Easter Island, easternmost outpost of Polynesia, has long been of
at least passing interest to me. Even before Jared Diamond had
presented a story of the island culture's eventual decine through environmental exploitation as a warning for our times in the mid-1990s, I had been interested in the island for its cultural achievements. There were the famous
moai statues, depicted in the books I read as a child as liberally scattered across the island, but there was also the mysterious
rongorongo, something that might be a script but was currently undecipherable. What mysteries did the island hide?
Aurbina's photo in the
Wikimedia Commons, "Moai set in the hillside at Rano Raraku", is superb.
Diamond's narrative was simple.
Eventually Easter’s growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used the land for gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses--and, of course, for lugging statues. As forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more uncomfortable-- springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available for fires.
People also found it harder to fill their stomachs, as land birds, large sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared. Because timber for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises disappeared from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation allowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving.
With the disappearance of food surpluses, 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 from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers, made by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took to living in caves for protection against their enemies. 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.
The problem with this story, I began learning a few years ago, is that it isn't true. The bulk of ecological damage to the island was, two archaeologists argued, a consequence of the accidental importation of the Polynesian rat, compromising native ecosystems. The Rapa Nui of the island ended up coping quite well, as
described in 2013 at NPR.
For one thing, they could eat rats. As J.B. MacKinnon reports in his new book, The Once and Future World, archeologists examined ancient garbage heaps on Easter Island looking for discarded bones and found "that 60 percent of the bones came from introduced rats."
So they'd found a meat substitute.
What's more, though the island hadn't much water and its soil wasn't rich, the islanders took stones, broke them into bits, and scattered them onto open fields creating an uneven surface. When wind blew in off the sea, the bumpy rocks produced more turbulent airflow, "releasing mineral nutrients in the rock," J.B. MacKinnon says, which gave the soil just enough of a nutrient boost to support basic vegetables. One tenth of the island had these scattered rock "gardens," and they produced enough food, "to sustain a population density similar to places like Oklahoma, Colorado, Sweden and New Zealand today."
According to MacKinnon, scientists say that Easter Island skeletons from that time show "less malnutrition than people in Europe." When a Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggevin, happened by in 1722, he wrote that islanders didn't ask for food. They wanted European hats instead. And, of course, starving folks typically don't have the time or energy to carve and shove 70-ton statues around their island.
[. . .]
Because, say the Hawaiian anthropologists, clans and families on Easter Island didn't fall apart. It's true, the island became desolate, emptier. The ecosystem was severely compromised. And yet, say the anthropologists, Easter Islanders didn't disappear. They adjusted. They had no lumber to build canoes to go deep-sea fishing. They had fewer birds to hunt. They didn't have coconuts. But they kept going on rat meat and small helpings of vegetables. They made do.
Discover's Collide-a-scape
took a look in 2014 at the shift in the consensus away from a long history of decline. Estimates of ancient population sizes have been
found to be overlarge, for instance. The Rapa Nui seem to have been good custodians of their island. The
newest studies seem to confirm this.
What ended a civilization that built so many impressive stone statues and even managed to develop what might have been a writing system? The statues were no longer being built when the Chileans came, nor was knowledge of rongorongo passed on. What happened to the Rapa Nui? Not ecocide, as Diamond's scenario implies, but genocide.
The above Wikimedia Commons picture shows
Side b of Rongorongo Text R, one of the few rongorongo texts to survive. I saw them myself in a 2001-2002 exhibition at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Splendid Isolation: The Art of Easter Island. The catalogue, happily, is available in PDF format
here. Texts
R and
S were there on loan from the Smithsonian, along with a few dozen artifacts of pre-contact Rapa Nui society. This society did not survive, it turns out, because it was actively destroyed as a consequence of genocidal acts. Wikipedia's
dry summary leaves my head spinning at the scale of the catastrophe.
In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck Easter Island. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing or killing around 1500 men and women, about half of the island's population. International protests erupted, escalated by Bishop Florentin-Étienne Jaussen of Tahiti. The slaves were finally freed in autumn, 1863, but by then most of them had already died of tuberculosis, smallpox and dysentery. Finally, a dozen islanders managed to return from the horrors of Peru, but brought with them smallpox and started an epidemic, which reduced the island's population to the point where some of the dead were not even buried.
Little wonder, as I
noted in my review of Andrew Robinson's
Lost Languages, that the few survivors of Easter Island by the end of the 1860s had abandoned much of their traditional culture. For all its brilliance, all its accomplishments and knowledge, it had clearly failed to save the Rapa Nui from catastrophe. That conscious rejection made far more sense to me than Diamond's narrative of decline.
Savage Minds
noted in 2005 that researchrs were challenging the integrity of Diamond's historical research. Sitting here in 2016, knowing what I know about how the depopulation of any number of colonized populations by disease and the extension of foreign rule and how this depopulation has been used to justify the very colonization, I wonder about the potential misuses of Diamond's apparent misinterpretation of the island's historical trajectory. Is his model of an imagined Easter Island as a metaphor for the Earth and its risks even usable?
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