Easter Island: Not So Mysterious After All
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 pre-history. 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"
(A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.)
Public toilets, heads of state and –teddy bears?
A few people have weighed in with answers to my question on a previous post outside the comments box. Some of them were too good not to share. In addition to vespesianos and London bobbies, here are some more eponymous tributes to heads of state, statesmen, and mere politicians:
1. The Teddy bear, named after Theodore Roosevelt
2. The Wellington boot, popularized by the Duke of Wellington (Those battlefields must have been muddy!)
3. Gerrymandering, named after Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814). (Personally, I'd rather be known for public toilets.)
Keep 'em coming!
The First Common Market?
Bruges. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
My Own True Love and I leave next week for Belgium and my thoughts are turning toward Waterloo, Flanders Field, and the Hanseatic League.* Especially the Hanseatic League.
I'm fascinated by traveling merchants, from the Silk Road caravans that brought luxury goods from China and India to the Muslim peddlers who sold dry goods and notions to farm wives in the upper Midwest in the nineteenth century.** Part of it's the romance of the thing: desert caravans, clipper ships and gypsy-style wagons. Part of it is the hardheaded economics of who bought what from where.
In many ways, the Hanseatic League can be seen as Europe's first attempt at a Common Market. In the twelfth century, the European economic world was expanding. Increased agricultural productivity allowed more people to work at something other than farming, creating surplus goods for sale and a need for raw materials. (This is the same thing that made the Crusades possible. Cool, huh? The way different bits of history link together like that?) At the same time, the Teutonic Knights, a fighting monastic order interested in conversion and conquest (or possibly conquest and conversion), invaded the Slavic lands to the east. They established a network of fortified bases along the Baltic Sea that became new towns with markets where foreign goods could be bought and sold.
Being a merchant was dangerous work. By land, you had to worry about armed brigands and raiding militias. By sea, you were in danger from storms as well as pirates and their legally sanctioned cousins, privateers. Merchants from the newly formed cities of the Baltic began to join together into informal associations (hansas) to make long-distance trading safer.
They soon learned that working together not only brought greater safety at sea, it also made it easier to negotiate in the foreign towns with which they traded. (Collective bargaining, anyone?) Loose associations grew into merchant companies and guilds. By the end of the thirteenth century, Hanseatic merchants had built a trading network that stretched from Bergen (Norway) in the north, to Novgorod (Russia) in the East, and London (you know this one, right?) and Bruges (modern Belgium!!) in the west.
Hanseatic merchants were intermediaries between the workshops of Western Europe and the forests of Eastern Europe. They brought salt from the mines at Kiel to the herring fisheries of the Baltic. They exchanged cloth from Flanders, wool from England, and metalwork from Westphalia for furs, timber, wax, grain, and amber from Russia. They traded in salted fish from Scandia, wine from the Rhineland, copper and iron ore from Sweden and beer from north Germany, once Hamburg brewers figured out that adding hops would stabilize their product for transportation.
The Hanseatic League dominated northern Europe until the mid-sixteenth century, when they were elbowed aside by England and the Netherlands, whose merchants had larger, more seaworthy ships and a free-trade philosophy that made them welcome in foreign markets.
Bruges and Antwerp, here we come!
*Not to mention chocolates, waffles, beer and pommes frites.
** Yes, you read that right. Muslim peddlers in rural Iowa in the 1890s. A story for another day.