I’ve never read any of Jared Diamond‘s books, so I’ve been reluctant to say much about him and his ideas. Chaco is one of his main case studies in Collapse, however, so I really should read it at some point and try to figure out what I think of it. I’ve heard conflicting things about how accurately it presents and interprets the evidence he gathers from archaeologists. A lot of people seem to really like it, but most archaeologists seem to hate it and think that it’s riddled with errors. I browsed through it a little once in the Chaco bookstore (which, yes, carries it, or at least did at the time), and I didn’t see any obvious errors of fact in the parts of the Chaco chapter I looked at, but the caption for one of the pictures, an overview of the canyon as it appears now, seemed to imply that the current desolate look of the area was the result of the overexploitation of the local environment by the Chacoans, which presumably led to their collapse. My understanding of Diamond’s message, based mainly on the subtitle of the book (“How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”), is that the main driver of collapse he sees is environmental degradation, and the book’s popularity in environmentalist circles certainly makes sense in this light.
In any case, I’m skeptical about the whole idea that Chaco “collapsed” in the way that Diamond seems to think. I’ve put forth my case in detail elsewhere and won’t repeat it now, but the basic idea is that what happened at Chaco is more complicated than a simple catchword like “collapse” (however it’s defined) implies. On the narrow point of whether whatever happened at Chaco was the result of “choices” the Chacoans made about whether to “succeed or fail,” I guess it depends on what choices you mean by that. David Stuart argues that the rigid, hierarchical social structure that allowed Chaco to become so impressive in the first place made the system too brittle to withstand severe climatic fluctuations, with the result that it was replaced by the more egalitarian and resilient social structures of the modern Pueblos. He sees some clear lessons for our own society from this, primarily about the problems with economic inequality (a timely topic these days). That’s one way of looking at “collapse.”
I’m not sure if it’s what Diamond is talking about, though. I’ve seen him described as an “environmentalist” in the old sense, i.e., an environmental determinist who sees major aspects of human societies as inevitable results of their environmental situations, with the twist that he obviously doesn’t have a completely deterministic view of human reactions to the environment but rather, more in line with the modern meaning of “environmentalism,” he recognizes that the interaction between humans and their environments goes both ways. Under this view, presumably the most enlightening examples of past “collapses” to look at for insights into how we should address our own environmental problems are those where collapse was the result of ecological “overshoot,” or human use of natural resources outstripping the ability of the environment to provide them. Joseph Tainter, who knows a lot about “collapse” from an archaeological perspective, has vigorously criticized Diamond’s (and others’) use of this approach, and I think choosing Chaco as an example of this type of collapse is particularly questionable.
It’s not that the Chacoans didn’t have major effects on their local environment. The permanent resident population of the canyon may not have been very large, but it’s not an area that’s exactly abounding in resources, and the fact that the Chacoans imported all kinds of stuff from outside the canyon strongly implies that there wasn’t enough of all sorts of things locally to support the community. I believe Diamond makes a big deal specifically out of the evidence for importing wood from the distant mountains, which I presume he sees as evidence that the Chacoans had deforested their local area more or less completely, with the attendant implications for overshoot and collapse. Hence the caption on the picture I noticed when leafing through the book: the implied sequence of events is rise of Chaco leading to deforestation leading to collapse leading to a treeless desert wasteland even 1000 years later.
But of course the evidence for importing timber from 50 miles away also implies that the Chacoans had the ability to organize some seriously impressive procurement for those resources they were lacking locally (whether because they had outstripped them or because they were never there to start with). It’s not that they didn’t deforest their local area; they totally did, and fast! But if that had been enough to make the system collapse, it never could have gotten going in the first place. The abiding mystery of Chaco, after all, is not that a major center of its scale arose in the Southwest but that it arose where it did, in one of the least inviting environments in the whole region. Somehow, the people at Chaco were able to marshal the resources of a much bigger area with many more resources, until suddenly they couldn’t. The thing that needs to be explained by any “collapse” narrative is why that social power stopped so abruptly, which presumably also requires an answer to the question of how it developed in the first place. We don’t know the answers to any of these questions, which is why Chaco remains such a fascinating and mysterious place even after over a century of intensive study.
“Overshoot” is not a very helpful explanation in this context. Stripping the canyon of all its productive potential clearly didn’t lead to the collapse of Chaco, as the Chacoans were able to draw on the much greater potential of the whole region, at least for a while. Overshoot doesn’t really explain why that control ended, either, since the overall resources of the region that the Chacoans apparently had access to were much too abundant for them to deplete. They easily deforested the mesas above the canyon, but they never came close to deforesting the Chuskas or Mt. Taylor. Those are big mountains, covered in trees! And the same goes for all the other imported goods. You could perhaps make a case for overshoot in some particular area perhaps contributing to the collapse of Chacoan power in some roundabout way, but it would definitely not be as simple as a straightforward story of overshoot leading to collapse implies. That picture doesn’t show the enduring effects of Chacoan deforestation on the canyon; it shows what the canyon probably looked like when the Chacoans first encountered it. Indeed, the canyon ecosystem we see today is the result of over fifty years of protection from grazing, and over a hundred years of protection from most other impacts.
So those are my thoughts on Diamond, and I really should read the book at some point to get a better sense of what he actually argues and whether this is a fair interpretation. What I find interesting, though, is that noted archaeological iconoclast Steve Lekson has recently written an impassioned post in support of Diamond. He points out that most archaeologists seem to hate Diamond’s books and spend a lot of time pointing out the flaws in them, but he argues that doing this is missing the more important point:
I’m sure there are errors – real errors. Any work of this scope will have errors. But much of the carping seems to concern not facts, but interpretations. Diamond necessarily works from other archaeologists’ interpretations and I suspect the authors upon whom he relies would have something to say about all this. The interpretations he accepts are not necessarily wrong; they are simply inconsistent with those of his critics.
I’m not saying that Diamond gets it “right.” It’s hard to get things completely “right,” especially in science when many very reasonable hypotheses are probably wrong. But the vehemence of academic reaction to Diamond is, I think, far disproportionate to his sins – sins of omission, commission or (worst of all) failure to cite the critic. It is my opinion that much of the heat comes from Diamond’s success as a popular writer. It’s not jealousy — well, maybe a little: after all, the guy won the Pulitzer with our data. We don’t want anyone else to tell our story, even though we almost never tell it ourselves – accessibly. And, it must be said, there is antipathy, even hostility from academics towards popular writers, even when that popular writer is an academic. We all should re-read Article 4 of the SAA’s Principles of Archaeological Ethics, especially the bit about “Archaeologists who are unable to undertake public education and outreach directly should encourage and support the efforts of others in these activities.”
Fair enough. I do obviously agree with the value of outreach and it’s true that Diamond has been a wildly successful popularizer of archaeology. Lekson goes on to give a very interesting account of what he sees as the important “collapses” in Southwestern prehistory. I note that Chaco, specifically, doesn’t appear on the list, although the depopulation of the Four Corners around AD 1300 does. I have my doubts about that one too, but it really depends a lot on how you define “collapse.” It’s not clear if Lekson has actually read Diamond’s book(s) (although obviously I’m hardly one to judge on that score), and he doesn’t directly address any of Diamond’s claims or interpretations about Chaco specifically, even though he is of course much more of an expert on Chaco than either Diamond or me. Still, his general points about the reaction to Diamond are fair. It would probably be more helpful for archaeologists who object to interpretations of their data put forth in popular accounts like Diamond’s to explain their objections in similarly popular fora, rather than just whining amongst themselves. Diamond’s work may have a lot of problems, but at least he’s trying to draw conclusions from archaeological data and apply them to modern issues in accessible way, which is much more than you can say for most archaeologists, with a few notable exceptions like Stuart and, to a lesser extent, Lekson himself. In any case, I think it’s clear that this conversation is really just getting started, so anyone who is really upset by the direction it’s taken so far has plenty of opportunity to jump in and contribute a different perspective.
Thanks for sharing this and throwing some Chaco knowledge into the Collapse conversation. I think I’ve asked you about this before, although I don’t know if I shared this syllabus that I developed after an epic argument over at Crooked Timber. Lacking any particular knowledge about Chaco, its associated science, and Diamond’s use thereof, I found that chapter to be the least bad part of Collapse. It would be nice to hear a genuinely informed opinion of the scholarly argument in the context of the whole book. So read the damn thing already, willya!
Thanks, Adam. I’ll read it at some point, I promise. In the meantime, though, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on what you took Diamond’s interpretation of Chaco to be. As I said in the post, I’ve heard conflicting things, but most of them were from park visitors who didn’t have any particular expertise on the subject and hadn’t necessarily read the book recently.
In the bizarre worlds of anthropology and archaeology these days virtually no one writes to the public (Brian Fagan being a major exception) and thus Jared Diamond (ornithologist, physiologist and generalist) has become the voice of both disciplines. Guns, Germs, and Steel is grand theory and, to me, makes a great deal of sense. I note that Diamond cherry-picks his sources, and I think that is, in part, that he is not “deeply steeped in the literature.” I am familiar with ethnographers and archaeologists cherry-picking as well, but Diamond jumps in where others fail to. People actually like to read about the stuff that many anthropologists and archaeologists do, but can anyone actually read an American Antiquity or American Anthropologist these days? the AAA, as you know, banned the word science from their definition of just who they think they are.
So . . . . I think Diamond indeed takes the environmentalist route, and why not? Humans are hardly immune to evolutionary variables. Population increases when it can, overruns the carrying capacity when it can, and figures out a better way of doing things if it can – just like other organisms. I have been calling it “Carrying Capacity Increasing Strategies” for years in my classes where I have used Cahokia (with its almost exactly parallel rise and fall dates) as a prime example. Sooner or later resources get used up or dried up or both. And, as previously noted by another writer, the very top echelons of a society are the most conservative, least likely to advocate change (just listen to the news) and most likely to dig in and advocate that what we did that got us here (to the pinnacle) is the best thing to continue doing only more so. I have a feeling this applies to Cahokia and to Chaco as well. Both the Anasazi and the Mississippians fell back to lower energy levels which were the societies described by the Spaniards as they set to obliterate as much as they could.
Anthropologists have long rejected deterministic factors and archaeologists are only slightly better because they don’t usually have anyone to talk to and culture explains it all. I am working on a sort of ethnobotanical book (Hidatsa Uses of Plants) and Buffalobird-woman (of Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden fame) completely fails to mention the absolutely hellaceous drought of the mid1860s which lasted for three years when she was in her middle twenties so even talking to people can be quite misleading. But more to the point — look how many years it took Mayanists to A) accept the fact that the Maya had actual cities, B) fought vicious wars, and C) probably were done in by the climatic changes ca. 800-900 AD. The Maya were supposed to be the people we weren’t – just as the Pueblo people were Apollonian and lived in cliff palaces for the view. Eric Wolfe, no less, wrote (1969?) that Teotihuacan was destroyed by marauding hunters and gatherers. Sooner or later it will turn out to be resource depletion and climate change — but not yet.
As you may have noticed, people are generally oblivious to environmental deterioration until it’s too late.
Oops, meant to put together a meaningful reply to the earlier comment. Still pending, I guess. But just for the record: Mike — the AAA, as you know, banned the word science from their definition of just who they think they are is not at all what happened. There’s been oceans of internet ink spilled on the subject, and a special panel at the AAAs as covered here.
Whether ‘science’ has any bearing on Diamond’s work and popularity is a separate question, of course.
I’ve read Collapse a couple of times. As an unlettered non-academic I’d make the following observations.
I curiously thought the portion about collapse in the four corners to be the least persuasive……… maybe familiarity breeds a more critical reading.
Political economy/culture vs-environmental determinism…..chicken vs egg. Where does one draw the line?
The notion of cliff dwellings as”rooms with a view” is funny. They are in usually scenic locals and fun to find, access and explore but sit in one for a few minutes and contemplate the daily necessity of obtaining water and the logistical problem of planning storage for amounts sufficient to withstand even a short siege. Those places were inhabited out of sheer terror in times of red red war. Spooky really. Read LeBlanc.
The part of Collapse about Easter Island was thought provoking. Imagine cutting apart the last ocean going canoe (Stuck!) Or cutting down the last damn tree……amazing. Then read the last example where relatively modern Europeans in the form of Scandinavian colonizers of Greenland; who once had several annual ships traveling back and forth to Europe and a Catholic Bishop for pete’s sake……… vanishing from the face of the earth.
I thought the book was more about the general idea of what can happen when culture collides with environmental limitation; and presenting the general ideas and examples in an entertaining and readable form than trying to be some authoritative thesis. I’m always surprised it provokes so much contrary and frankly nit-picking criticism.