Easter Island - Where Giants Walked .
In the early 18th century, a Dutch explorer named Admiral Jacob Roggeveen
was sailing across the vast blue expanse of the South Pacific Ocean. He had been
on the sea for 17 days, searching the southern ocean for a mythical continent
known as Terra Australis. And when he saw a small island on the horizon, his heart
must have skipped a beat, as Roggeveen recounts in his diary.
There was a great rejoicing among the people and everyone hoped that this low
land might prove to be a foretoken of the unknown southern continent. But as
their ships approached, it became clear that this was no vast continent, only a
small island, a dot of land in the middle of the ocean. Nevertheless, Roggeveen
was curious and he ordered his three ships to prepare for landing. It was
Easter Day, 1722. As the Dutch got closer, it became clear that the island ahead of
them was inhabited. They saw smoke rising from the villages along the coast,
but it was a seemingly barren land. We originally, from a further distance,
considered Easter Island to be sandy. The reasons for that is that we counted as
sand the withered grass, hay or other scorched and burnt vegetation, because
its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a singular
As they sailed closer, the island's inhabitants came out on canoes to meet
them, greeting them with friendly astonishment. This was much like other
islands that Roggeveen had visited before, but when he got ashore, what he found on
this island amazed him. Along the beaches, lined up in rows with their backs to the
sea, was a line of stone statues. They were carved from black volcanic stone,
some of them standing 10 meters high, wearing crowns of red sandstone. But
Roggeveen and his men couldn't understand how these statues had got
there. The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment, because
we couldn't comprehend how it was possible that these people, who were
devoid of heavy thick timber for making any machines, as well as strong ropes,
nevertheless had been able to erect such images which were fully 30 feet high and
thick in proportion. Roggeveen and his men didn't stay long. They soon set sail
away from the island and on across the Pacific. But the remarkable image stayed
with them and they must have asked themselves how did those people
construct so many vast stone statues when so little building material seemed
available to them? Why had they built so many? And if such an advanced civilization
had once lived on this island, where on earth had it vanished to?
My name is Paul Cooper and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations
podcast. Each episode I look at a civilization of the past that rose to
glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask what did they
have in common? What led to their fall and what did it feel like to be a person
alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to
tell the story of one of archaeology's most enduring puzzles, the mystery of
Easter Island. I want to explore why it's not actually much of a mystery at all. I
want to examine how this unique community grew up in complete isolation,
how it survived the test of centuries against overwhelming odds, and I want to
take you through the evidence about what happened to finally bring this society
and its enormous statues crashing down.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceans. At over 165
million square kilometers, it covers one-third of the Earth's total surface.
It's so vast that if you were to look at Earth from outer space, it's just about
possible to position yourself so that only the Pacific Ocean is visible and
you could imagine that you were looking at a planet completely composed of water.
But the Pacific is not an unbroken sea. Across its blue expanse, there are over
25,000 islands of varying size, many of them thrown up by volcanic eruptions
that burst from the lively tectonics of the Pacific Plate. Easter Island is at
the eastern corner of an area we call the Polynesian Triangle, a vast region of
the Pacific Ocean broken by over a thousand volcanic islands. Easter
Island itself is a loosely triangular shape too, made up of three extinct
volcanoes at each of its points. The largest of these volcanoes is called
Terevaka. It's a young volcano bursting out of the sea less than 400,000 years
ago, its lava gushing out and raising a peak that looms half a kilometer above
the ocean. When it first erupted, Terevaka's lava pooled so that it joined
up two older volcanoes on either side of it and the landmass that today we call
Easter Island was born. The people who have lived on Easter Island for centuries
call it by the name Te Pito o Te Henua, which translates literally to the center
of the world. Other names for it are translated as the land's end or fragment
of the earth, and today's Polynesians call the island Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui is a
small island, only about 24 kilometers end-to-end and 12 kilometers wide, and
it's one of the most remote and isolated places on earth. From the coast of Easter
Island, it would take 3,200 kilometers to reach the nearest continent of South
America, about the distance from Paris to Damascus, and even the nearest inhabited
island is over 2,000 kilometers away.
The Polynesians who first settled the island arrived from the West. Sometime
before the year 3000 BC, they had left the mainland of the Asian continent, and
since that time, these hardy sailors had perfected their craft until they were
the most successful ocean-going settlers in history. They built large
sturdy canoes with two hulls, in fact, effectively two canoes joined by a deck
and with two masts with sails. The catamaran design of these ships was
incredibly sophisticated, and in fact, they look like a modern sailing boat
used for racing. They were both stable and fast, and they allowed the Polynesians
to gradually settle the entire Pacific Ocean. These early settlers navigated the
oceans without any physical navigation devices. They knew the stars well enough
that they could make astonishing calculations about latitude and
longitude using only the night sky, and they didn't write this detailed
knowledge down, but used only songs and stories to memorize the properties and
positions of the stars, islands, and known sea routes. The Polynesians also used the
natural world as an aid to their navigation. They followed the flight
paths of seabirds like the black tern, and this ancient Polynesian sailors' song
shows the significance of these birds. The black tern, the black tern is my bird,
bird in whom my eyes are gifted with unbounded vision. These epic voyages were
all the more impressive because the winds in the South Pacific blow westwards
against the direction of the Polynesians' expansion. To travel these vast distances
against the winds, the explorers developed a sailing technique known as
tacking, where the craft zigzags against a prevailing wind in order to catch some
forward motion. And storms in the Pacific could be deadly to these early
explorers. It's been recorded that when a severe typhoon struck, these sailors had
a method of surviving that seems unthinkable to a modern sailor. They
would actually purposefully flood the hulls of their canoes, and because the
wooden hulls provided enough flotation, the ship would stay afloat. But with most
of its body submerged, it would survive being bufted about in the gale-force
winds. While the storm went on, the sailors would climb inside their
flooded hulls, keeping their heads above water, and wait for the winds to pass.
There has long been a debate about when exactly these intrepid Polynesian
adventurers arrived on Easter Island. It was long assumed that they had arrived
sometime in the fourth or fifth centuries, but studies of the islanders
language and radiocarbon dating recently revised that estimate to somewhere
around the 8th century, and even more modern analysis has pushed that date
forward even further. Many scientists today believe that Rapa Nui wasn't
settled until sometime around the year 1200 AD. At this time around the world,
the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan were finalizing their conquests of northern
China. The notorious Fourth Crusade, headed for Jerusalem, instead sacked and
burned the Christian capital of Constantinople. An exotic import from
Arabia called sugar was mentioned for the first time in an English text. On
the other side of the world, in the middle of the vast expanse of the
Pacific, a small band of Polynesian sailors landed their boats on the shores
of a new land.
An ancient piece of Rapa Nui folklore credits the settlement of the island to
a Polynesian king called Hotu Matua.
In Heva, Haumaka had a dream in which his spirit traveled to a far country,
looking for a new home for his king Hotu. His spirit arrived at three small
islands, and another with a larger one with a crater on the southwest corner.
The island was the eighth or last island in the dim twilight of the rising sun.
