10- a monumental collapse?
It is a familiar tale of greed, stupidity, and self-destruction. For hundreds of years the inhabitants of Easter Island competed to build ever more impressive statues, depleting their resources to feed their obsession. Ecological disaster was inevitable. As the island's last tree was felled, the society collapsed into warfare, starvation, and cannibalism. Rival clans toppled each other's statues. The workers rose up against their rulers. The vanquished were either enslaved or eaten.
This version of events on Easter Island has become not only the accepted story, but a dark warning about a possible fate for our entire planet. "The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious, writes Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, in Collapse. "Easter's isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources." But is it true, or are we too eager to think the worst of our species?
There are problems with almost all aspects of this story, say Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and his colleague Carl Lipo of California State University, Long Beach. Take the idea that the population was once much larger than the low estimates made by early visitors. "People say, 'Look at all these statues, there must have been armies of people to do this,'" says Lipo. Many conclude that by Roggeveen's time the society had already collapsed. "But that is just absolute speculation," Lipo says.
Population estimates based on the remains of prehistoric settlements are difficult to validate. Totals range from a few thousand to 20,000. It is an inexact science because no one knows how many people lived in each house, and not all settlements have been well studied. Besides, recent archaeological analyses suggest a different conclusion. In 2005, a paper by Hunt and Lipo and another by Button Shepardson of the University of Hawaii gave the first thorough analyses of Rapa Nui's networks of prehistoric paths. Hunt and Lipo suggest the paths were built at different times by different groups of people. There is no evidence of an "interstate system," but rather a number of separate roads. "We suggest this indicates smaller groups working on their own," says Hunt—perhaps different kin groups rather than workers operating under the control of a single authority.
Then there is Hunt and Lipo's recent re-analysis of the date when Rapa Nui was colonized. Results of radiocarbon dating of charcoal from a new excavation push forward the arrival of the first Polynesian settlers by some 400 years, from an estimated AD 800 to AD 1200. Although there is no evidence to say how many colonizers there were, it is likely that numbers were small.
When it comes to claims of massive deforestation, however, the evidence is undeniable. Soil analysis suggests an estimated 16 million palms once stood on the island, and deforestation seems to have begun as soon as the settlers arrived around 1200, and was complete by about 1500. Yet the reason the islanders wiped out their forest is still open to dispute. Some palms may indeed have been cut down to assist in moving the statues, though Hunt points out that they would not have been ideal for the job since they have very soft interiors. Other trees were used for firewood, and land was cleared for agriculture. Still, the blame for the disappearance of the palms might not rest entirely with people, say Lipo and Hunt. They point the finger at rats.
However it happened, was losing the forest really such a bad thing? Some researchers deny that it was all bad. According to the theory of self-destruction, the massive deforestation loosened the topsoil, which blew into the ocean, depleting the ground of nutrients and causing food shortages. However, ongoing -research suggests that erosion was not the problem people have assumed.
Thegn Ladefoged of the University of Auckland in New Zealand is analyzing samples of soil from locations across the island. In general, the soils are poor, he reported at the meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in May 2006. Nevertheless, he adds, there is no clear 95 evidence of extreme soil degradation across the island. "I think people have extrapolated from one area which does show extreme degradation to the whole island. I just don't see it," says Ladefoged.
What is apparent on the ground is the large number of rock gardens that cover much of the island's interior, in which crops such as taro, yarns, and bananas were grown. These take several forms, from windbreaks made of large lava boulders to piles of smaller rocks mixed with earth that would have acted to keep moisture in the soil. Lipo and Hunt suggest that, given Easter Island's poor soils and relatively low rainfall—which struggles to top 1,500 millimeters a year—it actually made sense to get rid of the forest to make way for these gardens, and to extend agriculture across a greater range of soils and levels of rainfall.
The earliest gardens seem to date from around 1300. Christopher Stevenson of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources thinks that they were abandoned from about 1600. This would have coincided with a revolt against the ruling class, triggered by food shortages when the timber ran out and people could no longer make rafts for deep-sea fishing or hunt the birds and animals that died out with the palm forests. Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, who studied the island in the 1950s, pinpointed the infighting to about 1680, based on a bum layer in the soil. Diamond also settles on a date of around 1680. "The collapse of Easter society followed swiftly upon the society's reaching its peak of population, monument construction, and environmental impact," he writes.
This all seems to support the accepted story of Easter Island history, but not everyone is convinced. Most of the evidence for starvation and cannibalism comes from oral histories, which are "extremely contradictory and historically unreliable," according to John Flenley at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. He points out that by the time detailed observations were made in the 19th century, the culture was virtually dead. Hunt and Lipo suspect that stories of cannibalism, in particular, could have been fabricated by the Europeans who arrived in 1864.
What about the oral history of starvation and conflict? It is possible this could describe events that occurred not before European contact but afterwards. Between 1722 and 1862, an estimated 50 European ships visited Easter Island. By the 1850s, whalers reported widespread disease on the island, says Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University, U.K. Slave raids also began in about 1805, and in 1862 and 1863, Peruvian and Spanish slave boats captured an estimated 1,500 local people. After this, reports of smallpox are rife. When European settlers arrived, they found a starving people whose society undeniably had collapsed. By 1872, following further slave raids and transports to Tahiti, only around 100 local people were left on Rapa Nui.
Diamond and others conceive of these disasters as the final assault on a society that had already destroyed itself. Peiser, along with Hunt and Lipo, thinks the disease introduced by Europeans is a plausible trigger of the only real collapse of the society. They note also that while Roggeveen's impression in 1722 was of "singular poverty and barrenness," there are contradictory descriptions. Peiser quotes an extract from the journal of a member of a French expedition that visited in 1786: "Instead of meeting with men exhausted by famine... I found, on the contrary, a considerable population, with more beauty and grace than I afterwards met with on any other island; and a soil which with very little labor furnished excellent provisions."
Lipo and Hunt do not claim to have all the answers. Instead, they aim to make other researchers think more critically about the history of Easter Island. The story of ecocide4 may usefully confirm our darkest fears about humanity but, as Diamond points out in Collapse, for every society that self-destructs there is another that does the right thing. It is far from clear that the Easter Islanders made their situation much worse for themselves, but only more evidence will resolve the issue.
