Showing posts from category: Environmental
The Sea Peoples Puzzle and the Collapse of Civilisations in the Late Bronze Age
By about 1200 BC the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean world was in turmoil. War and the movement of peoples around the region abounded as international trade ceased, cities crumbling and civilisations collapsed. With a scarcity of hard evidence for a period of history so very distant from our own, the default explanation of many historians until recent times was that the large-scale collapse and destruction was down to one factor, the emergence of vast hordes of nomadic warriors, enigmatic and mysterious pirates and marauders which have been subsumed under the name “Sea Peoples”𝕒. Very little is known of the Sea Peoples outside of what the ancient Egyptians have recorded about these shadowy invaders of the Eastern Mediterranean littoral…which is problematic for historical enquiry in itself – having “the (hefty) disadvantage of being known only by their enemies” [Duke, T. T. The Classical Journal, vol. 65, no. 3, 1969, pp. 134–37. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3296263. Accessed 15 Feb. 2025]
The assumption that the Sea Peoples were pretty much wholly responsible for the collapse of civilisations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 12th century BC has been challenged by historians of recent time. This revisionist view maintains that other factors could equally have caused the carnage of that world…drought, grave food shortages leading to a state of famine, the effects of climate change. Research into early agro-economies indicates their vulnerability to drought and long-term temperature change owing to general cooling which truncates their crop-growing season [McCormack et al (2012) cited in Wiener, M. H., FISCHER, P. M., & BÜRGE, T. (2017). Causes of Complex Systems Collapse at the End of the Bronze Age. In “Sea Peoples” Up-to-Date: New Research on Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean in 13th-11th Centuries BCE (1st ed., pp. 43–74). Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1v2xvsn.7].
Historian and archaeologist Eric H Cline in particular argues that rather than being the perpetrators of the mega-devastation that befell the region by ca.1177 BC, the Sea Peoples were victims of the collapse as much as anyone else. Cline describes them as refugees fleeing from the drought and famine of cities and civilisations collapsing asunder [‘The Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Aftermath’, Eric H. Cline with Javier Mejia, YouTube interview 2024].
Primary sources illuminating the identity of the Sea Peoples: The first reference we have to the Sea Peoples is the Amarna Letters of Upper Egypt (ca.1345 BC), clay tablets mentioning, among other things, the existence of and contact with various foreign peoples named as the Sherden, Lukka and Danuna. The richest source of information on the activities of these mysterious seafaring tribes resides in Medinet Habu, Ramesses III’s memorial temple near Luxor. The inscriptions of the scribes tell the Egyptian version of the story of the Sea Peoples who having defeated all other city-states and settlements in their way, launched an armada and land force led by the kingdom of Ekwesh, attacking the Nile Delta with the objective of establishing settlements on its fertile farmlands𝕓. They launched three attempts at invasion of Egypt over a period of 30-odd years and three times they were defeated by the Egyptians. The temple walls reveal the death toll and punishments of the vanquished Sea Peoples and the enslavement of many of them (some of the captured Shardans were incorporated into the Egyptian army to defend the kingdom’s northern frontiers from the Hittites).
So, who were the Sea Peoples and where did they come from?: In regard to the identity of the Sea Peoples the extant records give us names but little understanding of who they were. There appears to have been at least nine culturally separate tribal groups–including the Sherdan, the Peleset, the Lukka, the Shekelesh, the Tjekker, the Denyen (or Danuna), the Ekwesh, the Teresh, the Meshwesh and the Weshesh—some much better known than others. They formed themselves into a warring confederation (Egyptian records give it the name the “Nine Bows Confederation” whilst under the leadership of King Meryey of Libya). The question of their origins is more problematic to scholars. The Lukka is associated with the region of Lycia (in Anatolia) although they were thought to be highly mobile. Historians have tended to identify the Peleset with the later Philistines (in the Bible also called Phlishtim (“invaders”) and located vaguely in the region of the Aegean. The Shekelesh have been associated with the island of Sicily although this wasn’t necessarily their original homeland as it’s also speculated that they may have moved there some time during the Bronze Age. The origins of the Sherden (or Shardan) is equally mysterious, with some archaeologists placing them within the Nuragic civilisation of Sardinia. The Tjekker have been variously linked to Canaan, Eastern Crete and the Sicals of Sicily, but without any conclusiveness. The Ekwesh are thought to have been from or based in the land of Libya, as was the Meshwesh. The origins of other groups are even more shadowy, such as the Denyen (or Danuna), the Karkiya and the Weshesh. Balancing these theories, Cline and other noted scholars hypothesise that the Sea Peoples’ migration began from the Western Mediterranean.