The spirit traveled counterclockwise around the island, naming 28 places,
including Anakena, a landing place on the north coast of the island and future
residence of the king. When Haumaka awoke, he told his brother Huatava about the
dream. After hearing about the dream, Hotu Matua ordered Haumaka to send some
young men to explore the island. Hotu Matua told his two sons to build a canoe
and search for the island of Haumaka's dream. So the seven men left in a canoe,
stocked with yams, sweet potatoes, bananas and other foods. They left on the
25th day of April and arrived on the first day of June, a voyage of five weeks.
These settlers brought everything that was required for the traditional
Polynesian lifestyle. They brought their most crucial foods, bananas, a root
vegetable called taro with broad elephant ear leaves, as well as sweet
potatoes and sugar cane. They also brought saplings of the paper mulberry
tree, the fibers of which they used to weave clothes. They brought animals
with them too, although only those small enough to be transported. They brought
chickens and also the Polynesian rat, which was an everyday food for common
people. This was an entire ecological system in waiting, packed up in the
hulls of their canoes, optimized for transport and ready to be transplanted
to a new land. Hotu Matua may not have realized it, but his arrival on Easter
Island was of profound significance, not just for him and his people, but for all
of mankind. That's because Easter Island was the final stop on a journey of
60,000 years that had taken mankind out of Africa, through Asia and onto the
Americas. The final chapter of this journey was the gradual colonization of
the Polynesian islands, and Easter Island was the furthest and final piece of
uninhabited land. Mankind's journey out of Africa ended on the shores of Easter
Island, and with that step, a new phase of humanity's history began. I think it's
worth noting at this point that apart from the evidence we can find in the
archaeological record, we have essentially two sources of information
about the history of Easter Island, and each of them has their problems. Firstly,
there are the accounts of European visitors to the island, like the Dutchman
Roggeveen. These accounts come down to us either in the form of ships' logs or in
the form of memoirs written down when these explorers returned to their
homelands. The biggest problem for researchers of Rapa Nui's history is
that these early visitors to the island left behind accounts that are extremely
limited in their content and their reliability, and that sometimes directly
contradict each other. Most of them stayed for only a few days, they rarely
wandered far from their landing spot, and they commented little on the culture,
language, or society of the islanders. In the debate that has raged over what
happened on Easter Island, many writers have tried to use a selective reading of
these accounts in order to support their own favoured argument, and that's
something we should be very careful about as we go forward and assess the
evidence. But these written records do provide us with some useful information.
At times, as you'll see, they give us fixed points in time around which we can
build our story. The second source of information is the oral folklore of the
islanders themselves. This was passed down by word of mouth through the
generations, often in the form of songs and stories, and this can give us a
wonderful sense of how the islanders view their own history and their own
sense of identity. But this source of information can also be very difficult
to rely on when trying to sort historical fact from fiction. The
different strands of the island's folklore is also often extremely
contradictory, and the reason for that isn't hard to imagine. Detailed
observations of these songs and stories weren't written down until the 1880s, and
by that time, the culture of Rapa Nui had already undergone drastic change. By this
point, they had been in contact with the outside world for more than a hundred
and fifty years, and their population was reduced to a tiny fraction of what it
had once been. Now, only a few survivors pass down the stories they remembered,
and to add another level of confusion, these stories were written down by early
European explorers who may have mistranslated as well as added and
embellished elements that didn't exist in the original. One example of this is
the question of the name of the island's first king, who we've already mentioned,
Hotu Matua. But his name is so similar to the folk hero of another nearby island,
Mangareva, that some researchers have questioned whether this name isn't a
foreign import to Easter Island. If we can't trust this important detail to
have been faithfully transmitted, perhaps we can't be too sure about the rest. These
stories, refracted through these various mirrors, are now connected to the true
facts of the distant past by only the most fragile of threads. This is all to
make it very clear to you that the history of Easter Island is not even
close to being a settled matter, and it often relies on fragmentary and
contradictory evidence. Today, new research has begun to challenge the
familiar narrative we've all grown up with, and we will have to deal with a lot
of uncertainty as we forge ahead through the tragic story of this most remarkable
island. According to tradition, the first Polynesian settlers arrived on Easter
Island at a point called Anakena, a white coral sand beach on the north of the
island that forms a natural harbour. It's worth mentioning that the
landscape these first settlers would have seen was very different to the one
we see today on Rapa Nui. The bare grassy slopes first spied by Roggeveen in the
18th century and which we know from images today, would have been nowhere to
be seen. In fact, they would have been covered by a thick forest of tropical
palm trees. If you dig down into the earth of Easter Island today, you can
still see the hollow molds left by the roots of these trees. Studies of these
root molds as well as pollen analysis shows that when humans arrived on Rapa
Nui, the island was home to over 21 species of trees. Some of these were
large, including at least three which grew up to 15 meters or more. One species
of palm tree, the Easter Island or Rapa Nui palm, may even have been among the
largest species of palm tree in the world. This now extinct tree, known as
Pascalococcus, seems to have once been the most numerous species on the island
and its closest relative today, Jubaea chilensis or the Chilean wine palm, can
reach heights of over 25 meters, its bulbous trunk the thickest in the world,
reaching a diameter of more than a meter. The soil of Easter Island has never been
rich but the forest would have provided a small amount of food for the new
settlers, palm nuts and fruits too, along with the birds in the trees that could
be trapped. Luckily for archaeologists, the sand of Anakena Beach, the site of
that first settlement, is particularly good at preserving bone and human
remains. Because of this, skeletons examined here have given scientists
insight into the lives of the ancient Rapa Nui. Studies have shown that as well
as these plant crops, people supplemented their diet with a mix of marine animals,
including dolphins they trapped in the Bay of Anakena, seals, sea turtles, and
fish that they caught with hooks carved from bone. In fact, bone chemistry
analysis has shown that the people here got about half of their diet from the
sea. They cooked all of these foods in earth ovens known as umu, cavities dug
into the ground which then had burning grass and leaves placed on top of them
so the heat radiated downwards. These people were ingenious and inherited
knowledge from their ancestors. They made textiles from the fibers of the paper
mulberry tree and spun rope from a tree known as the how tree. With this
healthy and diverse mix of foodstuffs and resources, their settlement became
incredibly successful. From there, using slash-and-burn agricultural methods, the
original settlers spread quickly across the small landmass of the island and
they soon began to clear the forest in order to plant their crops, until the
whole of Rapa Nui was fully populated with around 3,000 people. Slowly, that
primeval palm forest began to disappear from Easter Island.
