Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

  Those were the immediate consequences of deforestation and other human environmental impacts. The further consequences start with starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism. Surviving islanders’ accounts of starvation are graphically confirmed by the proliferation of little statues called moai kavakava, depicting starving people with hollow cheeks and protruding ribs. Captain Cook in 1774 described the islanders as “small, lean, timid, and miserable.” Numbers of house sites in the coastal lowlands, where almost everybody lived, declined by 70% from peak values around 1400-1600 to the 1700s, suggesting a corresponding decline in numbers of people. In place of their former sources of wild meat, islanders turned to the largest hitherto unused source available to them: humans, whose bones became common not only in proper burials but also (cracked to extract the marrow) in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.”

  Easter’s chiefs and priests had previously justified their elite status by claiming relationship to the gods, and by promising to deliver prosperity and bountiful harvests. They buttressed that ideology by monumental architecture and ceremonies designed to impress the masses, and made possible by food surpluses extracted from the masses. As their promises were being proved increasingly hollow, the power of the chiefs and priests was overthrown around 1680 by military leaders called matatoa, and Easter’s formerly complexly integrated society collapsed in an epidemic of civil war. The obsidian spear-points (termed mata’a) from that era of fighting still littered Easter in modern times. Commoners now built their huts in the coastal zone, which had been previously reserved for the residences (hare paenga) of the elite. For safety, many people turned to living in caves that were enlarged by excavation and whose entrances were partly sealed to create a narrow tunnel for easier defense. Food remains, bone sewing needles, woodworking implements, and tools for repairing tapa cloth make clear that the caves were being occupied on a long-term basis, not just as temporary hiding places.

  What had failed, in the twilight of Easter’s Polynesian society, was not only the old political ideology but also the old religion, which became discarded along with the chiefs’ power. Oral traditions record that the last ahu and moai were erected around 1620, and that Paro (the tallest statue) was among the last. The upland plantations whose elite-commandeered production fed the statue teams were progressively abandoned between 1600 and 1680. That the sizes of statues had been increasing may reflect not only rival chiefs vying to outdo each other, but also more urgent appeals to ancestors necessitated by the growing environmental crisis. Around 1680, at the time of the military coup, rival clans switched from erecting increasingly large statues to throwing down one another’s statues by toppling a statue forwards onto a slab placed so that the statue would fall on the slab and break. Thus, as we shall also see for the Anasazi and Maya in Chapters 4 and 5, the collapse of Easter society followed swiftly upon the society’s reaching its peak of population, monument construction, and environmental impact.

  We don’t know how far the toppling had proceeded at the time of the first European visits, because Roggeveen in 1722 landed only briefly at a single site, and González’s Spanish expedition of 1770 wrote nothing about their visit except in the ship’s log. The first semi-adequate European description was by Captain Cook in 1774, who remained for four days, sent a detachment to reconnoiter inland, and had the advantage of bringing a Tahitian whose Polynesian language was sufficiently similar to that of Easter Islanders that he could converse with them. Cook commented on seeing statues that had been thrown down, as well as others still erect. The last European mention of an erect statue was in 1838; none was reported as standing in 1868. Traditions relate that the final statue to be toppled (around 1840) was Paro, supposedly erected by a woman in honor of her husband, and thrown down by enemies of her family so as to break Paro at mid-body.

  Ahu themselves were desecrated by pulling out some of the fine slabs in order to construct garden walls (manavai) next to the ahu, and by using other slabs to create burial chambers in which to place dead bodies. As a result, today the ahu that have not been restored (i.e., most of them) look at first sight like mere piles of boulders. As Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Claudio Cristino, Sonia Haoa, Barry Rolett, and I drove around Easter, saw ahu after ahu as a rubble pile with its broken statues, reflected on the enormous effort that had been devoted for centuries to constructing the ahu and to carving and transporting and erecting the moai, and then remembered that it was the islanders themselves who had destroyed their own ancestors’ work, we were filled with an overwhelming sense of tragedy.

  Easter Islanders’ toppling of their ancestral moai reminds me of Russians and Romanians toppling the statues of Stalin and Ceauşescu when the Communist governments of those countries collapsed. The islanders must have been filled with pent-up anger at their leaders for a long time, as we know that Russians and Romanians were. I wonder how many of the statues were thrown down one by one at intervals, by particular enemies of a statue’s owner, as described for Paro; and how many were instead destroyed in a quickly spreading paroxysm of anger and disillusionment, as took place at the end of communism. I’m also reminded of a cultural tragedy and rejection of religion described to me in 1965 at a New Guinea highland village called Bomai, where the Christian missionary assigned to Bomai boasted to me with pride how one day he had called upon his new converts to collect their “pagan artifacts” (i.e., their cultural and artistic heritage) at the airstrip and burn them—and how they obeyed. Perhaps Easter Island’s matatoa issued a similar summons to their own followers.