As Prof. Cline summed up the enigmatic Sea Peoples story: “the simple answer is that there is no simple answer. It remains an archaeological mystery that is the subject of much debate even today, more than 150 years after the discussions first began”.
𝕒 “Sea Peoples” was not a term used by contemporaries—Egyptians called them simply “Northerners”—but arose out of convenience to describe disparate groups of peoples thought to have come from islands and coastal areas of the Mediterranean (in reality, ironically, some came not from the sea at all!). What is established is that the Sea Peoples pursued a systematic pattern of invading and defeating the smaller empires and states of the region (Hittite kingdom, Mycenae (Greece), Syria, the Levant), culminating in a series of invasions of Egyptian Empire between ca.1213 BC and ca.1177 BC. They were repulsed and routed by the Egyptians (according to the Egyptian inscriptions) during the reigns of three succeeding pharaohs. The final Egyptian victory under Pharaoh Ramesses III was a Pyrrhic one. The war weakened the Egyptian economy to the point of bankruptcy, the empire was greatly diminished in size and by ca.1250 BC the Egyptian New Kingdom was finished.
𝕓 the Sea Peoples were atypical invaders, accompanying the fighting men was an entourage that included the families of the raiders and their livestock. The phenomena was a complete package, it’s objective included migration and the settlement of good farming lands…all of this added weight to the theory that the Sea Peoples were refugees in search of a permanent home
𓂉 𓂉 𓁈 ༗ ༗𓁈 ༗༗ 𓁈 𓂉 𓂉
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Mao’s War on Nature and the Great Sparrow Purge
Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” (GLF) in 1958—communist China’s bold venture to transform the nation’s economy from agrarian to industrial—necessitated some drastic social engineering, and more than a little tinkering with nature. The “Paramount Leader”, repudiating the advice of state economists, consistently advocated the efficacy of population growth for China (Ren Duo, Liliang Da – “With Many People, Strength is Great”) …he stated that “even if China’s population multiplies many times, she is fully capable of finding a solution, the solution is production” (‘The Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History’, (1949)). One strategy of Mao’s for protecting the imperative of national productivity and boosting output involved an extreme “solution” in itself.
Pest controllers: As a plank of the GLF Mao spearheaded the “Four Evils Campaign”, four “pests” of the natural world were targeted for elimination – rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows…the first three especially concentrated in large numbers certainly could pose a threat to public health and hygiene, but why sparrows? Mao singled out the sparrow because it consumed the grain seed and rice from agricultural fields. What followed was a government propaganda campaign exhorting the people to fulfil their patriotic duty and zealously hunt down these proscribed “enemies of the state”. The regime enlisted the civilian population in a military-like operation, a coordinated mass mobilisation, dedicated to this singular task. The mass participation event included the very young, armies of children aged five and older were despatched from their homes armed with slingshot and stones, to formicate all over the countryside and wipe out vast numbers of sparrows often with frightening effectiveness.
Mao v Nature: Mao’s war on passerine birds was part of a wider war on nature. Mao encapsulated the objective for China in one of his oft-repeated slogans: Ren Ding Sheng Tian (“Man must conquer nature”). Mao’s modernist conception of the world saw humans as fundamentally distinct and separate from nature, so in order to fashion the world’s most populous republic into the socialist utopia that he envisioned, nature, this external thing, had to be harnessed and defeated (Zhansheng ziran). The result was a drastic reshaping of China’s physical landscape, the over-extraction of resources, intensive farming schemes, massive deforestation, riverine pollution, over-hunting and over-fishing [Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature (2001)]
A monstrous ecological imbalance and a species endangered: The nationally coordinated campaign against the four pests proceeded with phenomenal speed and ruthless efficiency. By early 1960 an estimated one billion sparrows had been destroyed🄰, nearly wiping out the species altogether in China…a fateful consequence that was to prove catastrophic for the country’s food production. The authorities had not heeded the expert advice from Chinese scientists🄱 that sparrows fulfilled a vital function in feeding off not just crops but off insects including locusts. With the removal of this natural predator, locusts in plague quantities were free to ravage the nation’s fields of grain and rice, and ravage they did, in Nanjiang 60% of the produce fields were ruined [‘Mao and the Sparrows: A Communist State’s War Against Nature’, Agata Kasprolewicz, Przekroj, 22-Mar-2019, www.przekroj.org] .