I think at this point, it's worth running you through that traditional story of
what happened on Easter Island. It has been the dominant narrative about this
island for decades, perhaps even centuries. It was begun by early European
explorers, propagated by Victorian and 20th century anthropologists, and finally
popularized by authors like the popular science writer Jared Diamond. You
might find it familiar. In this narrative, the inhabitants of Easter Island were
the architects of their own demise. The story goes that their population boomed
until the island could no longer support it. They cut down their trees to use as
firewood for construction material and to use as rollers to transport their
enormous statues. The loss of trees on the island resulted in an ecological
collapse that destroyed the fertility of the soil and the productive potential of
the island fell apart. Along with the collapse of the island's ecology, the
complex and centralized society that had built the hundreds of stone statues on
the coast began to collapse too. Resources became scarce, starvation ran
rampant and this led to a period of violent civil war. Shortly before the
arrival of the Europeans in 1722, the whole of Rapa Nui society had come apart
and only a few thousand survivors were left. Jared Diamond, perhaps the greatest
champion of this theory today, puts it bluntly. In just a few centuries, the
people of Easter Island wiped out their forests, drove their plants and animals
to extinction and saw their complex society spiral into chaos.
This story has a widespread appeal for a number of reasons. In the latter half of
the 20th century, as we became increasingly concerned about our own
society's destructive impact on our environment, the story of Easter Island
became irresistible as an example of the fate that might befall us if we fail to
respect the environment around us. The stone statues too have proved
irresistible as emblems of human folly, our desire to always build bigger and
better than our neighbors. In his book, Jared Diamond even makes the comparison
to his neighbors in Hollywood building ever bigger and better mansions in an
effort to prove their status. The islanders were so obsessed with these
statues, the narrative goes, that they cut down all their trees to transport them.
This single-minded obsession drove them to starvation, then cannibalism and
finally to the edge of extinction. But there are a number of problems with this
narrative, a number of seriously questionable assumptions and over the
course of this episode, I'm going to try to unpick three of the most glaring of
these assumptions so that you can assess the evidence for yourself. Firstly,
there's the assumption that the Easter Islanders deforested their island due to
greed, overpopulation, or even a maniacal obsession with statue building. Secondly,
there's the assumption that the loss of the forest led to a societal collapse.
Thirdly, there's the assumption that Easter Island society collapsed at all,
at least before contact with the outside world. As we'll see, each of these
assumptions has significant problems and once we've dealt with them, we can get
down to what actually happened to decimate the islanders of Rapa Nui, to
strip the island of its plant life and to leave those famous stone statues
moldering on the lone grassy hills of Easter Island.
Virtually as soon as they arrived on the island, probably around the year 1200, the
islanders began carving the monuments that would one day make them famous
around the world. Stone statues are common on islands across the Polynesian
world but no other island can compete with the size of the Easter Island
statues or with the incredible number carved. These statues are called moai. The
moai are known for their large, broad noses and strong chins, along with
rectangle-shaped ears and deep eye slits. For the Easter Islanders, these statues
were what they called a ringa ora ata te puna, that is, the living faces of the
holy ancestors. These are stone representations of the islanders that
have gone before. Of the moai that were successfully moved into place, the vast
majority stand on the coast of the island on monolithic stone platforms
called ahu. While most people's eyes are drawn by the statues, these ahu are
themselves impressive undertakings. They are built of enormous stones cut so
precisely that they fit together in a perfect jigsaw, with not even enough room
to fit a razor blade between the stones. The largest of them, ahu Tongariki, holds
15 moai lined up in perfect order. Nearly all moai stand with their backs to the
sea, staring inland over the fields and hills of Rapa Nui with their deep,
expressive eyes. Almost all of the statues are carved from a volcanic stone
known as tuff. Tuff is formed when ash from a volcanic eruption falls thickly
on the ground and is then slowly compacted into solid rock. Tuff is
relatively soft and easy to carve, so it has been used for construction since
ancient times. It commonly occurs in Italy, for instance, and the Romans often
used it in their buildings. Most of the moai statues were carved in a quarry on
the outer cliff edge of the Rano Raraku crater. This quarry is an eerie sight
today. Here and there, the faces of half-finished giants still peer out of
the stone. The Rano Raraku crater is 700 meters across, formed of ash and
volcanic tuff thrown up in an ancient explosion and rings by cliffs 160 meters
high. The wide volcanic bowl is one of the three places on Easter Island where
fresh water pools to form a lake. Here, a kind of bulrushes called totora grow on
the water's edge, nodding in the breeze, and the Rapa Nui people once collected
them to weave thatched roofs for their houses. But it's on the outer slopes of
the crater's cliffs that the truly important activity took place. Here, the
islanders chipped their statues directly from the bedrock, using a kind of stone
chisel known as a toki that was made of dense basalt, perfectly suited for
carving the softer volcanic tuff. This would have been incredibly slow work.
Work that might take a modern craftsman with a steel chisel one hour might take
an Easter Islander with a stone toki a whole day or two days to complete. And
although estimates vary, it's thought that an entire statue could take over a
year for a team of 12 people to carve.
One fascinating aspect of this quarry is that there are a huge number of
incomplete Moai abandoned here, 397 in total. That's nearly half of the island's
total population of 887, and this shows just how difficult the carving of these
statues was. These abandoned Moai have been discarded for different reasons,
some more obvious than others. On some statues, it's clear that the workmen
discovered a seam of hard rock somewhere on the Moai's body, which would have been
virtually impossible to carve with their stone tools. Others have obvious flaws or
cracks in them, while some Moai have fallen over while raising them. Other
Moai simply seem to have been too ambitious in size. The largest of these,
nicknamed El Gigante, is nearly 22 meters in height. That's twice the height of a
telephone pole or the size of a six-story building. El Gigante, still
lying on his back in the cliff face, is almost twice the size of any Moai ever
completed. This enormous statue would have weighed an estimated 270 tons and
it's hard to imagine how the islanders ever intended to move it. We might
imagine an ambitious ancient craftsman overseeing the carving of this vast
statue, determined to create the largest Moai that the island has ever seen. Or
perhaps, as we'll find out later, the islanders believed they had to summon a
truly enormous protective spirit to defend their island against a threat. To
get a sense for how these people must have felt about these statues, let's
imagine ourselves into the role of a team of Moai carvers during the golden
age of Rapa Nui statue carving. The work would have been slow and painstaking, but
it would also have carried a great deal of responsibility. While you were carving
a Moai, you weren't working in the fields and so your community was
investing in your work. There must have been a lot of pride tied up in the
creation of these statues too. Before the carving could even begin, there would
likely have been ceremonies and rites that had to take place, chants and
incantations designed to summon the protective spirit of the ancestor to
inhabit the stone. There's an apocryphal quote often attributed to the sculptor
Michelangelo. Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of
the sculptor to discover it. Whether or not he actually said this, this must have
been something like what the people of Rapa Nui felt as the months passed and
the great statue, its head and arms and body, slowly materialized from the cliff
face in front of them.
