http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article802176.ece The real lessons of Easter Island by Roger Atwood
Terry L. Hunt and Carl Lipo THE STATUES THAT WALKED Unraveling the mystery of Easter Island 256pp. Free Press. £16.95 (US $26). 978 1 4391 5031 3 Published: 19 October 2011 The enigma of Easter Island was long supposed to have been solved. Its Polynesian inhabitants, we were told, felled the island’s trees to clear land for their heedlessly growing population and to build wooden sleds with which to carry their stone statues, the moai, to ceremonial platforms. Soon there were no trees with which to make canoes to travel back to the islands from whence they came. Trapped in a prison of their own making, they fell into a cataclysm of dwindling resources, war and cannibalism. They died through their own wretched excess. People everywhere, take note. This narrative was, in retrospect, ripe for the skewering. The problem was not that it mechanically blamed all the island’s misfortunes on its original inhabitants. As Terry Hunt, an anthropologist, and Carl Lipo, an archaeologist, assert in this fascinating book, the “ecocide” story was based on a misreading of historical sources and field archaeological evidence and, more perniciously, early Western assumptions about the island that crept into the record and remained unchallenged through decades of scholarship. They spend a lot of ink trying to debunk Jared Diamond’s bestseller Collapse (2005) and other purveyors of the ecocide theory. In its place, they offer not only a radically new perspective on the island’s history, but a critical study on how the West interacts with isolated societies and how bias continues to infect outsiders’ understanding of them. Easter Island, or Rapa Nui in its native language, rises from the South Pacific about 2,000 miles west of the Chilean mainland. To visit, as I did recently, is to arrive at a place with an overwhelming sense of isolation and strangeness. Nearly a thousand moai cover the island, some as tall as a three-storey building and many others left where they fell centuries ago. The moai do not look out to sea. Nearly all face into the interior of the island. When you look at them, you face the cosmos from which Rapa Nui’s seafaring ancestors came, and from where no one else followed until the arrival of Europeans in 1722. There is little debate now on the origin of the first inhabitants – they are from Polynesia, probably the Marquesas Islands, and not Peru, as the adventurer Thor Heyerdahl posited in the 1960s. The date of their arrival is obscure. Hunt and Lipo, on the basis of their own excavations and carbon-dating, say humans arrived about ad 1200, at least three centuries later than the date supported by Diamond and most other writers. Thus the authors start with a more compressed timeline for the island’s pre-European settlement, buttressing their overarching point that Western trade and disease arrived earlier and hit much harder than previously thought. When they arrived, the voyagers found an island teeming with life. Today it is mostly treeless, yet the island was once covered in forests of a now-extinct palm that towered 100 feet and was, while it lived, possibly the tallest in the world. In some respects, its disappearance is the unanswered question from which all other questions about Easter Island derive. Diamond and others propose a straightforward case of over-exploitation. Island clans strove to outdo each other to build bigger and finer moai, cutting more and more tree trunks to lug the statues to every corner of the island, until there were no trees left. Hunt and Lipo argue that the trees were killed off mostly by rats, which ate their seeds and shoots faster than they could regenerate. Humans surely cut down plenty, but fossil palm nuts are invariably punctured by rat teeth and could never germinate. Diamond also cites the rodent factor. But Hunt and Lipo bring a wider range of evidence to the table, including studies from Hawaii showing how rats can multiply into the millions in a few years and have profound effects on ecosystems. Next they question the moai argument. There is no evidence, they say, that islanders ever transported the statues horizontally, and thus that they used timber sleds. The moai, they assert, were moved vertically with ropes and muscle, rocked and pivoted like refrigerators along roads radiating out from the quarry where they were hewn. Those roads can still be seen today, and all along them are moai that have plainly fallen and broken into two or more pieces on impact. If they were sliding horizontally, it is hard to see how this could have happened. Oral traditions speak of the statues “walking” upright to their ritual sites. Far from being the source of Rapa Nui’s downfall, moai construction, in the view of Hunt and Lipo, had the effect of keeping the population down. Citing studies of other societies in extremely resource-challenged environments, such as the Inuit, they view the making of moai as a classic “bet-hedging” strategy by which people channel the reproductive urge into something else – in this case, statues. It may not be a conscious decision, they explain, but people in many societies will forgo having children in favour of engaging in massive civic projects. To argue that they preferred carving to sex is not an easy argument to sustain. The authors maintain that the population did indeed stand at a manageable 3,000 when the first Europeans arrived, not the 15,000 or more suggested in previous accounts. Hunt and Lipo see flabby assumptions everywhere in the traditional story of Easter Island. They challenge the thesis that statue-erecting shows the island had some kind of central authority to organize it all. Variations in moai style from village to village suggest independent traditions, they write, and anyway dispersed and small-scale societies from Stonehenge to Ohio mound-builders have been capable of monumental art. The whole notion that culture is a product of surplus resources, or that high art can be made only by centralized, “highly evolved” societies is bunk, they assert. Next comes the war that supposedly followed the islanders’ depletion of natural resources. The island shows none of the hilltop fortifications or defensive earthworks seen elsewhere in Polynesia, Hunt and Lipo note, and the “trench” on the island’s eastern side that tour guides explain was dug by one faction to bury the other alive is a natural formation caused by the confluence of two lava streams. Collapse followed the introduction of European disease, the authors argue. The Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen arrived on Easter Sunday, 1722, and described well-tended gardens, hundreds of standing statues, and, in his words, “whole tracts of woodland” – remnants of the native forest. He stayed a few hours, just long enough, Hunt and Lipo believe, for his men to introduce venereal diseases to the trusting, curious islanders. On this point, Hunt and Lipo ironically echo Diamond’s own Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which dramatically showed the power of exotic disease to transform societies. It is also the most speculative part of their