  I don’t want to portray social developments on Easter after 1680 as wholly negative and destructive. The survivors adapted as best they could, both in their subsistence and in their religion. Not only cannibalism but also chicken houses underwent explosive growth after 1650; chickens had accounted for less than 0.1% of the animal bones in the oldest middens that David Steadman, Patricia Vargas, and Claudio Cristino excavated at Anakena. The matatoa justified their military coup by adopting a religious cult, based on the creator god Makemake, who had previously been just one of Easter’s pantheon of gods. The cult was centered at Orongo village on the rim of Rano Kau caldera, overlooking the three largest offshore islets to which nesting seabirds had become confined. The new religion developed its own new art styles, expressed especially in petroglyphs (rock carvings) of women’s genitals, birdmen, and birds (in order of decreasing frequency), carved not only on Orongo monuments but also on toppled moai and pukao elsewhere. Each year the Orongo cult organized a competition between men to swim across the cold, shark-infested, one-mile-wide strait separating the islets from Easter itself, to collect the first egg laid in that season by Sooty Terns, to swim back to Easter with the unbroken egg, and to be anointed “Birdman of the year” for the following year. The last Orongo ceremony took place in 1867 and was witnessed by Catholic missionaries, just as the residue of Easter Island society not already destroyed by the islanders themselves was being destroyed by the outside world.

  The sad story of European impacts on Easter Islanders may be quickly summarized. After Captain Cook’s brief sojourn in 1774, there was a steady trickle of European visitors. As documented for Hawaii, Fiji, and many other Pacific islands, they must be assumed to have introduced European diseases and thereby to have killed many previously unexposed islanders, though our first specific mention of such an epidemic is of smallpox around 1836. Again as on other Pacific islands, “black-birding,” the kidnapping of islanders to become laborers, began on Easter around 1805 and climaxed in 1862-63, the grimmest year of Easter’s history, when two dozen Peruvian ships abducted about 1,500 people (half of the surviving population) and sold them at auction to work in Peru’s guano mines and other menial jobs. Most of those kidnapped died in captivity. Under international pressure, Peru repatriated a dozen surviving captives, w
ho brought another smallpox epidemic to the island. Catholic missionaries took up residence in 1864. By 1872 there were only 111 islanders left on Easter.

  European traders introduced sheep to Easter in the 1870s and claimed land ownership. In 1888 the Chilean government annexed Easter, which effectively became a sheep ranch managed by a Chile-based Scottish company. All islanders were confined to living in one village and to working for the company, being paid in goods at the company store rather than in cash. A revolt by the islanders in 1914 was ended by the arrival of a Chilean warship. Grazing by the company’s sheep, goats, and horses caused soil erosion and eliminated most of what had remained of the native vegetation, including the last surviving hauhau and toromiro individuals on Easter around 1934. Not until 1966 did islanders become Chilean citizens. Today, islanders are undergoing a resurgence of cultural pride, and the economy is being stimulated by the arrival of several airplane flights each week from Santiago and Tahiti by Chile’s national airline, carrying visitors (like Barry Rolett and me) attracted by the famous statues. However, even a brief visit makes obvious that tensions remain between islanders and mainland-born Chileans, who are now represented in roughly equal numbers on Easter.

  Easter Island’s famous rongo-rongo writing system was undoubtedly invented by the islanders, but there is no evidence for its existence until its first mention by the resident Catholic missionary in 1864. All 25 surviving objects with writing appear to postdate European contact; some of them are pieces of foreign wood or a European oar, and some may have been manufactured by islanders specifically to sell to representatives of Tahiti’s Catholic bishop, who became interested in the writing and sought examples. In 1995 linguist Steven Fischer announced a decipherment of rongo-rongo texts as procreation chants, but his interpretation is debated by other scholars. Most Easter Island specialists, including Fischer, now conclude that the invention of rongo-rongo was inspired by the islanders’ first contact with writing during the Spanish landing of 1770, or else by the trauma of the 1862-63 Peruvian slave raid that killed so many carriers of oral knowledge.

  In part because of this history of exploitation and oppression, there has been resistance among both islanders and scholars to acknowledging the reality of self-inflicted environmental damage before Roggeveen’s arrival in 1722, despite all the detailed evidence that I have summarized. In essence, the islanders are saying, “Our ancestors would never have done that,” while visiting scientists are saying, “Those nice people whom we have come to love would never have done that.” For example, Michel Orliac wrote about similar questions of environmental change in Tahiti, “... it is at least as likely—if not more so—that environmental modifications originated in natural causes rather than in human activities. This is a much-debated question (McFadgen 1985; Grant 1985; McGlone 1989) to which I do not claim to bring a definitive solution, even if my affection for the Polynesians incites me to choose natural actions [e.g., cyclones] to explain the damages suffered by the environment.” Three specific objections or alternative theories have been raised.

