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Fine di Pasqua [1 of 2]
Cari tutti,
invio un articolo 'parabola' di Jared Diamond [in due parti].
La storia della fine della civilizzazione dell' Isola di Pasqua -per
ragioni ambientali e sociali- e' una metafora per la nostra
civilizzazione (ha preoccupanti similitudini)...
Purtroppo e' in Inglese.
Spero interessi,
Alessandro Gimona
Easter's End
By
Jared Diamond
In just a few centuries, the people of Easter
Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants
and animals to extinction, and saw their complex
society spiral into chaos and cannibalism.
Are we about to follow their lead?
Among the most riveting mysteries of human history
are those posed by vanished
civilizations. Everyone who has seen the abandoned
buildings of the Khmer, the Maya, or
the Anasazi is immediately moved to ask the same
question: Why did the societies that
erected those structures disappear?
Their vanishing touches us as the disappearance of
other animals, even the dinosaurs, never
can. No matter how exotic those lost civilizations
seem, their framers were humans like us.
Who is to say we won’t succumb to the same fate?
Perhaps someday New York’s
skyscrapers will stand derelict and overgrown with
vegetation, like the temples at Angkor
Wat and Tikal.
Among all such vanished civilizations, that of the
former Polynesian society on Easter Island
remains unsurpassed in mystery and isolation. The
mystery stems especially from the island’s
gigantic stone statues and its impoverished
landscape, but it is enhanced by our associations
with the specific people involved: Polynesians
represent for us the ultimate in exotic
romance, the background for many a child’s, and an
adult’s, vision of paradise. My own
interest in Easter was kindled over 30 years ago
when I read Thor Heyerdahl’s fabulous
accounts of his Kon-Tiki voyage.
But my interest has been revived recently by a
much more exciting account, one not of
heroic voyages but of painstaking research and
analysis. My friend David Steadman, a
paleontologist, has been working with a number of
other researchers who are carrying out
the first systematic excavations on Easter
intended to identify the animals and plants that
once lived there. Their work is contributing to a
new interpretation of the island’s history that
makes it a tale not only of wonder but of warning
as well.
Easter Island, with an area of only 64 square
miles, is the world’s most isolated scrap of
habitable land. It lies in the Pacific Ocean more
than 2,000 miles west of the nearest
continent (South America), 1,400 miles from even
the nearest habitable island (Pitcairn). Its
subtropical location and latitude--at 27 degrees
south, it is approximately as far below the
equator as Houston is north of it--help give it a
rather mild climate, while its volcanic origins
make its soil fertile. In theory, this combination
of blessings should have made Easter a
miniature paradise, remote from problems that
beset the rest of the world.
The island derives its name from its “discovery”
by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, on
Easter (April 5) in 1722. Roggeveen’s first
impression was not of a paradise but of a
wasteland: “We originally, from a further
distance, have considered the said Easter Island as
sandy; the reason for that is this, that we
counted as sand the withered grass, hay, or other
scorched and burnt vegetation, because its wasted
appearance could give no other
impression than of a singular poverty and
barrenness.”
The island Roggeveen saw was a grassland without a
single tree or bush over ten feet high.
Modern botanists have identified only 47 species
of higher plants native to Easter, most of
them grasses, sedges, and ferns. The list includes
just two species of small trees and two of
woody shrubs. With such flora, the islanders
Roggeveen encountered had no source of real
firewood to warm themselves during Easter’s cool,
wet, windy winters. Their native animals
included nothing larger than insects, not even a
single species of native bat, land bird, land
snail, or lizard. For domestic animals, they had
only chickens.
European visitors throughout the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries estimated Easter’s
human population at about 2,000, a modest number
considering the island’s fertility. As
Captain James Cook recognized during his brief
visit in 1774, the islanders were
Polynesians (a Tahitian man accompanying Cook was
able to converse with them). Yet
despite the Polynesians’ well-deserved fame as a
great seafaring people, the Easter
Islanders who came out to Roggeveen’s and Cook’s
ships did so by swimming or paddling
canoes that Roggeveen described as “bad and
frail.” Their craft, he wrote, were “put
together with manifold small planks and light
inner timbers, which they cleverly stitched
together with very fine twisted threads. . . . But
as they lack the knowledge and particularly
the materials for caulking and making tight the
great number of seams of the canoes, these
are accordingly very leaky, for which reason they
are compelled to spend half the time in
bailing.” The canoes, only ten feet long, held at
most two people, and only three or four
canoes were observed on the entire island.
With such flimsy craft, Polynesians could never
have colonized Easter from even the nearest
island, nor could they have traveled far offshore
to fish. The islanders Roggeveen met were
totally isolated, unaware that other people
existed. Investigators in all the years since his visit
have discovered no trace of the islanders’ having
any outside contacts: not a single Easter
Island rock or product has turned up elsewhere,
nor has anything been found on the island
that could have been brought by anyone other than
the original settlers or the Europeans.
