacific” in some jurisdictions) is a fascinating documentary series about animal and plant life in the South Pacific and Hawaii. New Guinea, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and Polynesia are featured (including Easter Island).

If you like weird stuff, this is definitely for you! How about real footage of large sharks gathered to eat young albatrosses which are learning how to fly? Apparently an annual spectacle on a certain reef in the Pacific. Meanwhile on New Zealand, you can run into penguins in the forest. Another island features enormous crabs living in the palm trees. The poor cat Tibbles, who supposedly exterminated an entire species of songbird, is mentioned in one episode, although it seems feral cats had decimated the population of Lyall´s Wren already before his arrival at Stephens Island. Also featured are underwater volcanoes and above-water ones at Hawaii. Somewhat surprisingly, “Wild Pacific” promotes the idea that the culture at Easter Island might have been destroyed by rats.

One problem with this series is that most episodes tend to depict the Pacific as some kind of pristine paradise, which it definitely isn´t. This is particularly galling when discussing Hawaii, “the most isolated island chain in the world”. Yeah, except for Honolulu and the little detail that Hawaii is the 50^th state of the Union! Nothing about the civil war at Bougainville, the near-civil war at New Caledonia, the nuclear tests at Mururoa, the military coup at Fiji, you get the picture. Instead, we are shown happy natives living in fundamental harmony with nature. Only in the last episode do we get some insight into the environmental problems besetting the region, such as overfishing, coral death and climate change threatening to wipe out entire island nations.

That being said, “Wild (or South) Pacific” is well worth watching, and I therefore give it five stars out of five. And yes, I´m still eating tuna…

I'm not saying it was crustal displacement, but it was crustal displacement

“Atlantis Rising” is a magazine devoted to ancient mysteries, the unexplained and future science. This is the current issue, dated November-December 2017. I admit that I didn't find it *that* interesting, give or take a few articles.

Most of it feels like all the usual mysteries (some of them convincingly debunked) recycled all over again: pyramids at unusual places, ancient aliens at all the usual places, man-made structures at other planets, ancient technology, sunken continents, Nephilim, the Mayan calendar, Templar conspiracies, you know the drift already! Tesla isn't mentioned in this issue, but Camille Flammarion is. Velikovsky is also notable with his absence, but instead we get references to Charles Hapgood. I was surprised to find that some people *still* insist that the Shroud of Turin is authentic…

To give the Atlantean devil his due, I will now list the contributions I did find interesting. Maverick scholar and geologist Robert Schoch is back, together with his esoteric friend John Anthony West, and together they present supposed evidence that there *is* a hall of records below the Sphinx's paws, after all. This issue contains an article by Schoch himself, and a shorter news item introducing his and West's recent book “The Origins of the Sphinx”. The article on Easter Island by Martin Ruggles argues that no ecocide took place at the well known outpost of Polynesian civilization, while connecting the stone giants to speculations about lost high cultures in South America and the Pacific. Farfetched? Maybe, but probably not as farfetched as I previously imagined. There is also an article about Skara Brae, the Neolithic settlement in Scotland, arguing that Stone Age man had better astronomical knowledge than hitherto acknowledged.

Overall, I feel that this magazine only deserve two stars, but since I enjoyed some of the contributions, I give it three. If you are into “alternative knowledge”, you will probably enjoy it much more, and criticize the magazine primarily for having so short articles! Can be downloaded to your alien Tesla-Kindle device right away.

A postcolonial deconstruction

A positive review of an anti-Jared Diamond book I wrote in 2011. I would probably be more negative to a book like this today, since its real message seems to be "Diamond isn´t PC enough", which is like yeah whatever. I´m also less optimistic than when I wrote this. That being said, the book does raise some interesting points, for instance about Easter Island and the Natives in the US Southwest.

"Questioning Collapse" is a criticism of best-selling author Jared Diamond and his books "Collapse" and "Guns, germs and steel". The authors have a left-wing, "postcolonial" political agenda, which presumably explains the negative reviews of the book on this product page. Personally, I liked the sacrilegious character of this book!

The contributors' main objection to "Guns, germs and steel" is the book's determinism and implicit Euro-centrism, in which the success of Europe at the expense of the rest of the world is seen as a consequence of pure geography. In this scenario, the downfall of non-European cultures at the hands of Europeans is an unfortunate but inevitable process which simply couldn't have been otherwise. Nobody is guilty, especially not Europeans. Diamond has simply revamped the colonizer's view of the world. An over-simplified and exaggerated critique of Diamond? Sure, but Diamond's book *could* be given this particular spin, despite the anti-racist agenda of its author.

As for "Collapse", the authors question whether it's meaningful to view the history of the world as a series of collapses at all. Rather than "collapse", many societies simply change to cope with changing circumstances, making "resilience" a more meaningful term, or even "success". While this sounds like a more optimistic view of history than the quasi-Spenglerite view of Diamond, the contributors seem mostly interested in absolving Third World peoples from the charge of ecocide. Still, they have a certain point when accusing Diamond of subconscious Euro-centrism in "Collapse", as well. Diamond, it seems, never regards Western civilization as having collapsed. But why not? What about the fall of the Roman Empire, for instance? Or the Greek Dark Ages? Or the plagues and general mayhem of the late medieval period? Westerners tend to look at their own civilization as...well, a story of successful change and adaptation, rather than as a "collapse" (the fall of Rome being the only exception to the rule - and we seem to have survived that one, too!). Why not look at the Maya, the Hohokam or other non-European cultures in the same way?