The Great (man-made) Famine, 1959–1961: The resulting Great Famine in the PRC caused up to 30 million deaths and an estimated similar figure or more in lost or postponed births, making it the worst famine in human history judged by population loss [‘Berkeley study: Historic famine leaves multiple generations vulnerable to infectious disease’, Berkeley Public Health, www.publichealth.berkeley.edu]. The plunge in agricultural output linked to the sparrow decimation project was further exacerbated by other factors such as Peking’s procurements policy, increase in grain exports from 1957 (redirecting grain away from domestic consumption which otherwise could have allowed millions of Chinese to survive the famine); the priority on industrialisation diverting huge numbers of agricultural workers into industrial sectors adversely affected the food scarcity crisis.
Postscript: Reprising the eradication campaign In 1960 the Chinese government upon realising the folly of its sparrow offensive, overturned its proscription of the birds, declaring war on bed bugs in their place. The disastrous sparrow mega-kill episode however didn’t bury the Four Evils campaign forever. The Chinese government in 1998 launched a new version of the movement, posters were seen in Beijing and Chongqing urging citizens to kill the four pests…the first three were the usual suspects as in 1958, but this time cockroaches were substituted for sparrows. Unlike the original sparrow campaign the 1998 version was not successful [‘The Four Pests Campaign: Objectives, Execution, Failure, And Consequences, World Atlas, www.worldatlas.com].
🄰 along with 1.5 billion rats, over 220 million pounds of flies and over 24 million pounds of mosquitoes
🄱 there were doubters within the hierarchy of the Communist Party who had misgivings about the wisdom of the Paramount Leader’s policy, but most found it expedient to remain silent for fear of the personal consequences of incurring the wrath of Mao
Sargassum in the Sargasso Deep Blue
Anyone who has heard anything about the Sargasso Sea will have probably learned that it is unique among the planet’s seas in that it is completely bereft of any land boundaries and that it is full of seaweed. The boundaries of the sea are the four directional currents (N-S-E-W) which together create a clockwise-circulating system of ocean currents known as the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. This novel geographical oddity results in a clear, deep blue sea which is relatively warm and calm compared to the rest of the cold and often turbulent North Atlantic.
The Sargossa’s seaweed is planktonic (ie, floating freely), a genus of seaweed called Sargassum—hence the source of the sea’s name which is thought to be of Portuguese origin (also cf. Sp. sargazzo (“kelp”)—a golden-brown-coloured algae which reproduces vegetatively on the surface and never attaches itself to the sea-bed floor during its lifecycles, which marks it out from the typical behaviour of seaweed on the high seas. The sargassum forms itself into concentrated patchesA⃣ which drift around the sea’s circumference while being ecologically beneficial to the local marine life – providing a habitat, sanctuary and food for turtles, shrimp, fish, porbeagle sharks, eels and the like.
Sargassum on steroids The Sargasso and its seaweed (more correctly gulfweed) has been much in the news recently due to increasing amounts of it washing up on the shores of beaches in eastern Mexico, Florida and the Caribbean, causing a nuisance to sunbathers, coastal dwellers and even a potential hazard, and happening earlier in the calendar year than in previous yearsB⃣. Marine scientists attribute the recent explosion of gulfweed (the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt) to human activities such as intensive soya farming in the Congo, the Amazon and the Mississippi, which dumps nitrogen and phosphorus into the ocean (Barberton 2023).
Sargasso lore The Columbus expedition on route to the East Indies (or so he thought) in 1492 gave us the first recorded sighting of the seaC⃣and navigators and sailors have been long been wary of the suspected dangers thought lurking in the mysterious sea…in fear of their vessel being permanently entrapped in its becalmed, windless waters (known as “the Doldrums”) or inextricably entangled in the ubiquitous brown belts of seaweed. Columbus and later navigators sought to transit through the sea by manoeuvring around the masses of seaweed, fearful as Columbus was that the algae mats concealed coral reefs that would wreck their ships.