Yet the people living on Easter claimed memories
of visiting the uninhabited Sala y Gomez
reef 260 miles away, far beyond the range of the
leaky canoes seen by Roggeveen. How
did the islanders’ ancestors reach that reef from
Easter, or reach Easter from anywhere
else?
Easter Island’s most famous feature is its huge
stone statues, more than 200 of which once
stood on massive stone platforms lining the coast.
At least 700 more, in all stages of
completion, were abandoned in quarries or on
ancient roads between the quarries and the
coast, as if the carvers and moving crews had
thrown down their tools and walked off the
job. Most of the erected statues were carved in a
single quarry and then somehow
transported as far as six miles--despite heights
as great as 33 feet and weights up to 82 tons.
The abandoned statues, meanwhile, were as much as
65 feet tall and weighed up to 270
tons. The stone platforms were equally gigantic:
up to 500 feet long and 10 feet high, with
facing slabs weighing up to 10 tons.
Roggeveen himself quickly recognized the problem
the statues posed: “The stone images at
first caused us to be struck with astonishment,”
he wrote, “because we could not
comprehend how it was possible that these people,
who are devoid of heavy thick timber
for making any machines, as well as strong ropes,
nevertheless had been able to erect such
images.” Roggeveen might have added that the
islanders had no wheels, no draft animals,
and no source of power except their own muscles.
How did they transport the giant statues
for miles, even before erecting them? To deepen
the mystery, the statues were still standing
in 1770, but by 1864 all of them had been pulled
down, by the islanders themselves. Why
then did they carve them in the first place? And
why did they stop?
The statues imply a society very different from
the one Roggeveen saw in 1722. Their sheer
number and size suggest a population much larger
than 2,000 people. What became of
everyone? Furthermore, that society must have been
highly organized. Easter’s resources
were scattered across the island: the best stone
for the statues was quarried at Rano Raraku
near Easter’s northeast end; red stone, used for
large crowns adorning some of the statues,
was quarried at Puna Pau, inland in the southwest;
stone carving tools came mostly from
Aroi in the northwest. Meanwhile, the best
farmland lay in the south and east, and the best
fishing grounds on the north and west coasts.
Extracting and redistributing all those goods
required complex political organization. What
happened to that organization, and how could
it ever have arisen in such a barren landscape?
Easter Island’s mysteries have spawned volumes of
speculation for more than two and a half
centuries. Many Europeans were incredulous that
Polynesians--commonly characterized as
“mere savages”--could have created the statues or
the beautifully constructed stone
platforms. In the 1950s, Heyerdahl argued that
Polynesia must have been settled by
advanced societies of American Indians, who in
turn must have received civilization across
the Atlantic from more advanced societies of the
Old World. Heyerdahl’s raft voyages
aimed to prove the feasibility of such prehistoric
transoceanic contacts. In the 1960s the
Swiss writer Erich von Däniken, an ardent believer
in Earth visits by extraterrestrial
astronauts, went further, claiming that Easter’s
statues were the work of intelligent beings
who owned ultramodern tools, became stranded on
Easter, and were finally rescued.
Heyerdahl and Von Däniken both brushed aside
overwhelming evidence that the Easter
Islanders were typical Polynesians derived from
Asia rather than from the Americas and that
their culture (including their statues) grew out
of Polynesian culture. Their language was
Polynesian, as Cook had already concluded.
Specifically, they spoke an eastern Polynesian
dialect related to Hawaiian and Marquesan, a
dialect isolated since about A.D. 400, as
estimated from slight differences in vocabulary.
Their fishhooks and stone adzes resembled
early Marquesan models. Last year DNA extracted
from 12 Easter Island skeletons was
also shown to be Polynesian. The islanders grew
bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane,
and paper mulberry--typical Polynesian crops,
mostly of Southeast Asian origin. Their sole
domestic animal, the chicken, was also typically
Polynesian and ultimately Asian, as were the
rats that arrived as stowaways in the canoes of
the first settlers.
What happened to those settlers? The fanciful
theories of the past must give way to evidence
gathered by hardworking practitioners in three
fields: archeology, pollen analysis, and
paleontology.
Modern archeological excavations on Easter have
continued since Heyerdahl’s 1955
expedition. The earliest radiocarbon dates
associated with human activities are around A.D.
400 to 700, in reasonable agreement with the
approximate settlement date of 400 estimated
by linguists. The period of statue construction
peaked around 1200 to 1500, with few if any
statues erected thereafter. Densities of
archeological sites suggest a large population; an
estimate of 7,000 people is widely quoted by
archeologists, but other estimates range up to
20,000, which does not seem implausible for an
island of Easter’s area and fertility.