Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [82]
Then my mind turns to gentler possible endings of the movie. After a few generations of isolation on Pitcairn or Henderson, everyone in their microsociety of a hundred or a few dozen people would have been everyone else’s cousin, and it would have become impossible to contract a marriage not in violation of incest taboos. Hence people may just have grown old together and stopped having children, as happened to California’s last surviving Yahi Indians, the famous Ishi and his three companions. If the small population did ignore incest taboos, the resulting inbreeding may have caused congenital physical anomalies to proliferate, as exemplified by deafness on Martha’s Vineyard Island off Massachusetts or on the remote Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha.
We may never know which way the movies of Pitcairn and Henderson actually ended. Regardless of the final details, though, the main outline of the story is clear. The populations of Mangareva, Pitcairn, and Henderson all inflicted heavy damage on their environments and destroyed many of the resources necessary for their own lives. Mangareva Islanders were numerous enough to survive, albeit under chronically terrifying conditions and with a drastically reduced standard of living. But from the very beginning, even before the accumulation of environmental damage, the inhabitants of Pitcairn and Henderson had remained dependent on imports of agricultural products, technology, stone, oyster shell, and people from their mother population on Mangareva. With Mangareva’s decline and its inability to sustain exports, not even the most heroic efforts to adapt could save the last people alive on Pitcairn and Henderson. Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks (as well as the benefits) of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence. Many economically important but ecologically fragile areas (think of oil) already affect the rest of us, just as Mangareva affected Pitcairn and Henderson.
CHAPTER 4
The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors
Desert farmers ■ Tree rings ■ Agricultural strategies ■ Chaco’s problems and packrats ■ Regional integration ■ Chaco’s decline and end ■ Chaco’s message ■
Of the sites of societal collapses considered in this book, the most remote are Pitcairn and Henderson Islands discussed in the last chapter. At the opposite extreme, the ones closest to home for Americans are the Anasazi sites of Chaco Culture National Historical Park (Plates 9, 10) and Mesa Verde National Park, lying in the U.S. Southwest on New Mexico state highway 57 and near U.S. highway 666, respectively, less than 600 miles from my home in Los Angeles. Like the Maya cities that will be the subject of the next chapter, they and other ancient Native American ruins are popular tourist attractions that thousands of modern First World citizens visit each year. One of those former southwestern cultures, Mimbres, is also a favorite of art collectors because of its beautiful pottery decorated with geometrical patterns and realistic figures: a unique tradition created by a society numbering barely 4,000 people, and sustained at its peak for just a few generations before abruptly disappearing.
I concede that U.S. southwestern societies operated on a much smaller scale than did Maya cities, with populations of thousands rather than millions. As a result, Maya cities are far more extensive in area, have more lavish monuments and art, were products of more steeply stratified societies headed by kings, and possessed writing. But the Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and