argument. As Diamond, Charles Mann and others have shown, we have ample evidence for the implosion of aboriginal populations in the Americas in eyewitness accounts of abandoned towns, colonial death records and mass graves. Hunt and Lipo have none of this, at least not for the forty-eight years that followed Roggeveen’s visit. They say the Dutch visit “likely” caused the population to plunge to a few hundred, recovering to 800 or so by the time the next Europeans arrived – a Spanish party in 1770. The party stayed six days, long enough to land plenty of microbes. Warmly received, the Spaniards remarked on the island’s liberal sexual mores and how the native men did not object when the women offered the visitors their favours. The next visitor, Captain Cook, arrived in 1774 and found the place a wreck. Islanders were living in miserable huts and caves, and human bones were lying about. The scene was “precisely what the aftermath of epidemic and a population crash would look like”, as The Statues that Walked puts it. The Europeans knew nothing yet of germ theory and, in any case, never stayed long enough to see its effects. More traumas followed. In one of the best chapters, the authors explain how the arrival of European goods led to the collapse of moai traditions. Islanders continued to venerate the moai as late as 1770, yet they were entranced by the jaunty hats, jackets, tools and weapons brought by the outsiders, and brazenly stole them. With these new symbols of prestige, the old ways lost their value and the neglected moai toppled over – not levelled in the iconoclastic frenzy that previous authors have posited. At the quarry, I saw hundreds of half-carved moai, abandoned when the cult died. By 1830, only eight statues stood on their original platforms. The island became a popular port of call for adventurers and whalers from all over Europe and America, attracted by its “sweet potatoes, bananas, idols, brackish water and sex”. For a time ships’ captains avoided the island because of its reputation for syphilis, and by 1868 not a single moai stood. Its native worship dead, the island became little more than a brothel. Curiously, it was not until 1845 that claims of cannibalism appeared, in a French account of a sailor who returned to ship covered in teeth marks and alleging the islanders tried to eat him alive. It was probably a hoax, say Hunt and Lipo, but the cannibal label stuck, and was embellished with similarly lurid tales that reinforced colonial stereotypes about the heathen past just as missionaries were settling in to save souls. The final, nearly fatal blow arrived in the form of Peruvian slave-raiders in 1862, who rounded up over 1,400 islanders and shipped them to Peru to dig guano. Many were by then Christian converts, and the forcible “blackbirding”, as the practice was known, drew international condemnation. It came too late. The few, pustuled islanders who straggled home brought a new wave of smallpox, and by 1877 the population was down to 110. Centuries of folklore and knowledge were lost, and in its place a melodramatic pseudo-history of man-eaters and selfinduced catastrophe arose. Chile annexed the shattered island in 1888 and turned it over to sheep ranchers, whose livestock extinguished what little was left of the native vegetation. The majestic native palm, still alive as late as the 1840s, finally disappeared. Somehow the island’s Polynesian language survived, one of the few living connections with the past. You hear it today in shops, homes and hip-hop bands, muddled with Spanish but unmistakably alive. A hundred or so mighty moai have been re-erected on their platforms. Fresh, revisionist, multidisciplinary – The Statues that Walked makes for bracing reading. For those who saw Easter Island as a parable of apocalypse, its conclusions will come as something of a let-down. It was not civil war that ended Easter Island’s cultural golden age, but the inadvertent introduction of European germs. It was not human excess that killed its forests, but escaped rats. “History is the witness that Rapa Nui suffered near genocide, not self-inflicted ‘ecocide’”, the authors write. There are plenty of lessons for today’s world in this story, just not the ones we may have imagined. --- http://www.swans.com/library/art16/lproy60.html The Collapse Of Jared Diamond by Louis Proyect Book Review Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, Edited by Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee, Cambridge University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-73366-3, 372 pages. In general, the approach of the authors is to put the ostensible collapse into historical context, something that is utterly lacking in Diamond's treatment. One of the more impressive record-correcting exercises is Terry L. Hunt and Carl P. Lipo's Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, and the Myth of "Ecocide" on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). In Collapse, Diamond judged Easter Island as one of the more egregious examples of "ecocide" in human history, a product of the folly of the island's rulers whose decision to construct huge statues led to deforestation and collapse. By chopping down huge palm trees that were used to transport the stones used in statue construction, the islanders were effectively sealing their doom. Not only did the settlers chop down trees, they hunted the native fauna to extinction. The net result was a loss of habitat that led to a steep population decline. Diamond was not the first observer to call attention to deforestation on Easter Island. In 1786, a French explorer named La Pérouse also attributed the loss of habitat to the "imprudence of their ancestors for their present unfortunate situation." Referring to research about Easter Island by scientists equipped with the latest technologies, the authors maintain that the deforestation had nothing to do with transporting statues. Instead, it was an accident of nature related to the arrival of rats in the canoes of the earliest settlers. Given the lack of native predators, the rats had a field day and consumed the palm nuts until the trees were no longer reproducing themselves at a sustainable rate. The settlers also chopped down trees to make a space for agriculture, but the idea that giant statues had anything to do with the island's collapse is as much of a fiction as Diamond's New Yorker article. Unfortunately, Diamond is much more interested in ecocide than genocide. If people interested him half as much as palm trees, he might have said a word or two about the precipitous decline in population that occurred after the island was discovered by Europeans in 1722. Indeed, despite deforestation there is evidence that the island's population grew between 1250 and 1650, the period when deforestation was taking place -- leaving aside the question of its cause. As was the case when Europeans arrived in the New World, a native population was unable to resist diseases such as smallpox and died in massive numbers. Of course, Diamond would approach such a disaster with his customary Olympian detachment and write it off as an accident of history. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
