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 one of the most remote inhabited islands 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.

Rapa Nui also left behind a puzzle that has never been solved. In the 1860s a missionary reported wooden tablets in islanders' houses covered with rows of small carved signs, birds, fish, human figures and geometric shapes, and about two dozen such objects survive in museums today. The script is called rongorongo, and its lines run in reverse boustrophedon: the reader follows one line, then turns the tablet upside down to read the next, so that alternate lines are inverted. By the time outsiders asked about it, the slave raids and epidemics had killed the people most likely to read it, and no reliable reading was ever recorded.

Scholars still disagree about what rongorongo is. Some think it is true writing that records the Rapa Nui language, others that it is a set of memory prompts for chants, which would work only for someone who already knew the words. Its age is disputed as well: islanders marked a Spanish annexation document in 1770 with signs, and some researchers have argued that the script was inspired by that first sight of European writing, while others think it older. Dating the wood of the tablets cannot settle it, since a tree may be felled long before anything is carved on it. If it is true writing invented without outside influence, it is one of very few scripts ever created from scratch.

In the island's later independent history, much of its ritual life centred on the cliff-top village of Orongo, on the rim of the Rano Kau volcano. Each spring, when sooty terns returned to nest on the islet of Motu Nui offshore, chosen young men climbed down the cliffs, swam out through rough water on reed floats and waited, sometimes for weeks, for the first egg to be laid. The finder swam back and climbed to Orongo, and the leader who had sponsored him became the Birdman for a year, a sacred figure with special privileges. Carvings of bird-headed men still cover the rocks there.

The contest continued until the 1860s, when the slave raids and the arrival of missionaries ended it. One object links the two eras. Hoa Hakananai'a, a basalt moai taken from Orongo in 1868 by the crew of a British warship and now in the British Museum, has birdmen and ceremonial paddles carved on its back, added long after the statue was made, which suggests that an old ancestor figure was taken into the newer religion. In 2018 a Rapa Nui delegation travelled to London to ask for its return, part of a wider debate about who should keep objects collected from Pacific islands in the colonial era.

Many photographs show the moai on the slopes of the quarry at Rano Raraku as enormous heads emerging from the ground, and some visitors assume that is all they are. Excavations by the Easter Island Statue Project, led by archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg, dug down beside several of them and revealed full torsos buried by centuries of soil and debris washing down the hillside.

Some of the buried bodies carry carvings on their backs, and the excavations found evidence of how the statues were raised and supported, including deep post holes and ropes' wear marks. The finds changed the familiar image of the island, showing that the famous heads are complete figures half-swallowed by the landscape around the quarry where they were carved.

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.