Ancient Civilizations of Australia and the Pacific

Episode 29: Lifeways of Australia and the Pacific

The Big History of Civilizations (2016)

Dr Craig G Benjamin

Film Review

According to Benjamin, human beings first settled in Australia 50,000 years ago when Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania were still joined as a single continent. The first evidence of agriculture in Australasia dates back to 8000 BC in the highlands of New Guinea. Initially crops were limited taro and yams, but after sophisticated drainage channels were built around 5000 BC, residents were growing bananas, yams and sweet potatoes as well. According to archeological evidence they lived in small agrarian villages and engaged in art, religious rituals and warfare.

Indigenous Australians never adopted agriculture from their northern neighbors. As “affluent foragers,” they procured enough food via hunting, fishing and gathering. The Gunditjmara took an initial step towards agriculture by constructing ponds that entrapped eels. The aborigines in this region established permanent villages, social hierarchies and elaborate trade networks extending hundreds and thousands of miles.

In the Pacific, the Philippines and Solomon Islands were first inhabited around 40,000 BC. Around 2000 BC, people speaking Austronesian* languages began exploring and occupying other Pacific Islands. By 1000 BC, they had reached Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji with canoes filled with obsidian tools; sophisticated fishing technology; ceramic pots; domesticated dogs, chickens and pigs and 15 plant species, including taro, yam and bananas. By 900 BC they had reached Tonga and by 700 BC Samoa.

The settlement of the Pacific islands relied on the invention of the triangular sail (which enabled a boat to against the wind) and the single and double outrigger canoes. Extremely skilled at using stars and tides to navigate, early Pacific Island settlers established giant trade networks extending 4,000 miles.

Around 800 AD, they migrated further eastward reaching Hawaii, the Marquesas Islands, Society Island and Rapa Nui (Easter Island)** around 1200 AD. Owing to unfavorable prevailing winds, New Zealand was settled last in 1300 AD.

All these islands shared governance by hereditary chiefs and common religious and agricultural practices. They also share a common history of distant ancestors originating in Hawaitki (which Benjamin believes refers to Samoa and Tonga).

The South Island of New Zealand was too cold to grow the topical plants Māori settlers brought in their canoes so South Island Māori reverted to foraging. North Island Māori raised kumara (sweet potatoes), taro and other tropical plants. They lived in agrarian. socially stratified villages ruled by hereditary chiefs, grew taro, yam, gourd and ti pore (Pacific cabbage tree) and engaged in war.

When the first Europeans arrived, Aotearoa (NZ) had a population of about 100,000, most settled in the North Island.

Rapa Nui had an extremely wealthy agrarian civilization prior to its collapse from deforestation. Under the rule of powerful chiefs they constructed as many as 70,000 carved stone statues, some weighing as much as much as 80 tons. Prior to the collapse of their complex agrarian society (which led them to revert to foraging), they developed their own written language.

Hawaii also had a very successful agrarian civilization supported by pigs, intensive irrigation, terraced gardens and aquaculture ponds. Some of the Hawaiian kingdoms that emerged were as large a Sumer’s city-states.

Tonga and Samoa also evolved into complex hierarchical societies whose leaders built massive stone monuments and complex irrigation schemes. At one point Tonga reached a population of 40,000.

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*The Austronesian language group is believed to have originated around Taiwan and spread first to the Philippines and the Bismarck Archipelago and from there to the more eastern Pacific Islands.

**Benjamin believes that early Rapa Nui settlers may have sailed their canoes 800 miles to Chile, explaining the presence of pre-Columbian sweet potato crops in Chile and Chilean chickens in Rapa Nui.

Can be view free on Kanopy with library card.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/lifeways-australia-and-pacific

The Hidden History of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

The Spirit of the Ancestors: Journey to Bring Home Stolen Artifacts

Directed by Leonardo Pakarati (2015)

Spanish with English subtitles

Film Review

This documentary concerns the indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and their campaign to persuade the British Museum to return Hoa Hakananani’a to them. According elders, the enormous moai built by their ancestors were the embodiment of their protective mana. Many islanders believe Hoa Hakananani’a must be returned before their desperate living conditions can improve.

The film follows a trip to Europe by Rapa Nui to view artifacts stolen by French (France has an estimated 45,000 Rapa Nui works of art) and British explorers.

