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