It's been said that "The truth about stories is that that's all we are."

(Thomas King: The Truth about Stories.)

Keep that in mind.

Today:

We'll consider Ronald Wright's arguments from A Short History of Progress, and cover the story of Easter Island in particular.

But, being aware that there's more than one way to tell the story... Next week we'll come at this from another angle. We'll start with the data from several different collapses, and consider what other authors have to say about the ends of civilizations... and then return to Easter Island.

Recall the collapse stories you know (e.g.  the Norse in Greenland)

Left: Ruins of a small Norse church in Greenland. Image: http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/index.html

Right: Ruins of the Great Hall of the Western Settlement. Image: www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/index.html

Wright's argument

"The greatest wonder of the ancient world is how recent is all is. No city or monument is much more than 5 000 years old. Only about seventy lifetimes, of seventy years, have been lived end to end since civilization began. Its entire run occupies a mere 0.2 per cent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone."

- humans have encountered 'progress traps' before ... e.g. perfection of hunting ... and "our escape from that trap by the invention of farming led to our greatest experiment: worldwide civilization. We then have to ask ourselves this urgent question: Could civilization itself be another and much greater trap?"

- Civilization has been a runaway success: an experiment that started independently in multiple locations, "has coalesced (mainly by hostile takeover) into one big system that covers and consumes the earth"

- historically, collapse is usually due ultimately to environmental degradation, itself usually the result of over-farming but sometimes due to resource over-consumption in support of excessive monument-building etc.

The Story of Easter Island...

If you're interested... more on The Case of Easter Island.

"Easter Island's End", by Jared Diamond, in Discover Magazine, 1995. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/24/042.html

Secrets of Easter Island, NOVA website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/index.html

Easter Island Rock Art, by Dr. Georgia Lee: http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/easter/rockart.html

Usual questions about Easter Island / Rapa Nui

"The world that the Europeans first observed when they arrived on Rapa Nui in 1722 has puzzled us for centuries. What was the meaning of the massive stone human statues on the island? How did they transport and erect these multi-ton statues? And, finally, how did the original inhabitants arrive on this remote island?"  

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/index.html

Location as part of Polynesia

Where are the statues? All around the island.

Rano Raraku -- where all the Rapa Nui moai were quarried. These ones never made it to their final destinations elsewhere on the island.

More: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/explore/ranoraraku.html

Above:

Hoa Hakananai'a, "Stolen Friend", now in British Museum. 2.4 metres tall. Taken to Britain 1868.

Originally, the moai had hats and eyes.

But these are recently re-erected.  

Previous theories about how to move a moai:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/move/past.html

Illustrations of modern apparatus used to try  moving moai: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/move/ccdiag3.html

Record of recent attempts to move the moai: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/textindex.html

Then the Moai were toppled... all of them.

Life on Rapa Nui took a turn for the worse...

- Moai kavakava (right), wooden statuettes from the island, used to ward off evil spirits, indicate a familiarity with hunger (though their symbolism is complex)

- also clear evidence of an escalation in violence, including cannibalism (which had not previously been the norm)

What went wrong?

The Chilean Palm: Probably similar to the palm trees that once covered Easter Island.

How do we know about ancient vegetation on Easter Island?

The Ranu Kao Crater: An excellent source of ancient pollen!

Pollen profile below from Bahn & Flenley's Easter Island, Earth Island.

Pattern? Clear evidence of deforestation.

How? Why? Consequences?

Below: Rapa Nui today.

PICKING UP THIS WEEK

COLLAPSE

As we've discussed before.... archaeology was partly born of wondering...  what went wrong? Why did these civilizations end?

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- P.B. Shelley, 1817

(Ramesses II, aka Ozymandias)

There are a lot of popular 'new age' books that deal with these questions of what past civilizations can teach us, e.g. The Mayan Prophecies (which foretells the end of our age in 2012... mark that in your calendar). These books usually don't have too much to do with the actual archaeology, though.

Strictly archaeologically speaking...

What is Societal Collapse?: abandonment of a region, replacement of one subsistence regime by another (e.g. agriculture being replaced by pastoralism), conversion to a lower energy socio-political organization (empire shifting down to a local state; state shifting down to dispersed chiefdoms).

How has it been explained?

For a while in archaeology, single-cause explanations were popular.

Then multicausal explanations became popular.

Then, for a while (around the year 2000), single-cause explanations of catastrophic collapses became popular again, as these parodies show:

Oh No! Godzilla’s Attacking Babylon!

Things look bad for Babylon as Godzilla approaches the Ishtar Gate

www.archaeology.org/online/features/godzilla/

Catastrophes are real... but do they explain most collapses?

The Case of the Classic Maya: Shifting Explanations for Collapse

Recalling timeline: http://www.ancientmexico.com/content/timeline/

- politics? religion? war? ecology?

- theories have changed according to contemporary events, as well as because of new data

Another e.g. Sumerian civilization

Ziggurat of Ur today

"The desert in which Ur and Uruk stand is a desert of their making."

- Wright, A Short History of Progress

Chaco / Anasazi

Studying Climate Change and Societal Collapse in Prehistory

Palaeoclimate tracking methods have developed quickly in recent years, and have been used more widely than before. E.g. recovered pollen from archaeological sites OR from layers in the earth, lake sediments, or ice, corresponding to relevant dates, can be used to gauge vegetation and climate. Levels of dust in sediment can also indicate periods of drought. Tree-rings and coral can also be used. Palaeoclimate methods are the main method for understanding long range climate variation (i.e. drought patterns of multiple decades or centuries), other than using written history, which isn’t always available.