The days would have been hard. Many traditional Rapa Nui working songs
survive today and we can imagine the workers singing while they chipped away
at the cliff. One surviving folk song even derives its rhythm from the
striking together of two stones, emulating the sounds of the toki tools
napping away at the statue. Here it is, recorded especially for this podcast by
children from the Toki School of Music on Easter Island. The workers' hands must
have been covered in the blackish dust of the stone and they would take breaks
to eat meals of sweet potato and taro, along with the chicken baked white in
earth ovens nearby. After much arduous work, the whole outline of the Moai would
be carved out. They would then deepen the cuts and hollow out the cliff behind the
statue too, clambering into the narrow space and lying on their bellies as they
carved. But even with the back carved out, the statue would still be attached to
the bedrock below with a narrow keel that ran the length of its spine. And so,
the final and most painstaking stage of the process would begin. They would
gather up stones and earth in order to support the Moai so that it didn't fall
and then this spine of stone would slowly be chipped away. It must have been
an incredible moment when that last stone umbilical cord was cut. It was the
culmination of so much time and sweat of course, but it must have sent shivers
down their spines too, as the great statue of their ancestor broke free of
its stony slumber and was finally filled with a living spirit. It's likely that
more ceremonies surrounded this moment, the chanting of holy men who wore white
plugs in their ears and the beating of drums. Over what must have been days, the
Moai was edged clear of its quarry resting place, with huge teams of workers
pulling ropes spun from the how tree. When the statue was clear, they slid it
down the grassy slope of the volcano so that it could be stood upright at the
bottom of the slope. This was one of the most dangerous parts of the Moai's
journey, as the great number of cracked and abandoned statues on the slope below
the quarry shows us. They look like an army of stony wanderers marching down
from the volcano. Somewhat ironically, these abandoned statues, buried up to
their necks in the refuse from the quarry, form some of the most iconic
images of Easter Island today, more familiar to the layman than the
completed ones that stand on the Ahu platforms on the coast. This is why
people talk about the stone heads of Easter Island, ignoring the fact that
most of the Moai have bodies. At the bottom of the hill, the workmen would
raise the Moai up to a standing position so they could finish carving the details
on its back, using soft pumice to wear it smooth, and then they would prepare to
transport the statue into its final resting place on its Ahu. The carvers
could wipe the sweat from their foreheads and share congratulations, but
this was just the beginning of another long and arduous chapter in the Moai's
journey. At this point, I think it's worth noting that we don't actually know for
sure how the ancient islanders moved these vast statues. This question was
something that obsessed early visitors to the island. They looked around at the
seemingly barren landscape of Rapa Nui, at its grassy slopes seemingly devoid of
large trees, and asked how a people without metal tools, pulleys, or wheels
could transport nearly 500 of these vast statues. The largest successfully
transported Moai, nicknamed Paro, was 10 meters tall which is longer than a
London bus. It's estimated that this statue weighed about 82 tons, heavier
than a Boeing 737 aircraft when fully loaded with passengers and fuel. The
ancient islanders would sometimes transport these statues for distances of
20 kilometers across the island's rough, undulating terrain. It's a question that
has been asked of the islanders since Europeans first arrived. How did your
ancestors move these statues? And for a long time, the islanders would always
give the same reply. They would simply say they walked. Foreign visitors would
always roll their eyes at this answer. They assumed this must be a piece of
local folklore, a kind of magical thinking that imagined the statues to be
the living spirits of the ancestors. Some may even have thought that the Rapa Nui
were making fun of them, but researchers today have discovered that there may be
more truth to this legend than it seems. Early archaeologists believed that the
Rapa Nui moved the great stone statues into place using logs as rollers. In 1998,
archaeologist Joanne van Tilburg successfully tested this theory using a
large number of hardwood rollers to transport a statue for a short distance.
But recent research has cast doubt on this theory and proposed an incredible
alternate possibility, and the key to discovering how the statues were
actually moved lies in the ones that never made it to their intended
locations.
Littered across Easter Island are the sad shapes of statues that broke during
their transportation. Only about a fifth of the Moai ever carved would reach
their destination on the Ahu platforms, and these total about 200. The rest, some
700 more, were either abandoned in the quarry or along the roads. Stone heads
are cracked from bodies, decapitated statues lie moldering and moss-covered
in the long grass. For the ancient islanders, this must have been a
heart-rending sight. A whole team had worked for a year or more, then
successfully slid this statue down the slope of the volcano. Then, somewhere
its journey, it had cracked and the broken statue would have to be abandoned
by the side of the road. These so-called road Moai have a number of interesting
features. For instance, we know that the islanders waited to carve the eyes of
the Moai until the statues were in place on their platforms. This may have had a
ceremonial purpose which has parallels around the world. For instance, in Sri
Lanka, when new statues of the Buddha are built, the eyes are always the last part
to be painted and only the painter is allowed in the shrine room while doing
their work. But a team of archaeologists led by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo also
found something else interesting about these abandoned statues. They noticed
that when abandoned road Moai were found on uphill paths, they usually lay on
their backs and when the cracked statues were abandoned on downhill
paths, they usually lay on their fronts. On flat ground, it was more like 50-50.
And so, a theory began to emerge. Is it possible that the statues were
transported upright? Once this detail had been noticed, other details about the
road Moai seemed to fall into place. For instance, the road Moai had bulkier, lower
halves and rounder bellies. This had puzzled archaeologists for a long time
but Hunt and Lipo's theory seemed to make sense of this. The islanders were
designing the Moai in two phases. In the first, the transportation phase, the Moai
were bottom-heavy like a bowling pin and once it had been rocked into place on
its platform, it was then carved into its more slender and elegant final shape.
And so, Lipo and Hunt proposed that the statues were rocked back and forth by
teams of islanders with ropes, so that the statues actually seemed to walk over
the ground. Their team caused an international sensation when they were
able to successfully walk a scale model of a Moai cast in concrete, rocking it
back and forth along the road with three teams holding ropes. In this way,
the statue could literally walk down the path, just as the ancient folklore
recounted. The team managed to move the statue at a rate of about a hundred
meters in an hour, meaning it could have walked around a kilometer in a day.
If this is indeed how the statues were moved, it must have been an incredible sight to see.
The tallest Moai weighed over 80 tons and each one of the statues'
footsteps would have thundered on the earth, so that it really seemed like a
giant was stamping its way towards the platform. There would have likely been a
huge amount of ceremonial activity around the walking of these statues too,
people coming from all over the island to watch, singing and dancing and all
kinds of activity. For the days and weeks it took to transport one of these
statues, it would have really felt like a god had come down to earth. I love the
romance and imagination behind Lipo and Hunt's theory and I think they build a
convincing case that this was indeed how the statues were moved. But you might ask,
well, why does it matter how the statues were moved? Isn't this a minor detail of
the story of this society's collapse? Well, actually, this question has come to
take on an enormous significance for the mystery of what happened on Easter
Island. The traditional narrative, if you remember, was that the Rapa Nui Islanders
became so obsessed with building their statues that they destroyed their
environment to do so. The islanders cut down all their trees, the theory says, in
order to use as scaffolds and rollers to transport them. If this was the case, then
each statue must have taken hundreds, if not thousands, of trees to transport and
this seemed the obvious answer to why the island was so deforested, why its
ecology collapsed and its society followed. But if Lipo and Hunt were
correct and the statues were walked into place, then very little wood was
needed and the whole narrative of the Moai causing the collapse of the
island's ecology comes into question. So, the whole mystery of Easter Island
seems to hinge on this question of whether the statues rolled or whether
they walked. So, what do we know about the loss of trees on Easter Island? One thing
we can say for sure, the subtropical palm forest that the first settlers found on
the island wouldn't long survive the arrival of humans. One of the earliest
casualties of this deforestation was the largest of the island's trees, the Rapa
Nui palm. If we want to guess at how this enormous tree grew, we can look at
its closest surviving relative, the Chilean wine palm. This tree takes 50
years to reach its full height and until then it doesn't produce a single fruit.
