 |
| Easter Islands - Moais |
At Poverty Point, Louisiana, a remarkable monument overlooks a bend in the Mississippi river. Built around 3500 years ago, entirely from earth, it consists of six concentric, semicircular ridges radiating out from a central “plaza”, together with five mounds. Mound A, the largest, towers 22 metres– the equivalent of a seven storey building – over the lush floodplain. North America wouldn’t see another monument on this scale for 2000 years.
The Poverty Point earth works are not just impressive, they are also intriguing. Ancient monuments have always been regarded as products of large,complex, hierarchical societies, built as tributes to gods and kings. In what might be called the Ozymandias theory of construction, they are seen as physical manifestations of a powerful chief’s authority as in an evocative line about a mighty ruined statue in a poem by Shelley, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
But Poverty Point was constructed by hunter-gatherers, and they are famously egalitarian. They may have had local leaders, but these would not have exerted a commanding influence over their small groups. Sow ho, or what, motivated building on such a grand scale here?
A new and outlandish idea could answer that question. If correct, it will overturn our preconceptions about the purpose of ancient monuments, and could even hold lessons to help us improve modern societies.
Archaeologists have been excavating at Poverty Point for more than a century. However, the truly remarkable nature of the monument emerged only a few years ago when a team led by Tristram Kidder of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, drilled into Mound A. They saw that it consisted of neatly striated bands of coloured soil, as if people had alternately added layers drawn from different sources. It rains a lot in the Lower Mississippi valley, 3500 years ago as now, but there was no sign that the layers had bled into each other, as you might expect if it had rained during the construction. The archaeologists came to a startling conclusion: Mound A must have been built in one fell swoop, between rains. “It could have been built in as little as 30 days, and probably in no more than 90,” says Kidder.
This has big implications. Mound A contains nearly 240,000 cubic metres of earth, the equivalent of 32,000 standard dumper truck loads. There were no dumper trucks then, of course, nor earthmovers, packmules or wheelbarrows. Assuming, conservatively, that it was built in 90 days, Kidder’s group calculated that around 3000 basket-wielding individuals would have been needed to get the job done. The numbers are rough and ready, but given that people probably travelled in family groups, as many as 9000 may have assembled at Poverty Point for the duration. “If that’s true, it was an extraordinarily large gathering for hunter-gatherers,” says Kidder.
They would have been there of their own free will, not at a mighty ruler’s beck and call. Why? Another archaeologist, Carl Lipo of Binghamton University in New York, thinks he has the answer. He believes it is the same reason that the people of Easter Island built their famous stone heads. In 2001,when Lipo first went to Rapa Nui – as Easter Island is known locally – the prevailing idea was that the colossal statues, or moai, had been rolled into place using logs, and that the resulting depletion of trees eventually contributed to the collapse of the island’s human population. Lipo and fellow archaeologist Terry Hunt, now at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, showed that moai could have been “walked” upright into place by small, cooperating bands of people using ropes, with no need for trees. In their 2011 book, 'The Statues that Walked', they argued further that statue-making benefited these people by directing their energy into peaceful interactions and allowing them to share information and sexual partners. Far from causing their downfall,when the going got tough, Easter Islanders depended on this cooperation. They only stopped making statues, Lipo and Hunt claimed, precisely because life became easy – in part due to the domestication of plants – and it was no longer so important that they work together.
Likewise, according to Lipo, Mound A was not the product of top-down power play, but of bottom-up cooperation. In other words, it was a giant team-building exercise instigated by the people who did the work. “We’re starting to see that there’s this whole other condition under which these monuments get constructed, and it’s very different from the traditional story,”he says.
If this idea is correct, it will require“a pretty large shift in thinking”, says evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, also at Binghamton University. But, he adds, it does seem to explain several long-standing puzzles connected with ancient monuments. One is why their builders so often destroyed and rebuilt them.
A prime example of this can be found at the temple complex of Göbekli Tepe in south east Turkey,which at more than 11,000 years old is the earliest known example of monumental architecture. Since excavation started there in the mid-1990s, archaeologists have uncovered nine enclosures formed of massive stone pillars carved with pictograms and animal-themed reliefs. Given the size of these pillars – their average weight is 30 tonnes – a considerable work force would have been needed to transport them from nearby quarries.Yet every so often the workers filled in the enclosures with rubble and built new ones, sometimes even before an enclosure was finished.
The apparent disposability of these monumentsmakes sense if the primary goal was building a team rather than a lasting structure. Göbekli Tepe was created by hunter-gatherers and there was permanent activity at the site for 1500 years, says Oliver Dietrich of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin,who works there. Over this same period, plants and animals were being domesticated in that part of the world, ushering in farming and a more sedentary lifestyle.“There is good evidence that around 8000 BC this process was finished,”says Dietrich.“That is the moment when building activities at Göbekli Tepe stop,”he adds, in an echo of Lipo’s interpretation of what happened on Easter Island.
If human bonding was the objective, then you might also predict that celebrating a project’s completion was an important part of the process – perhaps even an incentive to take part in the first place.A big party would have allowed links forged through collaborative toil to bear fruit, cementing social ties and perhaps leading to sexual liaisons. The rubble filling the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe suggests celebrations took place: it is riddled with fragments of carbonised bones from aurochs and gazelle. Dietrich and Jens Notroff, also at the German Archaeological Institute, have found the remains of limestone vessels, too, bearing traces of fermented barley – otherwise known as beer. The largest enclosure contains 500 cubic metres – 65 dumper truck loads – of organic debris. That’s a truly gargantuan feast.