Eco-hazards: the North Atlantic garbage patch While the imagined threats to sailors and ships have not materialised over time, the real threats, aside from the runaway sargassum blooms, are those that are posed against the long-term health of the sea itself. Passing shipping has had a negative impact on the ecosystem of the Sargasso Sea. Storms and hurricanes transporting massive amounts of human-made pollution, followed by the characteristic stillness of the Sea, has made it susceptible to large-scale garbage accumulation, especially of microplastics (with volumes increasing exponentially the danger of increased plastic ingestion by marine life is a major concern). Other threats to the Sargasso come from climate change and overfishing of its waters. The future harvesting of sargassum seaweed is also a concern for marine biologists.
Endnote: Bermuda Triangle intervention in the Sargasso circle? While the Sargasso Sea has no land borders, there is land in the form of the tiny Bermuda islands on the Sea’s western fringe. The intriguing nature of the Sea is further accentuated by association with Bermuda, or more specifically with its Bermuda Triangle reputation – a series of legends and mysteries that have grown up over the last century about a supposed abnormal pattern of aircrafts and ships disappearing without trace in the loosely-defined “Triangle” areaD⃣.
Dimensions: the Sargasso Sea is elliptical in shape and encompasses an area of >1,000 mi in width and 3,000 mi in length; the Bermuda Triangle (aka Devil’s Triangle) is roughly 500,000 sq mi of water in a space bounded by Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda.
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A⃣ a “golden floating rainforest” (Dr Sylvia Earle)
B⃣ and not confined to the eastern side of the ocean, the media has reported the presence of giant sargassum blooms from West Africa right across to the Gulf of Mexico (‘The Aussie tackling an ocean-spanning seaweed monster’, Angus Dalton, Sydney Morning Herald, 26-April-2023, www.smh.com.au)
C⃣ though 4th century AD Roman writer Avienius referenced an ancient Carthaginian exploration of it that supposedly took place, and there were claims on behalf of Arab mariners from the 11th and 12th centuries
D⃣ critics have generally debunked the idea of the Bermuda Triangle as a nemesis, arguing that there is no evidence that mysterious disappearances occur more frequently there than on other well-frequented oceanic transit route, that the “phenomena” is a manufactured one, sustained by conspiracy theorists and media sensationalism
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟
Articles and other publications consulted
‘About the Sargasso Sea’, Sargasso Sea Commission, www.sargassoseacommission.org/
‘Maritime Heritage’, Sargasso Sea Commission, www.sargassoseacommission.org/
‘What is the Sargasso Sea?’, National Ocean Service, www.oceanservice.noaa.gov/
‘The Aussie tackling an ocean-spanning seaweed monster’, Angus Dalton, Sydney Morning Herald, 26-April-2023, www.smh.com.au/
‘The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt’, Zan Barberton, The Guardian, 07-Mar-2023, www.theguardian.org/
Castlecrag After the Griffins, Modernism and the Sydney School
Castlecrag is an affluent suburb on Sydney’s lower North Shore with an abundance of bushy vistas and water views. The other thing Castlecrag has in abundance is architectural heritage, and the foundation of that heritage was laid by Walter Burley Griffin (WBG), the suburb’s American planner, early in the 20th century.
Griffin’s Guy House (Source: Walter Burley Griffin Society) . . .
. . .
WBG’s bold experiments in living The 15 houses that Griffin completed in the northern peninsula suburb (>30 more remained on the drawing board) are low-rise dwellings constructed in concrete, sandstone or brick, mainly locally sourced. Most of the houses are modest dwellings, small and squat, and for the most part the exteriors could be said to be aesthetically challengeda⃞. WBG’s credo was “designing for nature”, his enunciated goal—subordinating the Castlecrag houses to the surrounding landscape thus preserving the natural features—was realised…WBG left a legacy that inspired the projects of later architects in Castlecrag, notwithstanding that much of post-war Castlecrag housing development has not however been sympathetic with the Griffins’ architectural vision (‘Sydney — Castlecrag’, Walter Burley Griffin Society, www.griffinsociety.org).
