anasazi america

ANASAZI AMERICA


You have to love Rawles ( http://www.survivalblog.com/ ). He tries to come off all serious and professional, not that he can pull it off when his hair never looks as good as mine, but deep down he must want us to skip and sing our way to the Apocalypse, big sloppy grins pasted on our face. Why else would he have such wonderful happy financial news ready for us on a Monday morning? I’m barely awake after forty minutes of exercise and four cups of coffee and it took me a bit by surprise, reading his link to the article about the US adding more debt to its books this year than the rest of the world combined. This is too friggin funny! That definitely put a stupid smirk on my face all morning long. We are all going to die!

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Anasazi America by David E Stuart was published almost ten years ago, and I’m not sure why it took so long to get noticed. Perhaps it was just pulled out of mouthballs to capitalize on the big gaping chasm opening in the ground right behind Obammies Green Shoots. How embarrassing is that phrase? Worse than “I am not a crook” or “read my lips, no new taxes”. Are you really that stupid? Our oil supply has declined for thirty months in a row and collapse is baked into the cake ( the economic troubles of the seventies were caused by a five percent decline in imported oil, and we have now seen a 25% decline- even factoring in the old manufacturing economy starved for fuel then and the paper pushing economy now needing less fuel, it is still too high of a decline to weather ). I know, I know, he’s just an ignorant foreigner, an idiot lawyer, a pretty boy puppet. Still, couldn’t he envision that stupid phrase coming back to haunt him? Hollow eyed skeletons waving AR-15’s without ammunition are going to be rioting in front of government food warehouses ( food bound for Wall Street for distribution to bank and investment house employees ) screaming hoarsely for their slice of the dwindling pie. “GREEN SHOOTS!!!! We want our green shoots!”. Anyway, perhaps the book started out as a peer read obscure treatise and to profit off the current slide towards the stew pot economy the publisher cranked out a few extra thousand copies and it is just now seeing the light of day. Again, we have Rawles to thank for bringing the book to our attention. Remember, he is wrong in his slow collapse but that doesn’t mean he’s not an invaluable resource. Buy his crap. After you buy mine. Seriously, how long do you really expect the Greenback to hold any value? Now that I think of it, just send me silver or canned bacon.

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I must be up front here with you. One of the main reasons I loved this book was because it validated most of my positions on collapse. It wasn’t like it was that great of a read, there being jaw yawning pages on archeology. The author is an anthropologist and also an archeologist, and he combines both fields to chart the rise and fall of the Anasazi in the Four Corner region ( for you Damn Yankees, that is the point where New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and Colorado meet ), or close enough to that area. That is good, in that he can back up custom with physical evidence. But I never would have plowed through the book if it wasn’t for the collapse theme. A bit on the snore side, even if the subject was fascinating. Let me give you the basics, in case you would rather buy a couple of months worth of wheat instead of reading a book. Indians learn how to live in arid region. Abnormally wet weather ( it being all relative, of course ) allows population to thrive and grow from scattered small tribes hunting and gathering with a smidge of agriculture to much bigger groups. Elites slowly rise in power, living off the surplus. Weather goes from wet to drought and system starts to collapse. After massive die-offs, economy shifts from wasteful growth to sustainability. There is a lot more to it than that, a lot more detail. And, yes, it was a stairstep collapse. Until it became a die-off. Populations moved, rebuilt, abandoned or were driven from fortifications, rebuilt elsewhere. A peaceful society started engaging in warfare. Society did go from a centralized structure to a decentralized, sustainable one, but not until the old society was destroyed.

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The Indians culture endured. It wasn’t like everyone died and then a new group repopulated the ruins. A few groups abandoned the fields and went back to hunting in the mountains. Settlements left the marginal fields and regrouped to the year round rivers. The society survived after it reconfigured itself. But what forced that change was indeed a collapse. The famine, warfare, massive population reduction type. Not the peaceful transitional type that the Pollyanna’s are dreaming of. To me, this was a document that said we are all going to die. To you, I’m sure it means that since we are smarter than all other collapsing civilizations combined we will all join hands and dance around a tree in our Birkenstocks and smoke crack and be one with Gaia. Whatever. Bottom line, if you have the cash it is a nice book to add to your library. But it is far from essential.

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