Case studies
 

Explaining Collapse: earlier theories, which explained such change primarily in terms of politics and economics, didn’t consider ecology enough.  Current information regarding societal collapse indicates that climate change is a key driver in processes of cultural collapse.

Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse (2005: 514-5)

"Are the parallels between the past and present sufficiently close that the collapses of the Easter Islanders... Anasazi, Maya, and Greenland Norse could offer any lessons for the modern world? At first, a critic, noting the obvious differences, might be tempted to object, 'It's ridiculous to suppose that the collapses of all thos ancient peoples could have broad relevance today, especially to the modern US. Those ancients didn't enjoy the wonders of modern technology... Those ancients had the misfortune to suffer from effects of climate change. They behaved stupidly and ruined their own environment by doing obviously dumb things, like cutting down their forests, overharvesting wild animal sources of protein, watching their topsoil erode away, and building cities in dry areas likely to run short of water. They had foolish leaders who didn't have books and so couldn't learn from history, and who embroiled them in expensive and destabilizing wars, cared only about staying in power, and didn't pay attention to problems at home.... IN all those respects, we moderns are fundamentally different from those primitive ancients, and there is nothing we could learn from them.'  "

Diamond retorts that actually, there are only two significant differences:

1) scale -- our impacts are that much worse because of our population size and technology

2) globalization -- our actions don't stay localized....

Jared Diamond (2005) adds that cross-culturally and throughout history: the eight environmental causes for collapse are: “deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people” (Diamond 2005:6). However, none of these challenges is in itself enough to induce collapse. Diamond specifies his five-point framework for understanding possible environmental collapses: “Four of those sets of factors – environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, and friendly trade partners – may or may not prove significant for a particular society. The fifth set of factors – the society’s responses to its environmental problems – always proves significant” (Diamond 2005:11).

SO:

environmental damage

climate change

hostile neighbours

friendly trade partners (and changes in relations)

And most significant - society's response to its environmental problems.

Lessons?

Peter de Menocal:  “Complex societies are neither powerless pawns nor infinitely adaptive to climate variability. As with modern cultures, the ancients adapted to and thrived in marginal climates with large interannual climate variability. As with ancient cultures, modern civilizations (regrettably) gauge their ability to adapt to future climate variations on the basis of what is known from historical (oral or instrumental) records. What differentiates these ancient cultures from our own is that they alone have witnessed the onset and persistence of unprecedented drought that continued for many decades to centuries. Efforts to understand past cultural responses to large and persistent climate changes may prove instructive for assessing modern societal preparedness for a changing and uncertain future.”

Weiss and Bradley: “We do, however, have distinct advantages over societies in the past because we can anticipate the future. Although far from perfect… [we have] a road map for how the climate system is likely to evolve in the future. We also know where population growth will be the greatest. We must use this information to design strategies that minimize the impact of climate change on societies that are at greatest risk. This will require substantial international cooperation, without which the 21^st century will likely witness unprecedented social disruptions.”

Back to Easter Island ...

There are two ways to tell this story.

So... at some point, the last tree on Easter Island was cut down. The entire island had been deforested at that point, and the last trees were at the highest point... meaning, as has been said, that the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island could see that it was the last tree, and they cut it down anyway.

But did they see?

Diamond suggests that perhaps they did not:

"Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm."

Implications of these different ways of telling the story?

Is it a story about deliberate evil?

OR is it a story about ignorance and inattention?

Bahn and Flenley on Easter Island:

"This is more, therefore, than an account of the rise and fall of an extraordinary prehistoric culture... it is, indeed, a cautionary tale relevant for the future of all humankind."

Ronald Wright, A Brief History of Progress, p 131-2

" The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.

We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist in our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.

Now is our last chance to get the future right."

What does history say: Is there hope?

Yes. There ARE complex societies who lived sustainably for many millennia (e.g. Papua New Guinea, Tikopia).

There ARE complex societies who acted effectively to halt environmental catastrophes.

The point is not that we are just like the Norse, or just like the Maya, or just like the Mesopotamians, or just like the Egyptians, or just like the Papua New Guineans, or the Tikopians.

The point is that we are just like all of them. Our story includes all theirs. And we can learn.

The bottom line?

Archaeology puts us in touch with not only the lives and deaths of individual people, but of entire civilizations... and this can tell us much about our own lives and deaths as individuals, and our civilization's future.

It tells us that there are different ways to tell the story of humanity.

It tells us that the end hasn't been written yet.

It tells us of the choices we have.

Choose to learn.

P.S.

Palm trees have been reintroduced on Rapa Nui.

For more, see:
 

Harvey Weiss and Raymond Bradley. 2001.  “What Drives Societal Collapse?” Science 291.
Charles Redman. 1999. Human Impact on Ancient Environments. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Peter deMenocal. 2001. “Cultural Responses to Climate Change during the Late Holocene.” Science 292 (27 April 2001)

Ronald Wright: A Brief History of Progress, and Stolen Continents

Jared Diamond: Collapse, and Guns, Germs and Steel, and The Third Chimpanzee

Paul Bahn and John Flenley: Earth Island, Easter Island

Jane Goodall: Reason for Hope