Glass House (Source: Sydney Living Museums). . . The Glass House Two architects drawn to Castlecrag in the 1950s to create Modernist residential buildings that are both innovative and in synch with the bush environment are Bill Lucas and Peter Muller. Lucas, a WWII veteran, with his wife Ruth, also an architect (cf. Walter and Marion Griffin) designed the “Glass House”…built in 1957 by Bill and his brother Nev and a friend and financed by Bill’s war service loan. The Glass House is like no other dwelling in Castlecrag, open plan in design, all four walls are of glass and thus the house is open to the landscape on all sides. The Lucas House (which was constructed as the Lucas family home and a studio for Bill’s practice) has been lauded for its economical design, providing the bare essentials while maintaining its sustainability…its “featherweight structure float(ing) miraculously about the tree canopy”b⃞ (with rocks and creek below) (‘Revisited: ‘Glass House by Bill and Ruth Lucas’, Peter Longeran, Architecture Australia, 17-Aug-2022, www.architectureau.com). The Glass House has been described as an “excellent seminal example of the shelter-in-nature minimalist composition constructed in Northern Sydney post World War II by architects of the ‘Sydney School’” (’Aus_Modern_House_Lucas_GL’, Docomomo International, 2003, www.docomomoaustralia.com.au).
The radical Glass House was a reaction by the Lucases to WBG’s restrictive covenants and building controls in force in Castlecrag. WGB’s covenant forbid housing construction in materials other than stone, concrete or brick, but the all-glass Lucas House somehow circumvented the stringent building restrictionsc⃞.
Lucas House, 80 The Bulwark Castlecrag, NSW
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Audette House. . . Audette House Muller’s House (built for an American client in 1952) was the 24-year-old rookie architect’s first completed commission. Intended as an American colonial house, however Muller won the client over to something more Antipodean, devising a technique for the walls which became known as “snotted brick” – mortar oozing out the grout lines between the bricks (‘Striking a chord: Peter Muller on Audette House and why architecture is like music’, Architecture and Design, 17-Sep-2014, www.architectureanddesign.com.au. Muller drew on his recent experience studying in the US for his project which bears the strong influence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic ‘Fallingwater’ and Muller’s liking for traditional Japanese motifs in residential architecture.
Audette House 265-267 Edinburgh Rd Castlecrag NSW
Gowing House [Gruzman] (Photo: Max Dupain)
. . .
Sydney School v International School: “Nature-responsive” v purist “white painted walls” Lucas and Muller were part of a loosely-connected group of Australian architects in the mid-20th century labelled the “Sydney School”. The group rejected the prevailing trend in architecture, the International School of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Van Der Rohe (whitewashed masonry, steel framed glass houses) as unsuitable in an Australian context. Sydney School architects, influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright‘s organic (“natural”) principles for designing houses, and WBG’s Castlecrag project which was visually sensitive to the natural bushland, “displayed distinctive choices that were driven by the natural environment and employed simple, ‘minimally processed’, low-cost materials”. ‘Sydney School, the virtuous case of Australian modernism’, Tommaso Picciioli, Domus, 27-Mar-2020, www.domusweb.it. The School was sometimes referred to as the “Nuts and Berries” Style for its preference for rustic materials (stone, brick, timber).
Buhrich House II (Photo: Eric Sierins 2000). . .
Footnote: Modernist Castlecrag Castlecrag architecture is interesting in that it contains examples of both of these rival Modernist styles. In addition to Lucas and Muller, many of the leading local architects of the second half of the 20th century (quite a number of them émigrés from Nazism) including Neville Gruzman, Harry Seidler, Hugh Buhrich and Andre Porebski, contributed to the residential profile of the suburb. The variety of architecture sitting under the umbrella of Modernism can be seen in houses as different as Gruzman‘s ”organic” monolithic Gowing House (8 The Bulwark) (1969) and the two Hugh Buhrich family homes, 315 and 375 Edinburgh Road (No. I constructed 1940s, No. II constructed 1968-72)d⃞. Both Buhrich Houses are in the European Bauhaus style, the later one rated by architect Peter Myers as “the finest modern house in Australia“, and an example of Brutalist domestic architecture (‘Brutalist Architecture in Sydney’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29-Sep-2017, www.smh.com.au). Architect and urban designer Glenn Harper extends the Brutalist tag to include the Lucas Glass House, despite Lucas eschewing the use of one of Brutalist architecture‘s key materials, raw concrete, in his Glass House (”How the ‘Sydney School’ changed postwar Australian architecture”, Davina Jackson, The Conversation, 28-Jun-2019, www.theconversation.com). ╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾
a⃞ with the exceptions of Fishwick House and Grant House
b⃞ the house has been described as being “barely there” (www.archinform.net)
c⃞ one explanation is that the construction being engulfed in dense bush was overlooked by Willoughby Council (Longeran)
d⃞ Buhrich also designed the Duval House at 2 The Tor Walk
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Lake Rotomahana, New Zealand: Once were Travertine Terraces
There’s only a handful of natural travertine rock formations𝔞 in the entire world, but after 1886 there was was one less. In that year in New Zealand’s Rotorua/Bay of Plenty area, the terraced hot springs wonderland known to Pākehā New Zealanders as the “Pink and White Terraces”𝔟 (Ōtukapuarangi and Te Tarata) were obliterated from sight in a massive eruption from nearby Mt Tarawera (Māori: “burnt spear/peaks”)𝔠.
