10- easter's end
Among the mysteries of human history, the mystery of Easter Island (called Rapa Nui in the local Polynesian language) remains unsurpassed. The mystery stems especially from the island's gigantic stone statues (called moai), its impoverished landscape, and the extreme isolation of a people living in what might have been an island paradise.
Easter Island, with an area of only 64 square miles, lies in the Pacific Ocean more than 2,000 miles west of the nearest continent (South America), and 1,400 miles from the nearest habitable island. Its subtropical location gives it a rather mild climate, while its volcanic origins make its soil rich and fertile. In theory, these blessings should have made Easter a miniature paradise, remote from problems that beset the rest of the world. The island derives its name from its Easter day discovery by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen in 1722.
The island Roggcvcen saw was not a paradise but a grassland without a single tree or bush over ten feet high. The islanders Roggeveen encountered had no real firewood to warm themselves during Easter's cool. wet, windy, winters. Their native ainimals included nothing larger than insects. For domestic animals, they had only chickens.
Despite the Polynesians' fame as seafaring people, the Easter Islanders came out to Roggeveen's ship by swimming or paddling canoes that Roggeveen described as bad and frail. The leaky canoes, only ten feet long, held at most two people, and only three or four canoes were observed on the entire island. The islanders Roggeveen met were totally isolated, unaware that other people existed.
Easter Island's most famous feature is its huge stone statues, more than 200 of which once stood on massive stone platforms lining the coast. At least 700 more, in all stages of completion, were abandoned in quarries or on ancient roads between the quarries and the coast. Most of the erected statues were carved in a single quarry containing a soft, volcanic stone and transported as far as six miles—despite heights as great as 55 feet and weights up to 82 tons. The abandoned statues, meanwhile, were as much as 65 feet tail and weighed up to 270 tons. The stone platforms were equally gigantic: up to 500 feet long and 10 feet high, with facing slabs weighing up to 10 tons.
Roggeveen himself quickly recognized the problem the statues posed. Without wheels and with no source of power except their own muscles, how did the islanders transport the giant statues? To deepen the mystery, by 1864 all of the statues standing had been pulled down, by the islanders themselves. Why then did they carve them in the first place? And why did they stop? Such an undertaking required complex political organization. What happened to that organization and how could it have arisen in such a barren landscape?
Evidence comes from three fields: archaeology, pollen analysis, and paleontology. Modern archaeological excavations, radiocarbon dating, and linguistic evidence suggest that human activities began around ad 400 to 700. The period of statue construction peaked around ad 1200 to 1500, with few if any statues erected thereafter. Archaeologists most often cite a population figure of 7,000, but estimates range up to 20,000.
Archaeologists have determined that twenty people, using only stone chisels made from hard stones available oil the island, could carve even the largest completed statue within a year. Given enough timber and fiber for rope, a few hundred people could load a statue onto wooden sleds, drag it over lubricated wooden tracks or rollers, and use logs as levers to stand them up. Hauling one statue would require hundreds of yards of rope made from plant fibers. Did Easter at one time have the necessary trees? That question can be answered by analyzing and dating the pollen trapped in the layers of sediment in swamps and ponds. Pollen analysis shows that during the early years of Polynesian settlement, Easter was not a wasteland at all. Instead, a subtropical forest of woody bushes and trees, including the rope-yielding hauhau tree, towered over a ground layer of shrubs, herbs, ferns, and grasses. The most common tree was the Easter Island palm, a relative of the Chilean palm, which grows up to 82 feet tail and 6 feet in diameter. This tail palm would have been ideal for transporting and erecting statues and constructing large canoes.
Excavations of garbage heaps yield an equally surprising picture of Easter's original animal world. Nearly one-third of all bones came from porpoises. Porpoises generally live far out at sea, so they must have been hunted offshore, in big seaworthy canoes built from palm trees. In addition to porpoise meat, the early Polynesian settlers supplemented their diet with seabirds, land birds, and rats.
This evidence lets us imagine that Easter's first colonists canoed into an unspoiled paradise and had the resources to develop a complex society. What happened to it? The pollen grains and the bones yield a grim answer.
Pollen records show that destruction of Easter's forests was well under way by the year AD 800, just a few centuries after the start of human settlement. Not long after 1400, the palm finally became extinct, not only as a result of being chopped down to clear land for agriculture and provide wood but also because the growing population of rats devoured the nuts necessary for regeneration. The hauhau tree did not become extinct in Polynesian times, but its numbers declined drastically until there weren't enough left to make ropes from.
The widespread destruction of the island's animals was just as extreme. Every species of native land bird became extinct, and more than half of the seabird species breeding on the island were wiped out. With no trees for constructing big canoes, porpoise bones disappeared abruptly from garbage heaps around 1500. In place of these meat supplies, the islanders intensified their production of chickens and also turned to the largest remaining meat source available: humans, whose bones became common in late Easter Island garbage heaps.
With fewer food sources. Easter Island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex society running. Surviving islanders described to early European visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over. By around 1700, the population began to crash toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. Around 1770 rival clans started to topple each other's statues, breaking the heads off. By 1864 the last statue had been thrown down and desecrated.
As we try to imagine the decline of Easter's civilization, we ask ourselves, Why didn't they realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late?
The disaster may have happened gradually. Consider the hundreds of abandoned statues. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams or the last rope snapped. When the last palm tree was cut, palms had probably long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each 160 year. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.
By now the meaning of Easter Island for us should be chillingly obvious. Today, again, a rising population confronts shrinking resources. It would be easy to close our eyes or to give up in despair. But there is one crucial difference. The Easter Islanders had no books and no histories of other doomed societies. Unlike the Easter Islanders, we have histories of the past— information that can save us. Our main hope is that we may now choose to learn from the fates of societies like Easter's.
