▶ Your Answer : The reading passage asserts that there are many satisfactory explanations about the rapid disintegration of the Hohokam civilization. However, the lecturer totally refutes the passage by stating that those hypothesis are not based on solid evidence.
First, the lecturer maintains that it is hard to believe that Hohokam people abandoned their land due to floods. According to him, flood was common in the region. Also, Hohokam people went through a devastating flood, but they recovered from it, and this shows that they were capable of flood problems. This is antagonistic with the reading passage's claim that Hohokam civilization relocated due to devastating floods.
Furthermore, in the lecture, he contends that there is no evidence that diseases led to collapse of the Hohokam civilization. The first explorers from Spain came to America in 1492, which is decades after from the disintegration of the Hohokam civilization. Also, if such diseases killed many people at once, there must be a site where many people are buried together, but there is no such graves. This, however, totally contradicts a point of the reading passage that deadly epidemics caused the collapse of the Hohokam civilization.
Last, the lecturer disagrees with the reading passage's argument that internal conflict was the cause of disintegration of the Hohokam civilization. He states that it is impossible to prove that Hohokam people revolted against there leaders. The leader's existence is not even sure, and the evidence of this theory, which is an oral history, is not always reliable.
In a nutshell, the lecturer entirely rebuts the reading passage, which argues that anthropologists are close to revealing the secret of the Hohokam civilization's deterioration. by mentioning that there is no conclusive evidence to any of the passage's claims. |