Easter Island Theory

In the article by Jared Diamond, many interesting theories are discussed about Easter Island’s history and decline. Diamond makes connections to the environmental challenges we face today and he compares the catastrophe of Easter Island to our current over consumption of natural resources. While this article makes for an interesting read, much of it is offered from a single perspective and little counter evidence is offered. The author writes in a way that could engage a non-academic audience who may not be interested in counter evidence, or proper referencing. The article lacks credibility due to its narrow scope and conversational diction. At the root of this discussion however, is the notion that the Rapa Nui people were

Since the inception of human civilization there have been countless cultures and societies which have helped shape the current world today as we know it. The modern human race dates back more than 200,000 years and in that time frame many cultures have risen to great virtue and success only to deteriorate or cease to exist altogether. First before examining one of these cultures we must know what culture truly means. The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Culture Center defines culture as a “dynamic social system,” containing the beliefs, behaviors, values and norms of a “specific organization, group, society or other collectivity” learned, shared, internalized, and changeable by all members of the society (Watson, 2010). In

I found this chapter absolutely fascinating. For me the real insights were the role of the political system in the building of the giant stone statues that became Easter Island’s biggest mystery when it was discovered in 1722. There were hundreds of erect statues with no one there. Who built them? As Diamond explains, it was the dozen clans that controlled the island who built them. “The clans competed peacefully by seeking to outdo each other in building

According to cultural anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, culture is a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” In other words, culture is a concept that social organizations practice in order to explain certain phenomena in nature whether through mythology, rituals, art, music, and language. However, as explained by Ethan Watters in “The Mega Marketing of Depression in Japan,” culture is not permanent, since it has the ability, and more than ever in the present society, to “move across boundaries of race, culture, class, and nation” (Watters 519). In addition, as demonstrated by Oliver Sacks in the articled called “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See,” it is a mistake to think that individuals are bound to behave in a way that culture told them to behave. Instead, individuals are free to create his or her own unique experience of interpreting the world. We might consider the “reality” that we live in to be fiction to the extent that we are willing to use different faculties and analyze what we are witnessing; this gives us the power, as individuals, to think and search for each of us’s unique interpretation of reality. .

Adaptive Failure: Easter's End was written by Jared Diamond and was featured in Discover Magazine in August of 1995, this article was mainly written to discuss the rise and fall of the Easter Island civilization. Easter Island is the world's most isolated habitable land, more than 2,200 miles from the nearest continent (South America), and 1,400 miles from the nearest habitable island (Pitcairn). Diamond concluded that the rise of the Easter Island civilization was around 400 A.D. when the Polynesian ancestors of the Easter Island people.

Prior to the discovery of the New World, vast numbers of indigenous people lived for centuries without knowing that they were lost. These civilizations touted political and family hierarchies, established forms of trade and currencies, agricultural developments, medical knowledge and various well-developed spiritual beliefs. Europeans, with their complex history of international political intrigue and Catholic-Protestant schisms, were quick to judge the varied American cultures they encountered as inferior.

Polynesian societies and cultures have developed by living in a place hard to survive for centuries. Throughout these years the Polynesians have developed into a group of people with a strong sense of community. Many things have shaped the way the Polynesians developed. The country of origin for the Polynesians heavily influenced their own traditions and culture. When the Polynesians first settled in Polynesia their traditions most likely would have been the same as those of their country of origin.

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean sits a tiny, remote island. Easter Island takes up 64 square miles and is isolated from the rest of the world. What makes this island so interesting is not it’s size or location, but the large statues found on it. Commonly called Moai statues, they resemble men’s faces and weighed over 80 tons. They were sculpted after the tribal leaders that had died and they sat on platforms to look over the people that lived there to look over after them. These monstrous statues were carved out of a quarry on the island with rocks, which took years, and moved to a certain location. For centuries, this island and its inhabitants were a mystery. Who lived on the island? How did they die? Where did they come from? Why were these statues

The idea that Prehistoric Aboriginal culture is averse to change or is static is a belief shared by the minority. Although it can be said that Indigenous culture and our ancestral peoples share many similar or unchanged basic behaviour patterns, each society or culture can be distinguished from others by the certain configurative patterns or directives for why the Prehistoric peoples did or did not achieve things and how they were or were not achieved. This willingness to change and not be opposed to innovation and holding traditional values all the time, suggests that Prehistoric Aboriginal Culture was constantly changing. This essay discusses the concept that Prehistoric Aboriginal culture adopted a willingness to learn, change and grow through forms of art and culture, for both aesthetic and useful purposes. Secondly, the developing cultural intricacies will be deliberated, how hunter gatherer societies affected Prehistoric Aboriginal culture and how these complexities are the source of change for many Indigenous peoples through time.

This paper will explain the history on losing the Hawaiian culture. It will explain how the foreigners came to the islands and influenced the native people. Also, it will explain how the Hawaiians went from practicing and living out their culture everyday to losing their culture more and more each day.

Easter Island was once a haven for its inhabitants. It provided them with all of their needs, food, shelter, tools, and even the ability to create great works of art. They abused this Eden, and turned it into a disaster, with almost no natural resources. This could very well happen to us, because our earth is the same Eden that Easter Island once was.

The novel Guns, Germs, and Steel, written by Jared Diamond, is a 1997 non-fiction that describes the fate of human societies through a geographically based natural experiment (Diamond, Jared). It portrays how varying geography affects its culture, and how the availability of natural resources and the clash of different societies resulted in the supremacy of some societies, at the collapse of others. The rise of the primacy began in the 16th century, on a series of islands known as the chatham islands (Diamond, Jared M). Near the border of New Zealand, the chatham islands in the --__ was the home to a group of indigenous Polynesian people known as the Maori. In the ____, a portion of the Maori population traveled to an uninhabited island of

In 400 AD to 900 AD, the Polynesians decided to migrate to a little island south of the pacific ocean to start their civilisation. Since they are surrounded by water, that meant that the Polynesians had only a few limited resource until they can find a way to start their civilisationsomewhere else. Within time, the Polynesians started using their resources in a rapid amount of time, which can soon lead to deforestation, loss of food production, limited to slim amount of resources, etc. Tragedy of the commons lab relates so much to Easter Island because they bothhave to deal with survival of the fittest. In the lab, we didn't have a limit on how much you canfish but everyone had to have enough to survive.

Several factors affect the formation of one’s culture, Palispis, E. (2007) quoted Sir Edward Tylor, “Culture… refers to that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as member of society.” (Palispis, E., 2007) In this context culture is something we acquire from the people we have lived with since we were born, it is not something a person can learn overnight nor can be disposed effortlessly.

Easter island has been called ‘the best historical example of a society collapsing’. From roughly 700 to 1400 Easter Island flourished; they had a stable