The first recorded European arrival in Rapa Nui was by Dutch explorer Roggeveen in 1722. After 1770, a steady increase in European visits brought new infections to Rapa Nui, which, owing to lack of immunity, decimated islanders. As on other Pacific islands, the forced enslavement of natives began around 1805 and climaxed in 1862-63, when two dozen Peruvian ships abducted about 1,500 people (half the surviving population) and sold them to work in Peru’s guano mines.

By 1877, Rapa Nui’s population had dwindled to 111.

In 1888 Chile took possession of Rapa Nui, which it “hired out” to a Chile-based Scottish company to administer. With the entire island becoming a sheep ranch, the islanders became virtual slaves. Confined to a single village, they became virtual slaves of the company. Meanwhile overgrazing by sheep, goats and horses caused soil erosion and eliminated nearly all native vegetation.

A 1914 revolt was put down by the Chilean navy.

Postscript to film: In 2017, the Chilean government granted the Rapa Nui people the right to self-administer their ancestral island. The following year their governor lodged a new request for the British Museum to return their stolen moai. The Museum responded with an offer to loan it out on a temporary basis. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/20/easter-island-british-museum-return-moai-statue

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*In the culture of Melanesians and Polynesians, mana is the spiritual life force and healing energy that permeates the universe.

Film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/spirit-ancestors

What Causes Civilization to Collapse?

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

Jared Diamond

Penguin Books (2005)

Book Review

This book was very different from what I expected. I anticipated an account of the environmental mismanagement that caused the collapse of prehistoric civilizations such as Easter Island. Collapse is actually a detailed historical analysis of a wide spectrum of both failed and successful societies. In addition to Easter Island, Diamond also covers the vanished Anazazi civilization in New Mexico, the Mayan civilization, the Viking settlements of Iceland (which persists to the present day), Greenland and Vineland (present day Newfoundland and New Brunswick), pre-1853 Japan, the New Guinea highlands and modern day Rwanda and Australia (the modern society he describes at highest risk for collapse).

Diamond’s thesis is that the ability of any society to meet the survival needs of its members depends on certain basic preconditions. He maintains historical forest management is the most critical – deforestation features in every historical collapse he mentions. Forests are not only essential to provide fuel for cooking, heating and refining metal, but loss of forest cover leads to soil erosion and destruction of topsoil, as well as decreased rainfall and fresh water shortages.

In some societies Diamond analyzes, collapse was the direct result of environmental mismanagement. In others, the odds of survival were extremely low to begin with, due to low rainfall, a cold or windy latitude or poor soils. In many cases, a political factor such as war, lack of external supports (eg trade), overpopulation and/or a greedy ruling elite diverting resources to luxuries were important contributing factors.

The section I found most interesting concerns the New Guinea highlanders, who (prior to the arrival of Europeans) maintained an environmentally sustainable civilization via bottom up direct democracy for over 46,000 years.

Collapse: Revisiting the Adam and Eve Myth

A Short History of Progress

by Ronald Wright (2004 Caroll and Graf)

Book Review

The theme of A Short History of Progress is social collapse. In it, Canadian historical archeologist Ronald Wright summarizes humankind’s biological and cultural evolution, as well as tracing the role of ecological destruction in the collapse of the some of the most significant civilizations (Sumer, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Easter Island and the Mayan civilization). Exhaustively researched, the book advances the theory that many of colossal blunders made by modern leaders are very old mistakes made by earlier civilizations. Wright starts with the mystery of the agricultural revolution that occurred around 10,000 BC, when Homo sapiens ceased to rely on hunting and berry-picking and began growing their own food. Twelve thousand years ago, the global population was still small enough that there was more than ample wild food to feed them. Yet for some reason, a half dozen human settlements in widely separated regions simultaneously domesticated plants and animals. Why?

The Importance of Stable Climate

Citing extensive geological and archeological evidence, Wright suggests plant and animal domestication may have been triggered by unprecedented climate stability. Prior to 10,000 BC, the earth’s climate was wildly unstable, with ice ages developing and abating over periods as short as a decade or so. These sudden periodic changes in climate forced our hunter gatherer ancestors to continually migrate in search of food. The climate stabilization that occurred following the last ice age (around 10,000 BC) enabled them to settle in larger groups, save seeds to cultivate crops that took months to harvest, and engage in trade for other basic necessities.

