The problem is that Diamond's story is incorrect. There have been a few works that have challenged his narrative, not least the excellent Questioning Collapse (2009). But sadly few of those have broken through into popular understanding. The Statues that Walked is an impressive book about Easter Island that challenges misconceptions. It relies on detailed archaeological field work as well as comparative studies with other Pacific islands to draw out a much more nuanced explanation of the enigmatic people who lived on Easter Island and built the incredible stone monuments.
The authors begin with misconceptions, some of which arise from Colonial attitudes to indigenous peoples that mark encounters between European travellers and settlers in many parts of the world. The key one of these is that indigenous peoples are lazy and don't utilise land properly. Despite their ability to erect massive monuments, people don't use the land properly. As one account from 1722 says, "this place [Rapa Nui] as far as its rich soil and good climate are concerned, is such that it might be made into an earthly Paradise, if it were properly worked and cultivated; which is now only done in so far as the Inhabitants are obliged to for the maintenance of life".
To a certain extent, similar attitudes led scholars to miss interpret the real nature of Rapa Nui's archaeological remains. In 1996 a graduate student Joan Wozniak noticed that while there was "no obvious evidence of cultivation" there were countless places were broken rocks, stones and obsidian splinters. The "surface remains appeared to be just a carpet of cobbles and boulders, the subsurface demonstrated plenty of prehistoric activity". It turned out that the soil had been deliberately "enriched" with broken rocks to improve soil fertility and improve growing conditions. Rapa Nui is an "engineered landscape". Rapa Nui's seemingly barren landscape was actually carefully managed. Similar investigations by the authors show that there was an extensive road network which facilitated the moving of the massive stone heads that are the principle known monuments from the island. Incidentally, the book has a detailed explanation of attempts to understand how these heads were moved and how they were most likely moved. The explanation is relatively straight forward and is similar to the way we might move a tall and heavy fridge. The nuance is that clever sculpting of the heads themselves which ensures they have a low centre of gravity. Belief that these statues couldn't be moved by people with stone age technologies is reflective of the same racist colonial attitudes that suggested they didn't farm their landscape because they were too primitive.
The authors explain that the people of Rapa Nui cannot be understood without seeing them as a society that operated carefully to maintain a delicate balance between them and their environment. Rapa Nui is not resource rich. It is likely that it was colonised only once by Pacific islanders which explains the small number of plants and animals that were used. Deforestation did occur, caused by the rats that probably arrived with the original settlers. But deforestation was not total - many early accounts did refer to trees and woodland (as well as agriculture). These were forgotten in the construction of European colonial myths about the islands.
What did destroy the Rapa Nui's pre-contact society was contact itself. A series of violent encounters which brought disease (as well as colonial murder) decimated the original populations. The "collapse" of Rapa Hui's society is, according to Diamond the result of islanders "pent up anger at their leaders" similar to the throwing down of statues by East European's in their "paroxysm of anger and disillusionment... at the end of communism". However, less emotionally (and politically charged) Hunt and Lipo conclude that while some toppling "may have been purposeful... many more likely came down as a result of inattention and lack of maintenance". They conclude that "what is clear... is that with the arrival of Europeans the rationale for participating in moai construction and movement had been undermined; the activity had lost its value."
Whatever the reasons for erecting the statues (and we can only speculate) the point is there was a reason that was inseparable from the nature of pre-contact Rapa Nui society. The arrival of Europeans broke the social relations up on the island (with some evidence of a 'cargo-cult' type worship of European goods developing). Other things arrived with the Europeans apart from disease, guns and goods - one of these was ideological. Diamond refers to "cannibalism" appearing on the island after European contact which along with chicken farming "underwent explosive growth" after 1650. Hunt and Lipo argue that this was a myth: "references to cannibalism became a common theme only after the missionary presence, and these references become increasingly embellished, especially in the European accounts painting a treacherous picture of these 'savages' and their wild past."
Hunt and Lipo's analysis of the history of Rapa Nui is underpinned by archaeology and comparative studies of other, similar, inhabited island environments. But they also use game-theory to model how it such societies might live and conclude that it is much more likely that the pre-contact islanders lived in communal societies, rather than savage warlike ones. One intriguing argument is that the a by-product of statue building was that while it "wasted" resources from a purely economic point of view, it was also reducing reproduction to ensure that population levels in an environment were total resources were short. The authors explain:
We have to be careful to emphasise that we are not saying the islanders consciously decided to spend more time making and moving statues in efforts to take time and resources away from reproduction. The role of the statues as costly signals probably explains why so much time was devoted to them. But the benefits of bet-hedging offer a strong explanation for why spending so much time and energy on the statues didn't threaten Rapanui survival, and indeed probably helped to sustain it. In considering what leads to evolutionary success, those reaping the benefits of any given practice need not understand why it contributes to their survival.What emerges from this account is not one of humanity self-destructive behaviour. But rather one that shows that humans actually worked hard to protect and utilise the resources they had and, even in environments were resources might have been limited, they were able to create impressive and complex cultural societies. The arrival of European imperialists, with their myopic view of land utilisation and commodity fetishism broke the delicate balance between social and economic life, and that's what led to collapse. The story doesn't make for as great newspaper headlines as Diamond's version does. But it is more useful in terms of understanding how human societies have worked in the past and how they might organise to be sustainable in the future.
Related Reviews
McAnany & Yoffee - Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire
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