This slow-growing and slow-reproducing tree would have been one of the most
affected by the arrival of humans. Some theorists, Jared Diamond included, have
argued that the Easter Island palm would have been in high demand for use
as rollers to transport the giant Moai across the island, but experiments have
found that the palm would have been exceptionally badly suited for this job.
The hard outer shell of the palm trunk conceals a soft center that would have
been instantly crushed beneath the heavy stone statues. Diamond has even argued
that the palm may have been cut down in order to build large canoes, but nowhere
else in Polynesia are canoes built from palm trunks and they would be very
unsuitable for this purpose. So, what did happen to Easter Island's trees? Well,
undoubtedly, much of the forest was cut down by humans, but they didn't do this
unconsciously or foolishly. They did it for the same reason that people in
Iceland or England cut down their forests, because they were farmers. The
Rapa Nui, like all Polynesians, farmed energy-rich foods like sweet potatoes,
taro, and sugar cane. These abundant foods were vastly more productive than whatever
food they could have gathered from the forest. So, much of this deforestation was
controlled and conscious and actually improved the quality of these people's
lives. But that isn't to say there wasn't an ecological collapse on Easter Island.
Pollen analysis shows that virtually all large trees were lost from the island
within a matter of centuries, and by far the largest factor appears to have been
something very small. That's one of the animal companions that the original
settlers brought with them, the Polynesian rat. Wherever these Pacific
explorers went, they brought animals with them. Each Polynesian island got
some combination of these four animals, pigs, dogs, chickens, and rats. On Rapa Nui,
only rats and chickens were introduced. Some argued that these rats may have
stowed away on the canoes, just as they do on larger vessels, but rat has
actually been a foodstuff that Polynesians have relied on throughout
history. It was never a delicacy and seems to have been considered a food of
the common people, as rat bones are rarely found in the rubbish dumps of
high-status houses. However, they were a good and reliable source of protein on
long voyages. I can't speak to personal experience, but accounts I've read say
that rat tastes oily and gamey, a little like rabbit. Another advantage to
this source of food is that rats reproduce incredibly quickly. Once the
Polynesian rat was introduced to Easter Island, its spread would have been
unstoppable. The millions of giant palm trees covering the island would have
provided them with an almost unlimited supply of their favorite food, palm nuts.
Recent lab studies have shown that the reproductive potential of rats under
these ideal conditions can be enormous. In fact, the rat population could have
doubled every 47 days until they reached a population of up to 3 million and the
island was completely overrun. The rats would have quickly eaten the seeds and
palm nuts from the trees, preventing the forest from regenerating. In Anakena
Beach and certain caves, archaeologists have found the earliest remnants of
palm nut shells, showing the tooth marks of rats. As well as damaging the forests,
rats would also have eaten the eggs of seabirds, finishing off those the
islanders hadn't trapped and eaten. And since the seabirds fertilized the soil
with their droppings, this would have spelled disaster for the biodiversity of
Easter Island. But the question is, did this loss of trees cause a societal
collapse on Rapa Nui? The answer to that question is almost certainly not.
This isn't to say that the loss of palm forests on Rapa Nui didn't present a
number of challenges to the islanders. By around the year 1650, pollen studies
show that the deforestation of Easter Island was complete. Without tree cover,
the ocean winds could now blow right across the island. The wind and storms
threatened to blow away the topsoil and salt spray from the sea effectively
salted the earth in coastal regions, damaging the soil further. But in all
cases, the Rapa Nui islanders reacted to these challenges with ingenuity and
creativity. They transformed their island not into a desolate wasteland, but into
an astonishingly effective system of gardens, orchards and farmland. In fact,
archaeologists have found evidence of areas of the island where the islanders
planted groves of palm trees and cultivated them. Around this time, they
also began farming using a technique known as rock mulching. This involved
laying rock beds around the island which prevented the soil from washing or
blowing away. It also reduced the amount of water evaporated by the Sun and
increased the amount of nutrients available to growing plants as the
rainwater flowed over the rocks and carried minerals to their roots. Rock
mulching has been used by cultures around the world who live in harsh,
water-poor environments. It's been observed in the Negev Desert in Israel,
the pebbled fields of Lanzhou in China, the ash fields of the Canary Islands and
the fields of the Anasazi culture in New Mexico. The Rapa Nui set about the
task of rock mulching with the same great energy that they used to carve and
transport the Moai. They would ultimately cover half the landmass of their island
in rock gardens of this kind. It was an enormous task. It's been calculated that
over the 400 years that the practice was engaged in, it would have taken over 150
men working daily to construct these vast assemblages made up of billions of
stones. There's strong evidence that the Rapa Nui people also took advantage
of the deep underground caverns of the island.
The caves of Easter Island were formed by lava tubes which developed during the volcanic eruptions that
raised the islands out of the sea. When lava flows out of the mouth of a volcano,
it forms vast underground rivers as the lava on the surface cools and hardens
into rock. When the eruption ends and the lava stops flowing, the tubes drain their
lava, leaving enormous caverns that look as though a monstrous worm has eaten its
way through the rock. These tubes are as wide as a subway tunnel and Easter Island
has one of the largest systems of volcanic caves in the world. The
islanders' relationship with these caves goes back to the first known moment of
their history, as this piece of Rapa Nui folklore about King Hotu Matua shows.
The explorers went to the west side of the island and discovered a surfing spot.
They rode a wave to the right and called the place where they landed Hanga Roa.
They rode a wave to the left and landed at Apina Iti. They caught more waves, then
went ashore and rested in a cave at Pupaka Kina. Some of these caves can
stretch for three or four kilometers into the island's rock. As the forests
of Rapa Nui retreated, its people increasingly turned to these caves to
provide cover for their crops. They cultivated vast underground gardens
where they could grow sweet potatoes and yams to supplement their diet. They also
constructed circular rock walls called manavai that could be as much as six
feet tall and where they could grow a variety of crops. These kept plants safe
from the destructive elements of the weather, reduced the amount of water
runoff and concentrated nutrients. Archaeologists have identified over 2,500
of these rock gardens around the island, but this is likely only a fraction of
the original number. Studies have shown that even today, with no active
maintenance being done on them, these rings of rock are still operating as
designed by the ancient gardeners. Levels of phosphorus and potassium, crucial
minerals for plants, are much higher inside the manavai than outside, with the
concentrations being sometimes two or three times as high. Simply put, with
their rock gardening techniques, the Rapa Nui were able to make the land much
more productive after the forest was cleared than it was before. Some of this
great agricultural potential is hinted at in the accounts of the first Dutch
sailors to land on the island, although I will once again caution about trusting
too much in these accounts. Although Roggeveen believed Rapa Nui to be a
treeless, sandy wasteland from a distance, when he actually landed on the island, he
was surprised to find it a productive landscape. We found it not only not sandy,
on the contrary, exceedingly fruitful, producing bananas, potatoes, sugarcane of
remarkable thickness, many other kinds of the fruits of the earth. This place, as
far as its rich soil and good climate are concerned, is such that it might be made
into an earthly paradise. Another of Roggeveen's officers, a man named Carl
Friedrich Behrens, seems also to contradict this account of a treeless
island, and reported on a wide variety of uses the islanders had for palm leaves.