Wright goes on to describe a number of diverse civilizations that arose and collapsed between 4,000 and 1,000 BC – and their unfortunate tendency towards mindless habitat destruction and runaway population growth, consumption, and technological development. In each case, an identical social transformation takes place as resources become increasingly scarce. As prehistoric peoples find it harder and harder to feed themselves, inevitably a privileged elite emerges to confiscate communal lands and enslave their inhabitants. They then install a despotic tyrant who hastens ecological collapse by wasting scare resources on a spree of militarization and temple or pyramid building. This process is almost always accompanied by wholesale murder, torture, and unproductive wars.

Wright relates this typical pattern of ecological destruction and collapse to a series of “progress traps,” in which specific human inventions turn out to have extremely negative unintended consequences. Instead of fixing the underlying problem they’re meant to solve, the inventions create an even worse environmental mess. It’s a pattern so common in prehistory that it’s become enshrined in the Adam and Eve and similar creation myths. All describe how the quest for knowledge ended humankind’s access to freely available and abundant food and forced them to produce their own.

Our Ancestors Wipe Out the Neanderthals and Mammoths

According to Wright, the first of these “progress traps” was the invention of weapons (for hunting) by early Homo sapiens. Wright blames this early invention of weapons for the first (archeologically) recorded instance of genocide – namely the wiping out of Homo Neanderthalis (Neanderthal man) by Cro-Magnon man between 40,000 and 30,000 BC. This was followed by other important mass extinctions as Homo sapiens spread out across the globe between 30,000 and 15,000 BC. The most recent archeological evidence suggests the mammoth, camel and horse became extinct in North America during this period because of perfected hunting techniques that allowed human beings to carry out mass slaughters (involving as many as 1,000 mammoths or 100,000 horses simultaneously).

Some archeologists attribute the end of hunting as a predominate food source (in numerous regions simultaneously) and the rise of plant-based diets to the decline in game animals stemming from this indiscriminate slaughter. The birth of agriculture, in turn leads to widespread deforestation and soil erosion in all the ancient civilizations, accompanied by soil salinization from over-irrigation. According to Wright, the entire cycle takes around a thousand years, which happens to be the average lifespan of most historic civilizations.

Turning Iraq Into a Desert

The first civilization to collapse in this way was Sumer (in southern Iraq), which flourished between 3,000 and 2,000 BC. The Sumerians invented irrigation, the city, the corporation (in the form of priestly bureaucracies), writing (for trade purposes), hereditary kings and slavery. By 2,500 BC, soil salinization (from irrigation) had caused a massive drop-off in crop yields. Instead of implementing environmental reforms, the ruling elite tried to intensify production by confiscating communal lands, introducing slavery and human sacrifice and engaging in chronic warfare.

From Sumer the cradle of civilization moved north to Mesopotamia (Babylon), in the region of northern Iraq and Syria, and humankind created one of the first man made deserts out of a region lush in date palms and other native vegetation.

Around 1,000 BC, similar civilizations also appeared in India, China, Mexico, Peru and parts of Europe. The Greeks (around 600 BC) were the first with any conscious awareness that they were destroying their own habitat. Plato writes a vivid description of the dangers of erosion and runoff from deforestation. The Athenian leader Solon tried to halt increasing ecological devastation by outlawing debt serfdom, food exports, and farming on steep slopes. Pisistratus offered grants to farmers to plant olive trees for soil reclamation.

Wright makes a good case for similar environmental destruction, rather than barbarian invasion, causing Rome to collapse. By the time of Augustus, Italian land had become so degraded that Rome was forced to import most of their food from North Africa, Gaul, and other colonies.

The Role of the New World

The most interesting section of the book concerns the role the New World played in rescuing the environmentally decimated European civilization. According to Wright, it was mainly New World gold and silver that capitalized the industrial revolution. However he also stresses the importance of the New World foods that were added to the European diet at a point where the population had outstripped their food supply. Maize (sweet corn) and potatoes are twice as productive (in terms of calories per acre) as wheat and barley, the traditional European staples. He also makes the point – ominously – that, despite all our apparent technological progress, humankind hasn’t introduced one new food since the Stone Age. In fact, Homo sapiens hasn’t evolved culturally or intellectually since our ancestors failed to confront resource scarcity in a way conducive to their survival.

If anything, given mass extinctions, potentially catastrophic climate change, and a growing scarcity of energy, water and fertile soil, we seem to be repeating the old maladaptive pattern. As examples, Wright cites the idiotic war on terrorism, which has ironic parallels with the chronic warfare the Sumerians launched 4,000 years ago. He also cites the rise of the New Right and the folly of trying to address resource scarcity by consolidating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite.