courses/casestudies/easterisland/hunt-lipo.html

Hunt and Lipo present another view

see pdf file

• cultural elaboration (such as the carvings) might be considered as wasted energy
• in societies that are near their environmental carrying capacity
  • making the elaborations keeps them from using energy just for subsistence or procreation
  • these societies should be selected in environments that are severe or unpredictable
  • their hypothesis is that "we should expect to see higher frequencies of cultural elaboration in habitats characterized by frequent or extreme, yet largely unpredictable, disparities in productivity."
• model for survival of offspring, tradeoff of the number of offspring vs thier expected ability to survive in variable environments
• agent based model in systems with constant or variable environmental productivity potential
• repeated transitions between high and low environmental productivity allows bet hedging (such as cultural elaboration) to be a successful strategy
• also related to mobility (high mobility reduces value of bet hedging)
• Pacific Islands are known to have high environmental variability
• this explanation turns other accounts upside down
  • other anthropologists suggest that excessive monument building led to the collapse of Rapa Nui populations
  • in Hunt's and Lipo's view, the creation of monuments may have lead to the success over a long period
• the authors also studied similar aspects in the Hawaiian island chain