🌋 Charles Blomfield’s painting of the volcanic occurrence
Fallout from the volcano’s eruption blanketed some 15,000 sq kms of countryside with ash in the air travelling as far away as Christchurch, over 800 km to the south. The explosion of volcanic craters reduced Lake Rotomahana (“warm lake”) to mud and ash. The deafening noise and lightning of the dome volcano exploding caused some in Auckland to think that Russian warships were attacking the city [‘The Night Tarawera awoke’, New Zealand Geo, www.nzgeo.com]. The human casualties were almost all Māori, about 120 people died, as well as 10 Māori settlements destroyed or buried.
Blomfield’s painting of Te Tarata
19th century tourist attraction Nature’s violent removal of the Rotomahana travertines brought an abrupt end to a lucrative little 19th century tourism earner for the local region. Artist Charles Blomfield who painted the two terraces on multiple occasions was an eye witness to the tourist boom, observing groups of “moneyed people” bathing in the hot springs𝔡 while their lunches of potatoes and koura were cooking in the boiling pools (NZ Geo)𝔢. Village residents benefitted—some Māori guides netted incomes of up to £4,000 a year—but the First Nation community also copped the downside from the economic boost, rising illness and rampant alcoholism [‘Tarawera Te Maunga Tapu’, Rotorua Museum, www.rotoruamuseum.co.nz].
Lost and found? For 120 years New Zealanders thought that all trace of the iconic terraces—the two largest known formations of silica sinter on earth—had vanished. Scientific curiosity in recent decades has speculated whether the terraces has been destroyed altogether or perhaps permanently entombed. Recently, Geologists, drawing on Ferdinand von Hochstetter’s 1859 topographic and geological survey of Lake Rotomahana as a primary source, believe they have found traces of the lost White Terraces in the naturally-restored, crater-enlarged lake [‘A natural wonder lost to a volcano has been rediscovered’, Robin Wylie, BBC, 28-Apr -2016, www.bbc.com]. The terraces are thought submerged under sediment and 50-60 m of lake water.
🔻 1860 lithograph of Hochstetter talking to the Māori rangatira of the White Terraces
New Zealand’s miniature ‘Pompeii’ Right in the firing line of Mt Tarawera when it exploded in 1886 was the tiny village of Te Wairoa and its inhabitants the Tuhourangi people. Engulfed and obliterated by the eruption, it became known as the “Buried Village” of Te Wairoa. These days it has brought back tourism to the area. The excavated village is New Zealand’s most popular archaeological site.
(Source: Flickr.com)
Postscript: the Rotomahana travertines are destroyed but is at least one terraced hydro-thermal springs in the North Island remains. Wairakei Terraces, situated 90 km south of Tarawera in Taupō, is a smaller version of the Pink and White Terraces. This commercial operation is a combination of the synthetic (man-made geyser) and the natural (pink, blue and white silica steps).
🔻Pamukkale, Turkey
🌋 one of the most outstanding examples of travertine formations on the planet is the “Cotton Castle” of Pamukkale in eastern Turkey, with its glistening white-terraced geo-thermal springs sharing the site with the ruins of a Greco-Roman city Hierapolis, making it a world-class tourist magnet. Other extant travertines include Badab-e-Surt in Iran, Mammoth Hot Springs in Wyoming, USA, and Egerszalok in Hungary.
