Collapse Assignment 1

Easter Island history is a huge mystery I don't even know how else to describe it. The fact that we only have assumptions of what actually happened and who the Polynesians were, frustrates me because they built such amazing statues with no real evidence of how they pulled it off.
The mystery of the statues (carving erecting, etc.) brings up all of these important/interesting questions: Who were the Polynesians? How, based on the studies of these people and their environment were they abel to move and erect these enormous statues weighing an average of 55-88 tons? How did they grow as a society? and How did they manage to sustain a way of life when they had scattered resources and had a lack of a variety of food? How was any of this possible?

I think the most important part of their history is learning about their environment and how they lived. It tells you a lot about the Polynesian islanders. They didn't have any trees to make other tools for example a form of crane or machinery to lift the statues or a way to relocate and erect them. There is a logical assumption to explain what happened to all of the trees that previously existed in the area but I don't fully believe it answers the entire mystery. "Organizing the carving, transport, and erection of the statues required a complex populous society living in an environment rich enough to support it." So if there were much more than a few thousand people living on the island before the arrival of the Europeans. The Polynesian islanders must have used all of the resources, the trees, to survive for as long as they could. But something must have gone wrong because the population decreased soon after. I believe they Easter Islanders mis-used/over-used their natural resources until they stopped growing back. The soil that the trees grew in may have been over worked, if they islanders continuously chopped down trees for their own benefit and tried to grow more trees in the same area it may not have worked. The soil may have dried up and lost most of its nutrients needed to grow a tree. Which reminds me of what they US is doing over seas. We depend on oil so much and use an enormous amount of it to make most things in the US. The US does not think about the consequences of abusing the existence of oil. All we care about is that it is there for the time being and we will use as much as we want. Which is stupid because the oil will not always be there. We will run into some major problems that could lead to an economic collapse. For example the Theory of Peak Oil, our society is based upon a constant growth and oil, the constant growth of oil. We have already found the most oil in many years, so the oil has already peaked and is now declining. This can become dangerous because oil production will be volatile during the decline and constant sources of energy are needed to keep a society going.

This lack of natural resources could have led to a collapse or at least a decrease in Easter Island's population because there was no environment to support such a large number of people. The Polynesian islanders had a poor environment where most food sources were widely spread apart. The islanders depended mostly on the few crops they grew and their domestic animal: the chicken. They didn't even have fresh water so they would drink sugarcane juice instead. They had very little variety in what they ate, more carbohydrates than sources of protein. The Polynesians were also into the idea of Agricultural Intensification: They had deep composting pits to grow their crops and vegetable fermentation pits. I was impressed that the Islanders were able to come up with such a way to grow crops. They also had stone chicken houses (hare mod) about 20 feet long and some up to 70 feet long. Kind of like industrial agriculture, trying to produce food as quickly as possible. They keep control over the chickens.

Classes and Clans may had a large contribution to the collapse the islanders experienced, leading to a decrease in population and then a crash and burn collapse of their society: There were difference of power among the classes, the chiefs would tell the commoners that they had relations to the Gods and would make promises of better crops and such. But those promises were never kept. Commoners would rebel against the elite chiefs. Then there were clans with different chief leaders and of different ranking. The statues also were a symbol of power among the chiefs, the bigger, the more powerful. Arguments came up and there was fighting between the clans.