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| | Collapse - Jared Diamond - Penguin Group (USA) |
 | | Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. |
 | | Norse Greenland is just one of many past societies that collapsed or vanished, leaving behind monumental ruins such as those that Shelley imagined in his poem “Ozymandias.” By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time. |
 | | Another comparative experiment was possible in the North Atlantic, where medieval Vikings from Norway colonized six islands or land masses differing in suitability for agriculture, ease of trade contact with Norway, and other input variables, and also differing in outcome (from quick abandonment, to everybody dead after 500 years, to still thriving after 1,200 years). |
| us.penguingroup.com /nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_9780670033379,00.html (8087 words) |
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