Pink Terraces (Photo: Charles Spencer/ Te Papa)
•••➖•••➖•••➖•••➖•••➖•••➖•••
𝔞 travertines are formations of terrestrial limestone and calcium carbonate deposits around mineral (especially hot) springs, which are often terraced
𝔟 their names in the Māori tongue translate respectively as “fountain of the clouded sky” and “tattooed rock”
𝔠 nicknamed Te Maunga Tapu (“the sacred mountain”), the volcano lies within a caldera (collapse crater) area
𝔡 the actual numbers of Europeans who visited New Zealand’s version of the “8th Wonder of the World” was not as high as might be thought, owing to the terraces not being easily accessible – from the closest settlement Rotorua it was a trek over hills by horse or buggy followed by a canoe trip and the last section on foot [New Zealand’s Pink and White Terraces’, (Tourism NSW), www.media.newzealand.com]
𝔢 English novelist Anthony Trollope was one of the European ‘celebs’ who fronted up to bathe in the pools and sleep in a whare (Māori hut) next to the terraces (NZ Geo). Trollope found nothing like its waters in the world – “you strike your chest against it, it is soft to the touch, you press yourself against it and it is smooth” [Australia and New Zealand, (Vol.II, 1873]
The Americas, Pandemic on the Back of Poverty: Peru and Ecuador; and a Southern Cone Contrarian
As Europe starts to pull itself out of the worst of the coronavirus outbreak, the Americas for the most part are still firmly mired in the devastating crisis of the pandemic…more worryingly, COVID-19 cases continue to rise and even accelerate in some countries as Latin America seems to be turning into “pandemic central”, the ‘new’ Europe❅. This is occurring despite the continent comprising only eight percent of the world’s population and having had the advantage of time to prepare for the virus which reached its shores some six weeks after ravaging Europe.
(Source: www.maps-of-the-world.net)
Smallness helps
The picture of Central and South America is not uniformly bleak. Some of the smaller countries, such as Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador, have managed to restrict their nation’s outbreaks to low levels of infection and casualties. This last mentioned country was surveyed in an earlier blog entitled Courting Controversy in Coronavirus Country: Belgium and El Salvador – June 2020). Among the Southern Cone countries, Argentina and Uruguay stand in contrast to their neighbours Chile and Brazil. Argentina (population of >45 million)—its commendable performance vs the virus slightly tarnished by a recent upsurge following an easing of the lockdown—has a total of 39,557 COVID-19 cases and only 979 deaths, compared with Brazil (whose leader Jai Bolsonaro has taken a recklessly dismissive attitude towards the pandemic). Even on a per capita basis Argentina‘s figures are still a fraction of the human disaster befalling Brazil which has racked up 1,038,568 cases and 49,090 deaths (population: 212 million). The Argentine Republic’s results are also way better than Chile’s record of 231,393 cases and 4,093 deaths (from just 19 million) [‘Argentina’s president enters voluntary isolation amid coronavirus surge’, (Uni Goñi) The Guardian, 18-Jun-2018, www.theguardian.com].
Brazil: COVID-19 mural message (Source: Getty Images)
Uruguay: Stellar success of an outlier
Uruguay has fared as well as anyone in Central/South America in avoiding a pandemic catastrophe on the scale of some of its neighbours. A tiny population (3.5 million) helps immeasurably but the sheer lowness of its corona numbers stands by themselves – just 1,040 confirmed cases and 24 deaths. This has been achieved despite a demographic profile that should have made it highly vulnerable to the disease: the largest regional proportion of elderly citizens and a population which is 96% urban. And an outcome secured not by lockdowns and quarantines (allowing Uruguay to preserve its national economic health cf. the stricken economies of its large neighbours Brazil and Argentina), but by eliciting the voluntary compliance of its citizenry – and through the luxury of having a near-universal, viable health care system✺ [‘Why Is Uruguay Beating Latin America’s Coronavirus Curse?’, (Mac Margolis), Bloomberg, 30-May-2020, www.bloomberg.com].
Uruguay (Photo: Daniel Rodrigues/adhoc/AFP via Getty Images)
Peru:
Aside from Brazil the country in the region most in strife due to the pandemic at the moment is probably Peru. Peru’s statistics are stark – over 247,925 confirmed cases and 7,660 deaths in a population of 32 million. What is particularly troubling about Peru is that, unlike Brazil, at onset it seemed to be pulling all the right reins, implementing one of Latin America’s earliest and strictest lockdowns. Months of enforced lockdown have however failed to flatten the curve of infections. Peru finds itself in a demoralising “double whammy”, the public health catastrophe continues unabated❈ while the recourse to a tough national lockdown has further crippled the economy [‘Poverty and Populism put Latin America at the centre of the pandemic’, (Michael Stott & Andres Schipano), Financial Times (UK), 14-Jun-2020, www.amp.ft.com; ‘Peru’s coronavirus response was ‘right on time’ – so why isn’t it working?’, (Dan Collyns), The Guardian, 21-May-2020, www.theguardian.com]✪.
