HomeMyths & Mysteries

November, 2002
You've really got to hand one to C-SPAN. Watching our elected representatives at work will occasionally earn the bored viewer a surprise or two. Those emotional and long-winded tirades sometimes offer insight into a subject you wouldn't otherwise consider. For example, when nearly any topic that involves a social problem or crime rates is brought to the floor, somebody must give a speech about the "way things were" - that Golden Age where the paper's headline was never bad news, where our kids were free to walk the streets without fear, and where nobody locked their doors at night.

It's a line that's been repeated countless times, and will probably be repeated countless more. But did you ever really stop to think about it? Try to envision this Golden Age of America, and then try to reconcile that vision with the America of your youth. Chances are, the two aren't compatible. Surely, then, the Golden Age must've been before most of us were born, right? Not likely.

The people who give such speeches are believers in a variant of what Michael Shermer called the "Beautiful People" myth. The Beautiful People myth is one of the scourges of serious historical study today, even though it is rarely asserted by real historians. The myth typically deals with the distant past, and tells of a people in complete balance and harmony with the environment and each other, who took only what they needed and gave everything back. This was a civilization of peace-land-nature lovers who detested war.

A necessary component of the Beautiful People myth is the THEM - the evil intruders who brought disease, war, or some other kind of change and led to the extinction, more or less, of the Beautiful People. Some variants of the Myth - such as that held by, or at least expounded by, our political, social, and religion leaders - bring the Beautiful People into the modern age - often immediately preceding our current state of society. Of course, from what we know about history, there never were a Beautiful People, ever.

"Mysteriously Vanished?"

In his book "The Borderlands of Science", Michael Shermer deals with two historic groups of people who are often given Beautiful People status by those less versed in history - the two groups being the Polynesians (specifically the inhabitants of Easter Island) and the Native Americans (specifically a tribe known as the Anasazi). Rather than living in "harmony" with nature, Shermer details how these two groups drove themselves into extinction through "ecocide". For example, everybody knows that when the Europeans first discovered Easter Island, there practically wasn't a tree to be found on the whole rock. Fringe theorists use this fact to support their theories about a "technologically advanced" civilization that must've been responsible for the moving of the huge statues, called "Moai", which lay scattered about the island.

If there were no trees, they say, how else could the statues have been moved? But in fact, there were trees, many of them; the Easter Islanders, not realizing the importance of conservation, eventually managed to cut down every single tree on the island to help build their homes and move their statues. Pulp fringe writers, seeking to evoke a feeling of mystery, ask why some of the statues lay half-finished in the quarries, and other finished statues lay in the grass, miles away from their intended destination.

The answer is actually simple - with the supply of lumber disappearing, the islanders forgot about their statues, engaging instead in fighting over the precious remaining resources. The soil thinned, crops refused to grow, and the huge population eventually dwindled to the handful discovered by the European explorers.

Same with the Anasazi. This Native American tribe inhabited the Chaco Canyon region of New Mexico. They are best known for their multi-level faux-"cliff dwellings". They are nearly universally touted as having "mysteriously vanished", leaving their homes behind. But the fact is, they killed themselves off, in the same fashion the Easter Islanders did. Those "magnificent" cliff dwellings used an exorbitant amount of wood in their construction.

There was plenty of wood nearby - until the Anasazi got a hold of it. Geological evidence indicates that the Chaco Canyon, now a bone-dry desert, was actually a mature deciduous forest at one time, and there were several other forests in the area as well. The Anasazi fell upon the woods with fervor. Once the nearby source was depleted, the Anasazi began to harvest wood from forests a bit more distant. They eventually constructed a complex and extensive series of roads to help transport lumber from forests up to 15 miles away. Predictably, once all the trees were gone, again the soil thinned, crops refused to grow, and the dwindling population scattered.

Constant Battles

It is telling that we come upon a significant archaeological site or region and begin to dig, no matter how early the site is, more often than not there is evidence of warfare. The evidence may not necessarily be as direct as weapons and spearheads, either; one of the most telling indications of hostilities between two tribes or groups of people is if the two are in close enough proximity to make contact probable, yet there is a "no-man's land", an area between the two where no evidence of settlement can be found, and for good reason - that's where the hostile confrontations happened most often. But there was always conflict - if not between two or more tribes, then internecine. It's interesting to note that whenever a civilization developed the written word, the thing that was invariably written about first and most often was not their religion, or their "understanding of the balance of nature", but warfare - boasts of victory and conquest.

Indeed, as painful as it may be to admit, men have been killing each other and wrecking their environment since the beginning. Archaeologist Steven LeBlanc, in his newly published book "Constant Battles", details the discovery of evidence of warfare as early as the Pleistocene Age, more than 11,000 years ago. He notes how, even now, so many researchers and archaeologists just skim right over the spearheads and warclubs, giving preference to their preconceived notions of a Beautiful People. Some of the "cover-up" was more active, as with the first explorers of the ruins of the pre-Columbian Maya, who brought back wonderful pictures of pyramids and temples but intentionally omitted mention of carvings and reliefs on those temples that highlighted the bloody Maya doctrine of human sacrifice.

But this brings us full circle. The Beautiful People myth is most often invoked by people with an agenda. Sometimes you can tell what the agenda is by whichever THEM led to the "extinction" of the Beautiful People. Of course, proponents of the myth are trying to imply that if we denounced the ways of THEM, and embraced the way things were, we could become the Beautiful People. Keep this consciously in mind next time you hear Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh talk about the "good old days", when there was no crime and everybody was happy - until THEY came - the "Liberals", the "Church/State Seperationists", the "Integrationists". Think very carefully...when, really, was that magical golden age when nobody locked their doors at night? Joshua Korosi also runs Bad Archaeology