January 27, 2011The fate of prehistoric Easter Island was an environmental catastrophe… but was it really, as Jared Diamond argues, in isolation? Perhaps Easter Islanders were trading both with other Pacific islands and with South America. In Jared Diamond’s bestseller, Collapse, Prof. Diamond outlined various examples of environmental over-exploitation, including Viking Greenland, the Maya of central America and [...]
January 16, 2011The Neolithic massacres at Talheim and Schletz-Asparn in northern Europe are usually interpreted in terms of village against village. But could they reflect something more familiar, the killing of a particular section of the community? It’s a story of misery, ethnic tensions and massacres in northern Europe. It would make for unconfortable reading in one of those [...]