They gave us palm branches as peace offerings. Their houses were set up on
wooden stakes, daubed over with luting and covered with palm leaves. In fact,
Behrens paints a remarkably positive impression of the island overall. This
island is a suitable and convenient place at which to obtain refreshment, as
all the country is under cultivation and we saw in the distance whole tracts of
woodland. And Roggeveen himself also witnessed cultivated groves of fruit
trees on the island. It was now deemed advisable to go to the other side of the
island, the principal place of their plantations and fruit trees, for all the
things they brought to us of that kind were fetched from that quarter.
So here, a relatively clear picture is beginning to emerge. We can say for sure
that the arrival of humans on Rapa Nui resulted in the disappearance of most of
its forest. But this is true of virtually every forested island on earth after the
arrival of people, and no one has yet been able to draw a clear causative link
between the loss of the forest on Rapa Nui and the collapse of so-called
complex society. In fact, studies done on the skeletons of islanders from around
this time showed that they suffered from less malnutrition than the average
European. This all seems to be backed up by Roggeveen's account of his first
visit to the island. It's clear from his account that when he arrived, the Rapa
Nui islanders weren't starving. They didn't make any attempt to beg for food
from the newcomers. In fact, they were much more interested in the Europeans'
hats, and one brave islander even climbed through a porthole on Roggeveen's ship to
steal a tablecloth. But there's no account of them stealing the Europeans'
food. In fact, it was the Dutch, malnutritioned on a diet of salt meat
and hard tack after weeks at sea, who begged the islanders for food, giving
them cloth and linen in exchange for 60 chickens and 30 bunches of bananas. None
of this sounds like the behavior of a people living on the edge of starvation.
With multiple abundant sources of food, alongside the efficient use of the land
around them, archaeological and written evidence begins to make that popular
scenario of starvation and even cannibalism look patently absurd.
Part and parcel of the starvation narrative is the assumption that the
society of the island descended into a period of brutal conflict once resources
ran scarce. But if resources were abundant, can we also question this
assumption? The folklore of the islanders does record a period of warfare, after
which the Moai building culture faded into obscurity. But as we've seen, this
folklore can be unreliable at the best of times. Much more reliable is the
archaeological record. When a period of conflict occurs in such an environment,
the evidence is usually hard to miss.
One great example of this is the island of Fiji, another Pacific island 7,000
kilometers away. In Fiji, archaeologists have found the remains of strong hilltop
forts and fortified towns, all pointing to a period of warfare. In Hawaii, it's
well documented that chiefs fought each other in large battles featuring
hundreds of warriors armed with clubs. The signs of war in the archaeological
record aren't difficult to spot. Increased number of weapons, increased
building of defensive structures, and skeletal remains that bear the marks of
violence. First, let's look at the evidence of weapons on Rapa Nui. The
islanders did make blades from the black volcanic glass obsidian. Obsidian forms
in the vents of volcanic eruptions when lava reaches the surface and cools
quickly, forming a glassy material that is brittle but has exceptionally sharp
edges. In fact, obsidian blades have been measured to be up to a thousand times
sharper than a steel scalpel. The Rapa Nui gave their blades names depending on
their shape. Fishtail, rat spine, banana leaf are some examples. Some writers have
argued that the large amount of these blades found points to a mass production
of weaponry and a period of conflict. But studies of these blades have found that
their edges were mostly covered in vegetable matter, that's sweet potato and
taro, and they were found in the highest concentrations in the area of the
islanders' rock gardens, where they were most likely used for everyday tasks like
the preparation of food. Studies of skeletons have also seemed to undermine
this picture of conflict. In a historical zone of conflict, we would expect to see
skeletons missing their heads, for instance, or skulls with arrowheads
inside, broken bones and bones bearing scratches from blades glancing off them.
But studies of skeletal remains on Easter Island have shown that the
islanders were in fact remarkable for their mostly peaceful existence. Only
around 2% of the skeletons studied have been found to have suffered trauma from
blunt and cutting weapons, and this isn't a large proportion of the population. I
do think here it's also worth remembering Behrens' observation that
the islanders were unarmed when they first came to meet the Dutch explorers.
In the search for defensive structures, archaeologists have also found
themselves frustrated. The small Pacific island of Rapaiti, for instance, is five
times smaller than Easter Island and yet it has no fewer than 14 hilltop
fortresses. On Rapaiti, life on the island actually did descend into a
nightmare of violence and civil war and the signs of this are hard to miss.
Fortifications on Rapaiti involve watchtowers and walls, ditches and wooden
palisade fences. We find weapons here and human remains bearing the marks of
violence, but on Easter Island no such fortifications exist. One feature known
as the Poika ditch was long assumed to be a defensive structure, but recent
investigations have shown that it's actually a natural feature caused by the
collision of two lava flows. Some walls built at the entrances to caves have
also been used as evidence of the islanders fortifying themselves, but
there's little other evidence of the caves being used as military strongholds
and in fact they seem to be more commonly used as hiding places. So
another one of our assumptions about Easter Island has been taken away. Now
we're left having to explain how Rapa Nui's culture could actually have been
less violent than many other comparable societies and certainly less violent
than any city of Europe at the time. We may never know what decides whether a
small community will descend into a violent hell like Rapaiti or whether
they will work together to maintain the peace like on Rapa Nui. Some have
suggested that the Rapa Nui islanders, all descended from that first
colonization attempt, would have had many family relations between tribes and so
it may have been unthinkable to escalate conflict beyond the occasional
feud or skirmish. When a rival chief is also the husband of your wife's sister's
aunt, for instance, you might try to avoid excessive conflict and reach for
peaceful compromises, that is, if you want to avoid a frosty atmosphere at your
dinner table. On a small island, word travels fast and it doesn't pay to be
viewed as overly aggressive. Some historians have even argued that the
construction of the Moai themselves may have helped prevent conflict by allowing
the island's different communities to compete for dominance in a non-violent
way. Another way this may have occurred is through an incredible ritual known
as the Birdman Competition.
The later history of the island is dominated by the cult of a mysterious
figure known as the Tangata Manu or the Birdman. Cave paintings on Easter Island
show this ceremonial figure with the body of a man but the head and wings of
a bird. Each year the men of Rapa Nui took part in a ceremony that allowed
them to become the human embodiment of this figure for the next year. It was a
test of strength and daring that is astonishing to even contemplate today.
The contestants who competed to become the Birdman had a simple enough task.
