What Happened on Easter Island? The Statues, the Trees and the Argument

The island's own name is Rapa Nui, and its people are Polynesians who arrived by double-hulled canoe from the Marquesas or Mangareva around 1200 AD, the last major landfall of the greatest seafaring expansion in history. They found a subtropical island of 160 square kilometres covered in palm forest, with no mammals, few birds and poor soil, and they brought chickens, rats, sweet potato, taro, banana and sugar cane. Within a few generations they were building ahu, stone platforms on the coast, and raising on them the moai, statues of ancestors carved from the soft volcanic tuff of a single quarry at Rano Raraku, where nearly four hundred lie unfinished today, including one that would have stood 21 metres.

How the moai reached the coast, some of them 18 kilometres from the quarry, was a puzzle that generated theories from log rollers to extraterrestrials. The islanders' own tradition said the statues walked, and in 2012 an experiment showed how: a 4.4-tonne replica, with ropes attached to its head and teams pulling alternately from each side while a third held it from behind, rocked forward on its rounded base and walked down a road at a hundred metres an hour, upright and without a single log. The prehistoric roads to the quarry are concave, which suits a walking statue and not a sledge, and the statues that fell along them lie face down on downhill stretches and on their backs on uphill ones, as a walked statue would. What the moai were for:

• •Ancestors: each represents a deified chief or lineage founder, and they face inland, over the villages they protect, with their backs to the sea
• •Eyes: the statues were given eyes of white coral and red scoria when set up, at which point the ancestor's mana entered them; the eyes were removed when they were toppled
• •Topknots: many carry a pukao, a cylinder of red scoria weighing up to 12 tonnes, from a second quarry, rolled and raised onto the head with ramps
• •Competition: lineages raised larger statues over time, and the biggest stood on the finest platforms

The story told in the twentieth century and in a best-selling book of 2005 ran as follows. The population grew to fifteen or twenty thousand, the forest was cut for canoes, fuel and statue-moving until the last tree fell, the soil eroded, the crops failed, the people could no longer fish because they had no wood for boats, they fell into warfare, toppled each other's statues and turned to cannibalism, and the Europeans found the starving remnant of a society that had destroyed itself. It was called ecocide, and it was offered as the Earth in miniature. Almost every step has since been challenged by people who dug.

The forest did disappear, between about 1250 and 1650, and the islanders cleared much of it. But the palm's seeds are found gnawed by the Polynesian rat, which arrived with the settlers, bred without predators, and may have prevented the forest from regenerating at all; the islanders, meanwhile, adapted to the loss with rock-mulched gardens that cover a tenth of the island, breaking stones to shelter and fertilise the soil, and their diet, read from bone chemistry, was mostly sweet potato and fish with little sign of famine. There is no evidence of a population above four thousand or so, no evidence of cannibalism beyond a few later tales, and the obsidian blades once taken as weapons were farming tools. The statues were still being raised in the 1600s and the society that met the Dutch in 1722 was, by the Dutch account, healthy and well fed.

The collapse came afterwards. Between 1722 and 1877 European and American ships brought smallpox, syphilis and tuberculosis, and in 1862 and 1863 Peruvian slavers took some 1,500 islanders, a third of the population, to work in guano mines; the handful who were returned brought smallpox with them, and by 1877 there were 111 people left on Rapa Nui. The statues had been toppled by then, in the decades after contact, when the old order of chiefs and ancestors had failed to protect anyone from what arrived by sea. Chile annexed the island in 1888 and leased it to a sheep company that confined the survivors to one village until 1966.

The ecocide account was compelling because it made the islanders the agents of their own ruin and the lesson universal. The revised account is less tidy and worse for the visitors: a small people on the most remote inhabited island on Earth adapted to a deforestation partly caused by a rat they had brought, kept themselves fed and their culture creative for four centuries, and were destroyed by disease and enslavement in the century and a half after they were found. Rapa Nui is Chilean territory today, its people number about eight thousand, and the moai, some re-erected by archaeologists, stand facing inland over a landscape that the parable got right and the history got wrong.

The Polynesians of Rapa Nui carved nearly a thousand moai from a single quarry and walked them upright to coastal platforms with ropes, as an experiment in 2012 showed, in a society that lost its forest to clearance and to an introduced rat but adapted with stone-mulched gardens and stayed fed. The famous story of self-inflicted ecological collapse is contradicted by the evidence; the real collapse followed European contact, through disease and the Peruvian slave raids of the 1860s, which reduced the population to 111.