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briefly summarize in the Further Readings section for Chapter 9 some of the many other famous past societies — Fertile Crescent societies, Angkor Wat, Harappan Indus Valley society, and others—that resembled the Maya in those respects, and to whose declines environmental factors contributed heavily.
    Our first case study from the past, the history of Easter Island (Chap ter 2), is as close as we can get to a "pure" ecological collapse, in this case due to total deforestation that led to war, overthrow of the elite and of the fa mous stone statues, and a massive population die-off. As far as we know, Easter's Polynesian society remained isolated after its initial founding, so that Easter's trajectory was uninfluenced by either enemies or friends. Nor do we have evidence of a role of climate change on Easter, though that could still emerge from future studies. Barry Rolett's and my comparative analysis helps us understand why Easter, of all Pacific islands, suffered such a severe collapse.
    Pitcairn Island and Henderson Island (Chapter 3), also settled by Poly nesians, offer examples of the effect of item four of my five-point frame work: loss of support from neighboring friendly societies. Both Pitcairn and Henderson islands suffered local environmental damage, but the fatal blow came from the environmentally triggered collapse of their major trade partner. There were no known complicating effects of hostile neighbors or of climate change.
    Thanks to an exceptionally detailed climate record reconstructed from tree rings, the Native American society of the Anasazi in the U.S. Southwest (Chapter 4) clearly illustrates the intersection of environmental damage and population growth with climate change (in this case, drought). Neither friendly or hostile neighbors, nor (except towards the end) warfare, appear to have been major factors in the Anasazi collapse.
    No book on societal collapses would be complete without an account (Chapter 5) of the Maya, the most advanced Native American society and the quintessential romantic mystery of cities covered by jungle. As in the case of the Anasazi, the Maya illustrate the combined effects of environ mental damage, population growth, and climate change without an essen tial role of friendly neighbors. Unlike the case with the Anasazi collapse, hostile neighbors were a major preoccupation of Maya cities already from an early stage. Among the societies discussed in Chapters 2 through 5, only the Maya offer us the advantage of a deciphered written record.
    Norse Greenland (Chapters 6-8) offers us our most complex case of a prehistoric collapse, the one for which we have the most information (be cause it was a well-understood literate European society), and the one war ranting the most extended discussion: the second sheep inside the boa constrictor. All five items in my five-point framework are well documented: environmental damage, climate change, loss of friendly contacts with Norway, rise of hostile contacts with the Inuit, and the political, economic, so cial, and cultural setting of the Greenland Norse. Greenland provides us with our closest approximation to a controlled experiment in collapses: two societies (Norse and Inuit) sharing the same island, but with very different cultures, such that one of those societies survived while the other was dying. Thus, Greenland history conveys the message that, even in a harsh environ ment, collapse isn't inevitable but depends on a society's choices. Com parisons are also possible between Norse Greenland and five other North Atlantic societies founded by Norse colonists, to help us understand why the Orkney Norse thrived while their Greenland cousins were succumbing.
    One of those five other Norse societies, Iceland, ranks as an outstanding success story of triumph over a fragile environment to achieve a high level of modern prosperity.
    Part Two concludes (Chapter 9) with three more societies that (like Ice land) succeeded, as contrast cases