Off the southwest coast of Rapa Nui, there is a small cluster of islands and
one of these is a rocky outcrop known as Motonui, which is home to several
species of nesting birds. Among these is the black tern, which we've already seen
held a mystical significance for Polynesian sailors. These birds seem to
be gifted with a magical ability to lead sailors home and it's not hard to see
how they would have assumed a powerful religious significance. The Birdman
contest took place in the spring during the laying season of the black terns.
Young men who wanted to become that year's Birdman would have to swim out to
the rocky island of Motonui, a distance of about a kilometer through choppy seas
and powerful currents. Once they reached the island, they had to climb up through
the flocks of cackling seabirds and search through their nests, looking for
the first egg of the season. Sometimes they would have to wait there for days.
But when they found their precious prize, they had to swim all the way back
to Rapa Nui. Then, dripping with cold salt water, they had to climb the sheer
300-meter cliff. The first man to complete this incredible triathlon event
would be crowned the Birdman. It's unclear how much power this figure actually had,
but in terms of status, there was no higher honor. And allowing men to battle
it out in this test of strength every year may have played a role in reducing
the violence of the island. So on Easter Island, the evidence seems to suggest
that there was no starvation. There was no widespread warfare. And so you might
be left asking, did their society even collapse at all? And the answer to that
is yes, but not when you think it did.
For early European explorers, there was no greater mystery than what they called
the riddle of Easter Island. The French seafarer and artist Pierre Lotti wrote
about it in the 19th century. There exists in the midst of the great ocean
in a region where nobody goes, a mysterious and isolated island. The
island is planted with monstrous great statues, the work of I don't know what
race, today degenerate or vanished. Its great remains an enigma. We've actually
encountered this kind of thinking a number of times over the course of this
series. When European explorers discovered the ruins of past
civilizations, they often found it hard to believe that so-called primitive
people had a hand in their construction. Whether it's assuming that the ruins of
Angkor were built by the Romans, or that the Mayan ruins of Tikal were built by
the citizens of Atlantis, European writers have often struggled to believe
that the indigenous people of other lands were capable of great
constructions. This kind of thinking follows a circular logic. Only a so-called
advanced civilization could have built these things, but the people I see living
here don't look like an advanced civilization, therefore these people
can't have built these monuments. The problems with this kind of thinking are
obvious. It deceives us into thinking that an advanced civilization can only
look like a European civilization, highly centralized and organized, and the very
notion of a society being advanced suggests that human progress follows a
fixed and inevitable path, and that our way of organizing our societies and
economies is the only one. It's this kind of thinking that made early explorers of
Easter Island look at the advanced rock mulching techniques of the Rapa Nui
people and see only a wasteland scattered with rocks. This belief system
found its logical conclusion in the Norwegian adventurer and archaeologist
Thor Heyerdahl. Heyerdahl believed that the Polynesian islands had been populated
not by Polynesians hopping the islands from the West, but from people from South
America traveling by raft from the East. He also believed, curiously, that these
people must have been white-skinned and European in origin. He simply couldn't
comprehend the idea that other peoples around the world could have developed
such artistic and architectural skills. So what appeared to be a puzzle to early
European visitors wasn't actually a puzzle at all. The stone statues of Easter
Island hadn't been built by some vanished ancient culture, but by the
people who lived there already and seemed to those Europeans to be so
simple. This idea of a societal collapse happening on Easter Island before
contact with the Europeans has survived into our day, even though it has very
little basis in fact. But this doesn't mean that a collapse didn't occur on
Rapa Nui. In fact, the island would soon undergo one of the most dramatic
examples of societal and cultural destruction that can be found in history.
But it wasn't because they cut down the trees. There is one event in Easter
Island's history that I think encapsulates the complete destruction
that would soon rain down on it and its poor unsuspecting inhabitants. That's the
toppling in only a few years of every one of the island's statues. For centuries
the islanders had loved and revered the Moai that their ancestors had spent
generations carving and transporting. And in 1722 the Dutch sailor Behrens
recounts what he saw of the islanders devotion to these statues. They kindle
fire in front of certain remarkably tall stone figures they set up, and
thereafter, squatting on their heels with heads bowed down, they bring the palms of
their hands together and alternately raise and lower them. But with every
subsequent European visitor to the island, this situation seemed to change.
On the 15th of November 1770, 48 years after the first European visit, a second
arrived. Two Spanish ships landed there and spent five days on the island,
performing a very thorough survey of its coast. They renamed the island Isla de
San Carlos and claimed it on behalf of King Charles III of Spain. They also
ceremoniously erected three wooden crosses and a Spanish flag on a hill.
When they explored the island, it seems that all of the 200 erected statues were
still standing. But four years later, the famous British explorer Captain Cook
sailed past the island and found a much different situation. Cook's diary of
Thursday the 17th of March 1774 gives his account of the impoverished state of
the island. This is undoubtedly the same island as was seen by Roggeveen in April
1722, although the description given of it by the author of that voyage does by
no means correspond with it now. No nation will ever contend for the honor
of the discovery of Easter Island, as there is hardly an island in this sea
which affords less refreshments and conveniences for shipping than it does.
Nature has hardly provided it with anything fit for man to eat or drink, and
the natives are but few and plant no more than sufficient for themselves. If
Cook's account is to be believed, the population size of Easter Island also
seems to have taken a serious hit. The inhabitants of this isle, from what we
have been able to see of them, do not exceed six or seven hundred souls. And
there's another significant detail too. Cook noted that the islanders now
carried weapons when approaching foreign visitors. Their arms are wooden
patapataus and clubs, very much like those of New Zealand, and spears about
six or eight feet long which are pointed at one end with pieces of black flint.
But the final tragic detail is that in the four years since the Spanish
expedition, virtually all of the standing Moai on the island had been toppled over.
On the east side, near the sea, they met with three platforms of stonework, or
rather, the ruins of them. On each had stood four of those large statues, but
they were all fallen down, all except one were broken by the fall or in some
measure defaced. The practice of statue toppling is called Huri Moau in the
Rapa Nui language and it continued into the 1830s. By 1838, every single coastal
Moai had been taken down. Now, the only standing statues were those abandoned on
the slopes below the quarry at Ranuraku. So, what happened to make the islanders
start to carry weapons? What caused their population to reduce so heavily?
And what made them turn so dramatically against their gods? Well, the answer to
that may lie in the very event that opened this episode and which we've
returned to a number of times. That's the arrival of three Dutch sails on the
horizon on Easter Day 1722.
At the sight of the enormous ships dropping anchor some way off the coast,
the Easter Islanders gathered on the shore in astonishment. They must have
felt how we would feel if a vast alien spaceship were to one day materialize
over one of our cities. It must have been a mix of fear and wonder, a sense
that the world would never quite be the same again. They selected one of their
number who must have been the bravest of them all. It's not unlikely, I think, that
he would have been the winner of the most recent Birdman competition, the
island's champion and protector. This man got in his canoe and rode out to meet
the strange vessels whose white sails must have looked brilliant and dazzling
in the sunlight. Perhaps he wouldn't have immediately realized how large they were
until he got up close and their prows began to loom over his small canoe. When
he approached, he saw that there were men on board and he waved to them. The Dutch
officer, Carl Friedrich Behrens, wrote about this incredible encounter.
