From the Archives: Easter Island: Not So Mysterious After All
One of the other places I hang out on the internet is Shelf Awareness for Readers--a very cool review publication that reaches the e-inboxes of avid readers twice a week.* I review new history books, with an occasional excursion into cookbooks or misc. reference works. Some of those reviews find their way here. Some of those books spark blog posts that are only vaguely related to the review. It's been four years and almost 100 reviews--time flies when you're reading.
In celebration, here's the post that came out of my first Shelf Awareness review:
Once upon a time, like many nerdy little girls, I wanted to be an archeologist. Today I get my hands grubby with old books and the occasional leaking ink pen instead of the sands of time, but my copy of C. W. Ceram's classic Gods, Graves and Scholars remains a prized possession and I still enjoy a good archeological read.
I was delighted to have the chance to read and review The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo.
Anthropologist Terry Hunt and archaeologist Carl Lipo turn the accepted wisdom about the ancient culture of Easter Island on its head in this well-written story of scientific discovery.
From the time the first Europeans arrived on Easter Island in the eighteenth century, Westerners have been fascinated by the island's monumental stone sculptures and baffled by how an impoverished prehistoric culture could have built them. The standard explanation was that the island had once been as fertile as other inhabited islands in the Pacific. Over time, its population committed ecological suicide, cutting down thousands of giant palm trees to support the statue cult.
When Hunt and Lipo arrived on Easter Island in 2001, they expected to simply add a few details to the already well-developed account of its early history. In their fourth year of fieldwork, they found evidence of the giant palms that scholars believed covered the islands when Polynesian settlers first arrived. It was a major discovery. There was only one problem: the oldest layers were several hundred years later than the latest accepted date for colonization. If the island was deforested over decades instead of centuries, then everything archaeologists thought they knew about the early culture of Easter Island was in question.
Hunt and Lipo re-examined, and re-built, archaeology's fundamental assumptions about Easter Island, using discoveries from other Pacific island cultures, local oral traditions, previously discounted field research, satellite images from Google Earth, studies by evolutionary biologists, game theory, and accounts by early European observers. They make a compelling case against the traditional version of Easter Island's prehistory. Instead of "ecocide", they describe a culture of careful environmental stewardship. And along the way, they prove how a small number of men can make a giant monolith "walk".
*I read Shelf Awareness as well as review for it. My fellow reviewers are the source for many, many books on my own to-be-read list.
"AhuTongariki" by Ian Sewell - IanAndWendy.com Photo gallery from Easter Island. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
Road Trip Through History? Sort Of.
Several weeks ago, My Own True Love took me to the Round Barn Theater at Amish Acres in Nappanee, Indiana to see Plain and Fancy, a musical I first discovered when I was in high school. I had developed the habit of checking out obscure soundtracks, opera recordings, and the like from our local library.* I loved the music to Plain and Fancy and I checked out the LP over and over. The play had opened on Broadway more than twenty years previously and had long faded into obscurity. I had no real hope of ever seeing it performed. When I found out that Plain and Fancy is the central show in the summer repertory program at Amish Acres, I was thrilled. I may have even squealed as we drove past the sign.**
Amish Acres is an odd mix: a restored Amish homestead from the mid-nineteenth century used as the center of a "heritage resort". The site offers tours of the homestead and outbuildings, living history demonstrations, buggy rides, and some efforts at explaining Amish history and culture. A truly glorious round barn has been transformed into a theater which offers a professional summer stock program of musical theater--something that would have been anathema to its original Amish owners. The historical site is a bit dated in its presentation, though it’s possible I’m jaded.*** (I’ve been to a lot of living history programs over the years.) The theater is a lot of fun. The barn is worth a stop all by itself.
Plain and Fancy is the point where the theater and Amish heritage come together. It tells the story of a pair of New Yorkers who find themselves involved with an Amish community for a brief time, with an initial lack of comprehension and gradual understanding on both sides. I must admit, I was afraid I would be disappointed after waiting literally decades for a chance to see the show. I’m pleased to tell you that it’s a charming minor work from the golden age of American musicals. It was the first musical play written by Joseph Stein, best known for Fiddler on the Roof. Plain and Fancy isn’t on the same scale as Fiddler, but shares some of its thematic elements, including an underlying philosophical strain and a respectful exploration of a traditional society. It’s also drop dead funny. If you happen to be driving through northern Indiana and have a taste for classical musical comedy, go.
Next up on the high school wish list, Irving Berlin’s Mr. President.
*Why yes, I did spell nerd with a capital N.
**As those who know me in real life will attest, I am not much of a squealer.
***If you’re interested in a serious look at the history and culture of the Amish, Mennonites and other Anabaptist groups, I recommend the Menno-Hof interpretive center in Shipshewana, Indiana.
Counting The Fallen
The size of the armies and the number of the casualties in a given war, or even individual battle, is always a difficult discussion for historians.
When dealing with pre-modern sources of any kind, historians are cautious about accepting contemporary estimates.* The assumption is that at best the writer of the source did not have access to accurate numbers and at worst he** diddled the numbers to make a victory more glorious or a defeat less humiliating.
Modern** record-keeping makes it easier to feel secure that the size of armies in the field is more or less accurate, but counting the fallen is still tricky. The conditions under which the counting occurs are inherently difficult, the temptation to make a victory more glorious or a defeat less humiliating remains constant, and the definitions of what is counted may vary from battle to battle. Casualties can include dead, wounded, fatally wounded but not yet dead, or missing (a category that is inherently fuzzy).
Accuracy aside, it is hard to visualize just what the body count actually looks like. Forty-eight thousand dead and wounded at the Battle of Waterloo*** is much less than 425,000 casualties in the Battle of Normandy. But what does either number mean, beyond the fact that enough men are dead to populate a small southern city, in the case of Waterloo, or a western state, in the case of Normandy?
Filmmaker and data-journalist Neil Halloran grapples with these questions, as well as the even slipperier issue of civilian casualties, in The Fallen of World War II--a web-based graphic documentary that looks at the human cost of the war. The graphics are as simple and painful as a fist to the gut. Halloran doesn't just look at how many people each country lost, but when and where they died. Most interesting of all, at least to this history buff/bugg, he compares WWII's numbers to those of other wars across historian and does not hesitate to draw conclusions about what it all means.
Check it out: http://www.fallen.io/ww2/
(There’s an interactive option, but I couldn’t get it to run. Possibly an operating system upgrade is needed for either my computer or my brain. If any of you get it to work, let me know what you think.)
*Not surprising given that the further back we go the looser our definition of contemporary. Primary sources means different things for different periods.
**I usually hesitate to use he for the generalized third person singular, but the case of pre-modern history almost all of the sources are in fact "he" due to historical realities related to access to education, etc. [rant over]
***Definitions may vary
****That's a LOT of teeth.