******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
(Received from a Marxmail subscriber a couple of days ago. Just by
coincidence I heard about this on NPR the same day in an interview with
archaeologist Dale Simpson who pioneered the research. It refuted the
specious case made by Jared Diamond that wasteful use of natural
resources caused a "Collapse".)
People of Easter Island Weren't Driven to Warfare and Cannibalism. They
Actually Got Along.
By Megan Gannon, Live Science Contributor | August 13, 2018
In popular science literature, much ink has been spilled on the supposed
collapse of Easter Island
<https://www.livescience.com/24021-easter-island-rapa-nui.html>, or Rapa
Nui, as it's known in the local language.
Jared Diamond's 2005 book "Collapse," for example, presents a chilling
version of what happened in the centuries after Polynesian seafarers
colonized the remote Pacific island around A.D. 1200: Rivalry between
clans drove the islanders to build hundreds of increasingly big "moai,"
the larger-than-life statues carved from stone. This fierce competition
and population growth caused a hubristic over-exploitation of resources,
driving the Rapanui people to desperation, and even cannibalism
<https://www.livescience.com/616-view-easter-island-disaster-wrong-researchers.html>,
and Europeans arriving in the 18th century encountered a society well on
its way to decline, according to Diamond's account.
But archaeologists who have been studying the ancient quarries, stone
tools and other resources on the island have recently been building a
different picture of what happened before European contact. A study
published today (Aug. 13) in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology
<http://pacificarchaeology.org/index.php/journal/article/view/230> adds
a new piece of evidence to the case against Rapa Nui's collapse.
Rapa Nui is probably most famous today for its 1,000 moai, the towering
statues that were placed on platforms ("ahu") and sometimes adorned with
colossal hats or topknots
<https://www.livescience.com/62747-easter-island-statues-hats.html> called
"pukao." The monuments —which weigh as much as 82 tons (74 metric tons)
and are found all over the island's coastal areas —were amazingly built
without the help of wheels or large animals
<https://www.livescience.com/50617-easter-island-hats-rolled.html>.
Previous archaeological research has shown that no one clan had all the
stone resources within its territory to make these massive monuments
<https://www.livescience.com/63097-ireland-newgrange-henge-uncovered.html>,
and that there were preferred quarries for each type of stone. For
example, the majority of moai came from a singletuff source, and most of
the pukao came from a single red scoria quarry complex. In the new
study, Dale Simpson, Jr., an adjunct professor of anthropology at the
College of DuPage in Illinois, set out to investigate the origin of
basalt stone tools that were used in the moai carving.
"Each quarry is like a finger and each stone you pull from it is going
to have a fingerprint," Simpson told Live Science. Simpson and his
colleagues sought to match the geochemical signatures in a set of 21
basalt picks and adzes (or "toki") with basalt quarries on the island.
He said that he and his colleagues were "pretty amazed" to find out that
the stones were mainly coming from one quarry complex, even though there
are other sites to get basalt on the island.
"This continued pattern of minimum sources-maximum use suggests a form
of collaboration," Simpson told Live Science. In other words, he thinks
the clans had a system of exchange that allowed them to trespass on each
other's territory to share resources. "I think that that goes against
the collapse model that says all they were doing was competing to build
bigger statues," he added.
Study co-author Jo Anne Van Tilburg, a UCLA archaeologist who is also
director of the Easter Island Statue Project, said the results support
"a view of craft specialization based on information exchange, but we
can't know at this stage if the interaction was collaborative." In a
statement, Van Tilburg suggested that it's possible that the quarrying
of the stone tools "may also have been coercive in some way," and that
the study "encourages further mapping and stone sourcing."
Carl Lipo, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University in New
York, who was not involved in the study, said the results aren't really
surprising. "The fact that there isn't 'control' of resources is pretty
clear when one looks at other aspects of the record," Lipo said in an
email to Live Science. "Yet, such findings are important because of the
degree of misunderstandings and assumptions people have about the island."
"What archaeologists who conduct fieldwork on the island have learned in
the past 20 years is that the evidence dramatically contradicts the
tales that most people have heard," he said. Lipo explained that there
is no archaeological evidence for the control of resources or any
hierarchical distribution of resources, which is leading to a new
narrative about the pre-contact Rapa Nui society: that the island was
not dominated by massive chiefdoms, and rather, communities shared
resources without any prehistoric warfare.
Simpson noted that there are still thousands of Rapanui people alive
today. Other archaeological research
<http://islandheritage.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/RNJ_23_2_Mulrooney_Etal.pdf>
has suggested that population levels on the island peaked around the
time of first European contact, in 1722, and then went into sharp
decline in the century that followed. In another study that he published
earlier this year in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X1730531X#bb0245>,
Simpson argued that the impacts of colonization, which included disease,
violence and forced labor, "arguably played the largest catalysts for
Rapanui cultural change."
There are two papers referred to in this article. The first is OA at:
http://pacificarchaeology.org/index.php/journal/article/view/230 (You
may need to copy and paste this link)
The second is from an Elsevier publication. Paywall, but I have a
pirated copy if you want it.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