  First, it has been suggested that Easter’s deforested condition seen by Roggeveen in 1722 was not caused by the islanders in isolation but resulted in some unspecified way from disruption caused by unrecorded European visitors before Roggeveen. It is perfectly possible that there were indeed one or more such unrecorded visits: many Spanish galleons were sailing across the Pacific in the 1500s and 1600s, and the islanders’ nonchalant, unafraid, curious reaction to Roggeveen does suggest prior experience of Europeans, rather than the shocked reaction expected for people who had been living in total isolation and had assumed themselves to be the only humans in the world. However, we have no specific knowledge of any pre-1722 visit, nor is it obvious how it would have triggered deforestation. Even before Magellan became the first European to cross the Pacific in 1521, abundant evidence attests to massive human impacts on Easter: extinctions of all the land bird species, disappearance of porpoises and tuna from the diet, declines of forest tree pollen in Flenley’s sediment cores before 1300, deforestation of the Poike Peninsula by around 1400, lack of radiocarbon-dated palm nuts after 1500, and so on.

  A second objection is that deforestation might instead have been due to natural climate changes, such as droughts or El Niño episodes. It would not surprise me at all if a contributing role of climate change does eventually emerge for Easter, because we shall see that climatic downturns did exacerbate human environmental impacts by the Anasazi (Chapter 4), Maya (Chapter 5), Greenland Norse (Chapters 7 and 8), and probably many other societies. At present, we lack information about climate changes on Easter in the relevant period of A.D. 900-1700: we don’t know whether the climate got drier and stormier and less favorable to forest survival (as postulated by critics), or wetter and less stormy and more favorable to forest survival. But there seems to me to be compelling evidence against climate change by itself having caused the deforestation and bird extinctions: the palm trunk casts in Mt. Terevaka’s lava flows prove that the giant palm had already survived on Easter for several hundred thousand years; and Flenley’s sediment cores demonstrate pollen of the palm, tree daisies, toromiro, and half-a-dozen other tree species on Easter between 38,000 and 21,000 years ago. Hence Easter’s plants had already survived innumerable droughts and El Niño events, making it unlikely that all those native tree species finally chose a time coincidentally just after the arrival of those innocent humans to drop dead simultaneously in response to yet another drought or El Niño event. In fact, Flenley’s records show that a cool dry period on Easter between 26,000 and 12,000 years ago, more severe than any worldwide cool dry period in the last thousand years, merely caused Easter’s trees at higher elevation to undergo a retreat to the lowlands, from which they subsequently recovered.

  A third objection is that Easter Islanders surely wouldn’t have been so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them. As Catherine Orliac expressed it, “ Why destroy a forest that one needs for his [i.e., the Easter Islanders’] material and spiritual survival?” This is indeed a key question, one that has nagged not only Catherine Orliac but also my University of California students, me, and everyone else who has wondered about self-inflicted environmental damage. I have often asked myself, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”? Or: “We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering”? Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment. When we return to this question in Chapter 14, we shall see that there is a whole series of reasons why societies nevertheless do make such mistakes.

  We still have not faced the question why Easter Island ranks as such an extreme example of deforestation. After all, the Pacific encompasses thousands of inhabited islands, almost all of whose inhabitants were chopping down trees, clearing gardens, burning firewood, building canoes, and using wood and rope for houses and other things. Yet, among all those islands, only three in the Hawaiian Archipelago, all of them much drier than Easter—the two islets of Necker and Nihoa, and the larger island of Niihau—even approach Easter in degree of deforestation. Nihoa still supports one species of large palm tree, and it is uncertain whether tiny Necker, with an area of barely forty acres, ever had trees. Why were Easter Islanders unique, or nearly so, in destroying every tree? The answer sometimes given, “because Easter’s palm and toromiro were very slow-growing,” fails to explain why at least 19 other tree or plant species related to or the same as species still widespread on East Polynesian islands were eliminated on Easter but not on other islands. I suspect that this question lies behind the reluctance of Easter Islanders themselves and of some scientists to accept that the islanders caused the deforestation, beca
use that conclusion seems to imply that they were uniquely bad or improvident among Pacific peoples.

  Barry Rolett and I were puzzled by that apparent uniqueness of Easter. Actually, it’s just part of a broader puzzling question: why degree of deforestation varies among Pacific islands in general. For example, Mangareva (to be discussed in the next chapter), most of the Cook and Austral Islands, and the leeward sides of the main Hawaiian and Fijian Islands were largely deforested, though not completely as in the case of Easter. The Societies and Marquesas, and the windward sides of the main Hawaiian and Fijian Islands, supported primary forests at higher elevation and a mixture of secondary forests, fernlands, and grasslands at low elevation. Tonga, Samoa, most of the Bismarcks and Solomons, and Makatea (the largest of the Tuamotus) remained largely forested. How can all that variation be explained?

  Barry began by combing through the journals of early European explorers of the Pacific, to locate descriptions of what the islands looked like then. That enabled him to extract the degree of deforestation on 81 islands as first seen by Europeans—i.e., after centuries or millennia of impacts by native Pacific Islanders but before European impacts. For those same 81 islands, we then tabulated values of nine physical factors whose interisland variation we thought might contribute to explaining those different outcomes of deforestation. Some trends immediately became obvious to us when we just eyeballed the data, but we ground the data through many statistical analyses in order to be able to put numbers on the trends.

  What Affects Deforestation on Pacific Islands?

  Deforestation is more severe on: dry islands than wet islands;

  cold high-latitude islands than warm equatorial islands;