The bulk of "Questioning Collapse" deals with some of the examples of collapse described by Diamond: Easter Island, the Norse settlements at Greenland, the Anasazi and the Hohokam in the American Southwest, the Maya, the Inca, Mesopotamia, and modern Rwanda and Haiti. China and Australia are also discussed. Of course, only sharp critics of Diamond have been invited to the show, and they often claim that what actually happened was pretty much the very opposite of what Diamond narrates in his books. Since archaeologists and historians tend to disagree on almost everything, the reader should study the issues further before making up his mind. Still, "Questioning Collapse" does raise many interesting points.

According to Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, the ecocide at Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is largely a myth. The forests at Rapa Nui were destroyed by rats, not by humans. (Of course, since the rats were introduced by humans, I suppose a deep ecologist *would* see it as a case of human-induced ecocide. Diamond, however, isn't a deep ecologist.) Hunt and Lipo also claim that the population collapse at Easter Island took place *after* the European colonization, while the ecocide hypothesis claims the opposite - crazed natives died like flies after cutting down the last palm tree already before the arrival of the colonists.

Joel Berglund questions whether the Norse settlements on Greenland really failed. His alternative hypothesis is that the settlers simply emigrated when climactic conditions became too severe. He also points out that the settlements lasted for 500 years - longer than many modern nation-states. Of course, Diamond might retort that this is beside the point, since the settlements *did* fail during the 14th century, perhaps because they were culturally conservative and refused to adapt to changing weather conditions by choosing a different lifestyle. However, I don't think this is merely a terminological squabble. Sure, the Norse settlements "failed", but perhaps they adapted by simply leaving Greenland? And shouldn't a culture that lasted for 500 years in *Greenland* be thought of primarily as a success story, rather than zooming in on its eventual disappearance?

Michael Wilcox claims that virtually everything we ever heard about the vanished Native civilizations of the U.S. Southwest is a gigantic hoax. There never were a people called the "Hohokam". The ethnic group living on the territory in question are know as O'Odham or Pima. They didn't vanish. The real collapse of their culture took place during the 19th century, due to actions taken by White European settlers and the federal government. The "Anasazi" are equally problematic. Wilcox believed that the abandoned towns of these vanished Native cultures were really a kind of ritual, religious centres (something like a Native Mecca). Their abandonment didn't spell the doom of an entire civilization. Somewhat disappointingly, Wilcox says very little about the lurid stories concerning Anasazi cannibalism.

The chapters I found most interesting deal with the Maya and the Inca. According to McAnany and Gallerta Negron, the Maya culture *didn't* collapse. In fact, it didn't even cease to be a high culture. Rather, the Maya transformed their "Classical" culture to a more commercial, maritime culture at the coasts of Central America and southern Mexico during the "Postclassical" period. While some areas were depopulated, others experienced a population growth. The society may have become less "complex", but it certainly didn't collapse. More as a sidebar, Mel Gibson's film "Apocalypto" is in for a good whipping for its terrible portrayal of the Maya.

As for the Inca, David Cahill points out that Diamond's narrative of the Spanish conquest is grossly over-simplified. The Spaniards arrived at a particularly propitious moment, since the Inca Empire was going through a civil war between two pretenders to the throne. Many non-Incans felt oppressed by the empire, and were more than willing to enlist on the side of the Spanish. After the conquest, the Spanish took over the imperial infrastructure and ruled with the aid of local elites. Also, it took the Spanish about 50 years to really pacify Peru after their initial (and swift) conquest. Obviously, "guns, germs and steel" did play a role in the Spanish conquest - the guns at the start, and the germs later on. However, without various chance events and the enlistment of native support, Pizarro might very well have failed. Cahill also gleefully points out that the Inca Empire was more centralized, well organized and prosperous than Spain - nobody in Tawantinsuyu (the real name of the Inca Empire) starved, due to food distribution by the state, while famines were common in Spain. Pizarro himself came from an impoverished Spanish province.

The weakest chapters in the book are those dealing with Rwanda and Haiti. In fact, the Haitian chapter says very little about the actual problems mentioned by Diamond: the deforestation of Haiti as compared to the better situation at the Dominican side of the border. Drexel Woodson opines that Haitian peasants cut down trees to meet fuel needs in the cities and for export. Which proves...what? Why don't Dominican peasants do the same thing? The Rwandan chapter argues against Diamond's Malthusian take on the Rwandan genocide, but most of it is devoted to an eye-witness account of the chaos in Kigali during that terrible year of 1994. Of course the Rwandan genocide has political and ethnic causes, but you don't have to be an orthodox Malthusian to realize that relative overpopulation and scarcity can happen. What about the Irish potato famine? Further, a kind of "Malthusian" catastrophes can take place in a world marked by colonial and neo-colonial relations of exploitation and dependence. Perhaps the Rwandan disaster wasn't "Malthusian" even in this qualified sense, but if so, author Christopher Taylor hasn't proved it. He didn't even try.

To sum up, I like "Questioning Collapse". But yes, I somehow liked "Collapse", too. Diamond's book does indirectly disprove some of the more romantic strands of eco-radicalism, since he mentions both egalitarian cultures which didn't live in complete harmony with nature, and hierarchic societies which did. I wonder what the contributors to this volume think about that aspect?

I cannot vouch for every single fact in "Questioning Collapse", and the debate about the merits and demerits of Jared Diamond's magna opera will surely continue. I didn't mind the contributors' "politically correct" deconstruction of Mr. Diamond's subliminal Euro-centrism, but what I found most inspiring was the idea that our history is one of resilience and change rather than "collapse". If the Maya and the O'Odham could survive their supposed "collapses", so can we.

I hope.