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.Lest the reader thereby bemisled into concluding that they are poor models for familiar big modernsocieties, I should explain that I selected them for close consideration pre-cisely because processes unfolded faster and reached more extreme out-comes in such small societies, making them especially clear illustrations.Itis not the case that large central societies trading with neighbors and locatedin robust environments didn't collapse in the past and can't collapse today.One of the past societies that I do discuss in detail, the Maya, had a popula-tion of many millions or tens of millions, was located within one of thetwo most advanced cultural areas of the New World before European arrival(Mesoamerica), and traded with and was decisively influenced by other ad-vanced societies in that area.I briefly summarize in the Further Readingssection for Chapter 9 some of the many other famous past societiesFertile Crescent societies, Angkor Wat, Harappan Indus Valley society, andothers that resembled the Maya in those respects, and to whose declinesenvironmental factors contributed heavily.Our first case study from the past, the history of Easter Island (Chapter2), is as close as we can get to a "pure" ecological collapse, in this case due tototal deforestation that led to war, overthrow of the elite and of the fa-mous stone statues, and a massive population die-off.As far as we know,Easter's Polynesian society remained isolated after its initial founding, sothat Easter's trajectory was uninfluenced by either enemies or friends.Nordo we have evidence of a role of climate change on Easter, though that couldstill emerge from future studies.Barry Rolett's and my comparative analysishelps us understand why Easter, of all Pacific islands, suffered such a severecollapse.Pitcairn Island and Henderson Island (Chapter 3), also settled by Poly-nesians, offer examples of the effect of item four of my five-point frame-work: loss of support from neighboring friendly societies.Both Pitcairn andHenderson islands suffered local environmental damage, but the fatal blowcame from the environmentally triggered collapse of their major trade part-ner.There were no known complicating effects of hostile neighbors or ofclimate change.Thanks to an exceptionally detailed climate record reconstructed fromtree rings, the Native American society of the Anasazi in the U.S.Southwest(Chapter 4) clearly illustrates the intersection of environmental damageand population growth with climate change (in this case, drought).Neitherfriendly or hostile neighbors, nor (except towards the end) warfare, appearto have been major factors in the Anasazi collapse.No book on societal collapses would be complete without an account(Chapter 5) of the Maya, the most advanced Native American society andthe quintessential romantic mystery of cities covered by jungle.As in thecase of the Anasazi, the Maya illustrate the combined effects of environ-mental damage, population growth, and climate change without an essen-tial role of friendly neighbors.Unlike the case with the Anasazi collapse,hostile neighbors were a major preoccupation of Maya cities already froman early stage.Among the societies discussed in Chapters 2 through 5, onlythe Maya offer us the advantage of a deciphered written record.Norse Greenland (Chapters 6-8) offers us our most complex case of aprehistoric collapse, the one for which we have the most information (be-cause it was a well-understood literate European society), and the one war-ranting the most extended discussion: the second sheep inside the boaconstrictor.All five items in my five-point framework are well documented:environmental damage, climate change, loss of friendly contacts with Nor-way, rise of hostile contacts with the Inuit, and the political, economic, so-cial, and cultural setting of the Greenland Norse
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