⇑ Andean pabluchas patrol Cuzco streets to enforce social distancing and mandatory mask measures (Photo: Jose Carlos Angulo/AFP/Getty Images)
Indicators of the poverty trap
The economic predicament Peru finds itself stems from the country’s high reliance on an informal economy (reaching some 70%). What Peru has in common with Brazil—and has been exacerbated by the pandemic—is very high social inequality. The poorest Peruvians cannot afford to stay home, to isolate as they should. Many are without bank accounts and under the informal economy have to travel to collect their wages, those without home refrigerators also need to shop frequently – all of which makes them more vulnerable to be exposed to the virus [‘Latin America reels as coronavirus gains pace’, (Natalia Alcoba), Aljazeera, 15-Jun-2020, www.aljazeera.com]. Disease and impoverishment have converged in Peru to make the predicament more acute for those of the poor who need life-saving oxygen of which there is now a scandalous critical shortage – the situation being exploited by profiteering hit men (the sicarios) controlling the black market oxygen supplies [‘In Peru, coronavirus patients who need oxygen resort to black market and its 1,000 percent markups’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 18-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
Ecuador and Guayaquil ⇓
Ecuador:
In Ecuador the pandemic epicentre is the western city of Guayaquil, the country’s largest city. This is thought to be due to a couple of factors, the city’s sprawling slums where “many residents live hand-to-mouth and routinely violate the government lockdown…in order to work”, and because many Guayaquil exchange students and migrant workers came back to the city from Spain and Italy in March [‘COVID-19 Numbers Are Bad In Ecuador. The President Says The Real Story Is Even Worse’, (John Otis), NPR, 20-Apr-2020, www.npr.org]. The unpreparedness and inability of the authorities to cope with the crisis has affected the woeful degree of testing done, the lack of hospital facilities for patients and even the capacity to bury the dead as the bodies of coronavirus victims were left piling up on the city’s streets. In the wake of the disaster the Guayaquil Council entered into a slinging match with Quito (the national government), asserting that the government has under-represented the city’s death toll by as much as four-fifths, that it failed to provide it with the health care backup demanded of the disaster, as well as calling out the corruption of public utilities which has accentuated the crisis (Alcoba). Ecuador currently has 49,731 confirmed cases and 4,156 fatalities in a population of 17 million.
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End-note: The hypothesis of virus protection at high altitude
Among the multitude of worldwide research projects triggered by the pandemic, a multi-country study looking at Bolivia, Ecuador and Tibet has advanced the theory that populations that live at a height of above 3,000 metres have significantly lower levels of susceptibility to coronavirus than their lowland counterparts. The study attributes the capacity of high altitude to nullify the disease down to the fact that living at high altitude allows people to cope with hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the blood), and that the altitude provides a favourable natural environment—dry mountain air, high UV radiation and a resulting lowering of barometric pressure—reduces the virus’ ability to linger in the air. The COVID-19 experience of Cuzco in Peru seems to corroborate this hypothesis, being lightly affected compared to the rampage elsewhere in the country – the high Andean city has had only 899 confirmed cases and three deaths. Similarly, La Paz, Bolivia, the world’s highest legislative capital, has recorded only 38 coronavirus-related deaths to date⊠ [‘From the Andes to Tibet, the coronavirus seems to be sparing populations at high altitudes’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 01-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
<Þ> all country coronavirus counts quoted above are as at 20-June-2020
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❅ for week ending 20th June 2020, confirmed cases for Latin America represented half of all new coronavirus cases (Source: WHO)
✺ a like-for-like comparison to Uruguay might be Paraguay – also a small population (6.9 million), only 1,336 cases and 13 deaths but at the cost of a draconian lockdown with an economy-crippling end-game.
❈ even prior to COVID-19 striking, the Peruvian public health system was struggling due to “decades of chronic underinvestment” (eg, spending <$700 a day on health care) (Tegel, ‘In Peru’)
✪ the strict lockdown has been less rigorous when removed from the urban centres…in outlying areas, in the northern coast and the Amazonas region (particularly bad in the Amazonian city of Iquitos) it was less “honoured in the breach than the observance” leading to the formation of new virus clusters (Collyns)
⊠ other experts discount the study’s findings noting that most coronavirus infections occur indoors, negating the relevance of UV levels (Tegel, ‘From the Andes’)