But this light-hearted encounter conceals a dark truth about
Roggeveen's visit. In fact, when Roggeveen and his men went ashore, their visit
would turn to tragedy. It's clear from both accounts that the Europeans were
nervous when they stepped ashore. They had heard stories of violent encounters
with indigenous people and it's worth noting that the novel Robinson Crusoe
had been published only three years before, full of garish stories of
cannibalism and murder. Despite their guns and cannons, it's clear that the
islanders frightened them and the natural curiosity and boldness of the
Rapa Nui people seemed to make matters worse. When the Dutchmen got ashore, the
islanders pressed around them, grabbing at their hats and clothes and even
touching the guns they carried. It's not clear which Dutchman shot first, but the
situation quickly spiraled out of control. The Europeans fired into the
unarmed crowd of islanders. Their guns were flintlock pistols and rifles that
would have sent up puffs of smoke and the cries of people shot would have rang
out, with the smell of gunpowder filling the air. Behrens recounts what happened
next, as he recognized a familiar face among the murdered islanders.
Many of them were shot at this juncture and among the slain lay the man who had
been with us before, of which we were much grieved. In order to obtain
possession of the bodies, they congregated in great numbers, bringing
with them presents of various kinds of fruits and vegetables, in order that we
might the more readily surrender to them their slain. The consternation of these
people was by no means abated. Even with their children's children in that place
will, in times to come, be able to recount the story of it. We can assume that what
Behrens said is true. The story of this violent encounter must have reverberated
through the history of the Rapa Nui people. It would have destabilized their
ancient beliefs and rocked their very sense of the world around them. Remember
that Behrens mentions that the islanders didn't have any weapons at this point,
that they only prayed to their gods for protection. Now imagine what would happen
to this belief system when visitors arrived from the sea, killed multiple
islanders with what must have appeared to be magic weapons, and then when these
visitors walked around the island, even approaching the statues, and then sailed
away unharmed. When you think about this encounter through that lens, it becomes a
lot clearer why the Rapa Nui might have lost faith in their ancestors. But the
sad truth is that the European bullets were not the deadliest legacy they left
behind. The true killer of the Rapa Nui would have been something much smaller,
invisible microbes, viruses and bacteria to which the islanders' immune systems
had never been exposed.
Europe has always been a crossroads between many different peoples, sometimes
separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles. Europe's constant wars and
exchange of trade spread localized diseases across the continent. Each
year the Silk Road brought fresh shipments of disease from China and
India, along with silks and spices. This all resulted in Europeans becoming
immune to a large variety of diseases. But although the diseases didn't affect
them, they could still carry them, and for populations that had not suffered the
same exposure, these germs could be devastating. In pathology, this phenomenon
is known as the virgin soil effect. It's not recorded what diseases may have been
transmitted. In other parts of the uncontacted world, cholera, measles,
diphtheria and even the bubonic plague swept through populations. By even the
lowest estimates, indigenous populations were reduced by 80% right across the
Americas. Four out of every five people died and it's likely that in the even
more isolated environment of Easter Island, the effects could have been even
more devastating. On other better observed Polynesian islands, the
reduction in population after first contact was as much as 90%.
And so, in the decades after the Dutch visit, we can imagine disease ravaging
the helpless population of Rapa Nui. It's possible that the population of the
island may have crashed from a height of around 3,000 to only a few hundred.
The population may have only just recovered by the time 48 years later that
the Spanish arrived and delivered a whole new dose of invisible death to the
islanders. The Rapa Nui people wouldn't have been able to understand why this
was happening to them. In fact, if you'd asked the Europeans of the time what
caused these diseases, they wouldn't know either. They may have told you that
they were caused by miasmas or bad night air, this being the prevailing theory at
the time. As whole families of islanders died, the Rapa Nui must have believed
that the ancestors they had so laboriously carved to protect the island
had failed them. By the time the Spanish brought the second wave of disease and
it began ravaging the population all over again, those looming monoliths on
the coast may have begun to represent not protective spirits but the very
specters of death themselves. The islanders, one by one, began to bring
them down. Soon, these fallen giants would litter the landscape. Now, only those
abandoned Moai, half buried in the runoff from the quarry, would remain upright and
the age of Easter Island statues would come to an end.
The loss of Easter Island's culture was an incalculable tragedy for our
understanding of humanity. One of the reasons this is true is that Easter
Island may have been one of the few places on earth where writing was
independently invented. A kind of script called rongo-rongo has been found on
just a few dozen wooden objects and tablets that have survived from Rapa
Nui. Many of them are heavily weathered, burned or otherwise damaged and they
were all plundered by private collectors in the 19th century, now scattered in
museums and private collections around the world. Every modern attempt to
decipher rongo-rongo has failed and the script stands as one of the true
mysteries of Easter Island. Many of the glyphs that make up the script are
representations of things the islanders saw around them. We can see the familiar
shapes of sea turtles and birds, for instance. The legends of the islanders
say that the original founder, the man they called Hotumatua, had brought the
wooden tablets with him when he landed on Easter Island. But this seems
unlikely. There is no known tradition of writing anywhere else in Polynesia and
so it's thought that rongo-rongo must have been an invention of the islanders
themselves. It doesn't seem like literacy was ever widespread. In fact, early
visitors to the island were told that reading and writing was a privilege of
the ruling families and priests. Some have argued that rongo-rongo must be a
more modern invention, that the islanders may have seen Europeans reading and
writing, thus inspiring them to create their own script. If this were the case,
then the written language of rongo-rongo would have emerged, flourished and then
fallen into oblivion, all within a space of less than a hundred years. But I think
one detail of the script makes me doubt this. That's the character that shows
clearly and unambiguously the distinctive wine bottle shape of a
jubaea palm tree, a species that went extinct on the island before the year
1650, more than 70 years before first European contact. To my mind, this alone
shows that rongo-rongo was developed on the island during a time when giant palms
still towered over its shores. In 1864, a French churchman, Eugène Ayrault, arrived on
the island and described seeing a vast number of these writing tablets, although
it seemed to him that the islanders no longer valued them as repositories of
knowledge. In every hut, one finds wooden tablets or sticks covered in several
sorts of hieroglyphic characters. They are depictions of animals unknown on the
island which the natives draw with sharp stones. Each figure has its own name, but
the scant attention they pay to these tablets leads me to think that these
characters, remnants of some primitive writing, are now for them a habitual
practice which they keep without seeking its meaning. European visitors in the
following decades reported seeing the islanders using these writing tablets as
reels for their fishing lines and as tools for fire-starting. By this time,
none of the islanders could agree on how to read the tablets. Whatever knowledge
was held in the rongo-rongo script, the destruction of the island society had
caused it to be lost. If attempts at deciphering it continue to be
unsuccessful, we may never know what the Rapa Nui people wrote down. This
