The podcast of the InReSearch Of… Easter Island Massacre episode … is now live!  https://www.patreon.com/posts/33833457 

Read More InReSearch Of…

It’s funny how things sometimes come back around full circle. Back in 1977, I was 12 years old and enamored with the TV show “In Search Of…”. Hosted by Leonard Nimoy (Spock), the show presented a range of stories about the natural world that evoked (certainly to a 12 year old) a sense of wonder. […]

Read More In Search of… Easter Island (revisited)

Beau, Terry, Tim and I just published a new article in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Some of the news releases for the article are here: http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/easter-island-society-did-not-collapse-08095.html and https://phys.org/pdf500210828.pdf The published version of the article is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440320300182?via%3Dihub. You can find a copy of this article here: https://orb.binghamton.edu/anthropology_fac/44 In the article, using existing radiocarbon dates […]

Read More A model-based approach to the tempo of “collapse”: The case of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

In this article, we document as many ethnohistoric accounts of fresh water usage on Rapa Nui as we were able to locate. This review probably misses some sources but we tried to be as comprehensive as possible. This article ideally addresses concerns of some critics who asserted that coastal seeps simply were not important or […]

Read More The Ethnohistory of Freshwater Use on Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile)

Carl P. Lipo1*, Robert J. DiNapoli2, Terry L. Hunt3 1Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, USA. 2Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA. 3Honors College and School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA. Keywords: collapse, demography, Easter Island, model parameterization, open science Constructive criticism is the foundation of sound scientific […]

Read More Commentary on Puleston et al (2018): Commentary: Rain, Sun, Soil, and Sweat: A Consideration of Population Limits on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) before European Contact

Pollen records show that destruction of Easter’s forests was well under way by the year 800 [there is no evidence were here on the island at this time. The only evidence for humans on Raa Nui comes at 1200AD], just a few centuries after the start of human settlement [also wrong]. Then charcoal from wood […]

Read More AN ANNOTATED VERSION OF JARED DIAMOND’S 1995 ARTICLE “EASTER’S END” – PART III

European visitors throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries estimated Easter’s human population at about 2,000, a modest number considering the island’s fertility [Why is this ‘modest’? It is only that way if you assume there must have been many more people. Given the size of the island, the fraction that is useful for cultivation […]

Read More AN ANNOTATED VERSION OF JARED DIAMOND’S 1995 ARTICLE “EASTER’S END” – PART II

The content below was written by Jared Diamond and appeared in the August 1, 1995 edition of Discover Magazine (http://discovermagazine.com/1995/aug/eastersend543). The content of the article article been widely copy-and-pasted by others and often serves as the basis for what people think they know about the island. Here, I try to provide comments to help update […]

Read More An annotated version of Jared Diamond’s 1995 article “Easter’s End” – Part I 

I’ve found this description on the logic behind Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to be quite useful in conceptualizing the approach: https://towardsdatascience.com/a-zero-math-introduction-to-markov-chain-monte-carlo-methods-dcba889e0c50 This summary of data visualization is also quite handy: Plotting the Course Through Charted Waters

Read More Some useful info…