Articles Worth Reading - Easter Island and New Orleans

A couple of articles of note:

There’s a fascinating new article about Easter Island in American Scientist by Terry Hunt, who teaches anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. It details his research and that of others that seems to show that the traditional understanding of the island’s history is seriously flawed – humans may have come much later than previously believed, and rats, not humans, may have been the cause of deforestation.

I saw this other great article in my hometown paper, The Tennessean, about the new New Orleans phonebooks, but it’s not on their website, so I’m linking to the Long Beach Press Telegram instead. This article shows the kinds of information that researchers, including historians, can glean from non-traditional sources, like, say, phone books. Combined with call volume records from the local telephone service, we can learn a lot of things about how the recovery is going in New Orleans. Not surprisingly, home repair firms are doing gangbusters – and so are chiropractors. A lot of people, it seems, are throwing out their backs hauling construction material around. Remember, lift with your legs, not with your back!