Dietrich and Notroff share Lipo’s view that the need to cooperate is what drove these monumentalists. As you might expect when a major shift in thinking is on the table, not everyone agrees. The sceptics include Kidder. For him, the interesting question is not “Did cooperative building promote group survival?” but “What did the builders think they were doing?” All human behaviour comes down to a quest for sex or food in the end, he says. As for why hunter-gatherers came to Poverty Point, he and his colleagues have suggested it was a pilgrimage site that drew people from right across eastern North America.
Another sceptic is Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at University College London who has worked at Stonehenge. Current evidence points to an astonishing scenario in which Stonehenge was erected twice: first at a site yet to be identified, but probably near where the stone was quarried in Wales, and a second time at its familiar Salisbury plain location. That might indicate a disposable structure, he says, but in fact Stonehenge is unique among Britain’s hundreds of known stone and wood circles in having been dismantled and rebuilt. “My guess is that we are looking at some pretty extraordinary situation,” he says.
Whatever that was, Parker Pearson believes Stonehenge was built to last. His group has compared it with Neolithic timber circles nearby and found the choice ofmaterial to be highly significant: wood represented the domain of the living and stone that of the dead. “It looks as if Stonehenge was a place of the ancestors, where stone symbolised permanence and eternity,” he says. Likewise, the filling in of enclosures at Göbekli Tepe could be seen as preserving an ancestral space, rather than destroying it. Subsequent generations may have built over them with the idea of reclaiming or reusing that space, Parker Pearson suggests.
None of these criticisms is incompatible with the cooperation hypothesis, Lipo says. For him, it is crucial to distinguish between short-range and long-range causes, and to understand that while the builders were well aware of the short-range drivers of their behaviour – the demands of a certain ritual, say – the long-range drivers may have been opaque to them. “You have to think about why that ritual was in that place at that time,” he says. Why, for example, is there no equivalent of the moai on other Pacific islands that shared Rapa Nui’s flora, fauna and belief systems? It must have something to do with its exceptional remoteness, he says. With little or no chance of obtaining resources from outside, or of emigration, cooperation was essential. “That’s the island that is perfectly suited for this being a solution to living over the long run.”
It is no coincidence, in Lipo’s view, that the “fancy stuff” tends to crop up at the fringes of the habitable zone. Stonehenge, for example, was built at the northern limit of Neolithic farming, where people were scattered sparsely across the landscape. Here, a frost could seriously damage productivity, so mutual support often spelled the difference between life and death. In North America, too, you see prehistoric monument-building moving north as domestication spread and more of the continent became habitable.
Even if Lipo is correct, surely his idea doesn’t apply to monuments left by large, complex and highly stratified societies. The Egyptian pyramids, for example, look like a clear-cut case of a despotic vanity project – a notion encapsulated in the adjective “pharaonic” and reinforced by Hollywood films. Nevertheless, Lipo sees signs of grass-roots cooperation here too.
Modern monuments
Since the early 2000s, excavations of the so-called “slave” quarters at Giza have been producing evidence that the permanent core of the labour force weren’t slaves at all, but paid volunteers. The work was undoubtedly hard, but their village was comfortable and well provisioned, and they were free to come and go. Comparisons of DNA extracted from their bones with that of modern Egyptians suggested that they came from all over the empire. Mingling at Giza with those from distant parts probably reinforced their common identity as subjects of the pharaoh, and people would have carried this identity, along with newly acquired skills and tastes, home with them. Moreover, in 1999, Sarah Sterling, then at the University of Washington in Seattle, showed that the most intense period of pyramid construction – between 3000 and 2600 BC– coincided not with a time of plenty ashad long been thought,but with a period of unpredictability in Nile floods.Once again, people responded to environmental stress by building big.
And there’s more. Peter Turchin, who studies history and cultural evolution at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, sees bottom-up cooperation at work in monuments from the Roman Colosseum to France’s Gothic cathedrals to the International Space Station (ISS). In each case, he says, the project brought together groups who hadn’t previously worked together, and opened the door to new forms of cooperation. The French church, for example, had to cosy up to the nobility and even commoners to pay for its vast construction projects. As a society grew in scale and complexity, so did its builders’ ambitions. The Great Pyramid at Giza took 400,000 people-years to build. Turchin estimates that the ISS required eight times that.
Such large-scale, technically advanced enterprises are undoubtedly underpinned by a good deal of chiefly vanity too. But in the modern world they are paralleled by smaller-scale projects that more obviously reflect the builders of prehistoric monuments. Wilson cites the Burning Man festival, billed as an experiment in community and art, which draws tens of thousands of people to Nevada’s Black Rock desert each summer. Among the ten principles laid downby its co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004 are “radical inclusion”,“communal effort” and “leaving no trace”. Whatever festival goers create they destroy before they leave, culminating in the ritual burning of a wooden effigy, the eponymous man.
Are those who attend Burning Man obeying some long-range drive, opaque to them but serving a useful social purpose nonetheless? Wilson thinks so. In fact, there’s evidence that such cooperative ventures matter more today than ever because we are dependent on a far wider range of people than our ancestors were. Social psychologist Susan Fiske of Princeton University recently showed, for example, that collective investment in a community project can help break down people’s negative stereotypes of strangers.
Wilson,who applies evolutionary theory to improve people’s lives in practical ways, is convinced there is untapped potential in cooperative works of the kind our ancestors favoured.A few years ago, as part of his Neighborhood Project in Binghamton, he and his colleagues helped locals create their own parks. “This brought people together and enabled them to cooperate in numerous other contexts, including relief efforts during a flooding event in 2011,” he says.
Wilson is planning similar projects for the future. “Let’s have more of these!”he says. They may never produce anything on the scale of Mound A, but if they help build bettercommunities that will surely be a monumental achievement.
By Laura Spinney in "New Scientist", UK, vol.237, n. 3160, January, 13, 2018, excerpts pp. 38-41. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comments...