Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [76]
Further evidence of human use is a huge buried midden, one of the largest known from Southeast Polynesia, running for 300 yards in length and 30 yards in width along the north-coast beach facing the only passage through Henderson’s fringing reef. Among the midden’s garbage left behind from generations of people feasting, and identified in small test pits excavated by Weisler and his colleagues, are enormous quantities of fish bones (14,751 fish bones in just two-thirds of a cubic yard of sand tested!), plus 42,213 bird bones comprising tens of thousands of bones of seabirds (especially petrels, terns, and tropicbirds) and thousands of bones of land birds (especially the flightless pigeons, rail, and sandpiper). When one extrapolates from the number of bones in Weisler’s small test pits to the likely number in the whole midden, one calculates that Henderson Islanders must have disposed of the remains of tens of millions of fish and birds over the centuries. The oldest human-associated radiocarbon date on Henderson is from that midden, and the next-oldest date is from the turtle nesting beach on the northeast coast, implying that people settled first in those areas where they could glut themselves on wild-caught food.
Where could people live on an island that is nothing more than an uplifted coral reef covered with low trees? Henderson is unique among islands inhabited or formerly inhabited by Polynesians in its almost-complete lack of evidence for buildings, such as the usual houses and temples. There are only three signs of any construction: a stone pavement and post holes in the midden, suggesting the foundations of a house or shelter; one small low wall for protection against the wind; and a few slabs of beach rock for a burial vault. Instead, literally every cave and rock shelter near the coast and with a flat floor and accessible opening—even small recesses only three yards wide and two yards deep, barely large enough for a few people to seek protection from the sun—contained debris testifying to former human habitation. Weisler found 18 such shelters, of which 15 were on the heavily used north, northeast, and northwest coasts near the only beaches, and the other three (all of them very cramped) were on the eastern or southern cliffs. Because Henderson is small enough that Weisler was able to survey essentially the entire coast, the 18 caves and rock shelters, plus one shelter on the north beach, probably constitute all the “dwellings” of Henderson’s population.
Charcoal, piles of stones, and relict stands of crop plants showed that the northeast part of the island had been burned and laboriously converted to garden patches where crops could be planted in natural pockets of soil, extended by piling surface stones into mounds. Among the Polynesian crops and useful plants that were introduced intentionally by the settlers, and that have been identified in Henderson archaeological sites or that still grow wild on Henderson today, are coconuts, bananas, swamp taro, possibly taro itself, several species of timber trees, candlenut trees whose nut husks are burned for illumination, hibiscus trees yielding fiber for making rope, and the ti shrub. The latter’s sugary roots serve usually just as an emergency food supply elsewhere in Polynesia but were evidently a staple vegetable food on Henderson. Ti leaves could be used to make clothing, house thatching, and food wrappings. All of those sugary and starchy crops add up to a high-carbohydrate diet, which may explain why the teeth and jaws of Henderson Islanders that Weisler found exhibit enough signs of periodontal disease, tooth wear, and tooth loss to give nightmares to a dentist. Most of the islanders’ protein would have come from the wild birds and seafood, but finds of a couple of