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Jared Diamond Collapse Summary

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I am always interested in knowing about our ancient societies and how they survived under different political and cultural circumstances. After reading the preface of this book, I was very glad that there is one book intended mainly for students and lay persons to provide an understanding of how our ancestors transformed their societies and moved through periods of crisis. I found this book very readable and thought provoking, especially for readers like me, who don’t have an anthropological background. This book was written by a group of Archeologists, Anthropologists and Social workers. It has very interesting collection of essays responding to Jared Diamond’s popular writings, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Diamond is a Professor of Geography at UCLA, not an anthropologist, archaeologist, or historian. He makes most complex and abstruse publications of historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists easily understandable for a larger public.
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The part of the book that caught my attention was “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, and the Myth of Ecocide on Rapa Nui”. I have watched few documentaries about the mystery behind massive heads and bodies of Easter Island in Discovery channel. I was surprised by those hundreds of massive statues (Moai) and did some research with keen interest. This might be the reason for my excitement over this topic. In Diamond’s opinion, it is ecological catastrophe, which brought on by the island’s occupants that prompted their own destruction. He calls it “ecocide”: Inhabitants of island chose to fail by constructing giant statues that led to island’s ecological destruction and the collapse of the ancient

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