Easter Island

It is a familiar tale of greed, stupidity and self-destruction. For hundreds of years the inhabitants of one of the most remote islands on Earth vied with each other to build ever more impressive statues, pillaging their resources to feed their obsession. Ecological disaster was inevitable. As the island's last tree was felled, the society collapsed into a holocaust of internecine warfare, starvation and cannibalism. Rival clans toppled each other's statues. Armed with deadly obsidian-tipped spears, the workers rose up against their rulers. The vanquished were either enslaved or eaten.This version of events on Easter Island has become not onlyreceived wisdom, but a dark warning about a possible fate for our entire planet.

"The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious," writes Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, in Collapse. "Easter's isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources." Here is the perfect illustration of the idea that humanity contains the seeds of its own destruction. But is it true or, in our eagerness to think the worst of our species, have we been seduced by mythologies?That is the question now being asked. Researchers point to mounting evidence that prehistoric occupants of Rapa Nui, as it is known by locals, made asuccess of life on the island. What's more, it seems the theory of self-destruction might conceal an even less palatable truth about what caused the ultimate toppling of this society. At the very least, there is painfully little archaeological evidence for the fundamental claims that underpin the self-destruction theory. "Much of what has been written about Easter Island is little more than speculation," says Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii. "When you start to search for the actual evidence for some of these claims, often it just isn't there."It is easy to see how the tiny, remote island has captured imaginations. Created by three volcanic eruptions and with an area of just 170 square kilometres, Rapa Nui'snearest. ...

© 2001 Jason Colavito

On a dusty speck of rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, one of the most celebrated cultures in history found a foot-hold into the popular imagination. The inhabitants of Easter Island created a cultural legacy that continues to resonate today as tourists flock to the tiny Chilean possession to see for themselves the impressive and distinctive statues, called Moai, which dot the landscape and stare with empty eyes toward the endless ocean. They stand on platform temples, called Ahu, which the islanders built up and enlarged over the course of centuries. Tourists are astounded by the fine craftsmanship and breath-taking beauty of Easter Island. Many believe a great mystery lies hidden there.

Alternative history author Graham Hancock believes that Easter Island is a focal point for a vanished civilization whose influence stretches across millennia: "The mystery of Easter Island so far seems to have involved... the mystery of the master architects who first conceived the great Ahu and Moai [and] the mystery of the master scribes who understood the Rongorongo language," he wrote in Heaven's Mirror (1998). Decades ago, anthropologist Robert Suggs wrote a history of Polynesia that was a standard text on the subject. He firmly believed that archaeology had solved most of the island's puzzles: "The mystery of this island, then, is largely of an artificial nature, created for specific purposes by nonscientific authors." He implied that those authors seek only fame and fortune, not truth. For that reason, they obscure the history of the famous Moai. The Moai of Easter Island are usually dated to the period between A.D. 1200 - 1650, and are considered a late addition to the Ahu platforms, which originated with the founding of Easter Island. When I asked Graham Hancock to comment on the age of the statues, he told me in August 2001 that the archaeological dating is "probably correct as far as it goes, though not necessarily the whole story." He referred me to Heaven's Mirror for a full explanation of his views, so it is from their that I quote...

It was the first and most extreme ecological disaster. Easter Island, in the south Pacific, once lush with subtropical broadleaf forest, was left barren and vast seabird colonies were destroyed after the arrival of man. But now there is new evidence that human beings may not have been responsible for the destruction after all. Although Easter Island has long been held to be the most important example of a traditional society destroying itself, it appears that the real culprits were rats - up to three million of them.This contradicts the belief that the native population's obsession with carving, constructing, and transporting its famous statues around the island led it to deplete its own natural resources, going intowhat has been called "a downward spiral of cultural regression"."A theme of self-inflicted, pre-European contact ecocide is common in published accounts," says the anthropologist Dr Terry Hunt, who led the research at the University of Hawaii.

"Easter Island has become a paragon for prehistoric human-induced ecological catastrophe and cultural collapse. Scholars offer this story as a parable of today's global environmental problems."He has examined new data from the Hawaiian and other Pacific islands that shows that by early historic times the deforestation of Easter Island was already complete, or nearly so. A dense forest of palm trees and more than 20 other types of trees and shrubs had mostly disappeared. As many as six land birds and several seabirds had also become extinct.The island had arelatively simple ecosystem with vegetation once dominated by millions of palms. The original ecosystem of the island, with a limited range of plants, and few if any predators, would, says the report, have been particularly vulnerable to alien invasions.Almost all of the palm seed shells discovered on the island were found to have been gnawed by rats. Thousands of rat bones have been found, and crucially, much of the damage to forestry appears to have been done before evidence of fires on the island. Evidence from other Pacific islands also confirms how devastating rats can be.

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This volcanic flyspeck is arguably the most remote inhabited spot on the planet — marooned in the South Pacific 1,200 miles from its nearest neighbor, Pitcairn Island, and 2,300 miles from Chile, which calls the shots. It's also one of the strangest.The sun rises and sets unnaturally late because clocks have been altered to better sync with the distant mainland. The tiny, 64-square-mile island, which locals call Rapa Nui (Big Island in the native tongue), was claimed by Chile in 1888, but the native islanders are ofMaori descent and identify themselves as Polynesians, not Latinos.About 2,000 horses, or about one for every two residents, roam free, wandering along the dusty streets of its sole settlement, Hanga Roa, and elsewhere.

The town sports a raw frontier feel with its haphazard collection of single-story, corrugated-roofed buildings. Rapanui men, generally a strong-jawed, broad-chested bunch, ride bareback through the streets, turning the heads of many a tourist. (Years ago, a Chilean landed here intending to open a brothel. It failed. "Guys here can get it for free," one resident explains.) Mayor Petero Edmunds boasts that he hasn't passed a single law in his 14-year tenure. Rapa Nui has Chile's highest per capita beer and cigarette consumption. "Everyone smokes," he declares. The island is difficult to get to. Its landscape is not lovely in the traditional sense. Its hotels, for the most part, range from not-great to not-good. Restaurants are expensive. Nightlife is almost non-existent. Yet Rapa Nui ranks on many a traveler's places-to-see-before-you-die list. The compelling draw, of course, is the stone giants. There are 887 of these monolithic statues, some of which stand with their backs to the sea, hollow eyes locked on the barren, windswept terrain as if guarding vanished villages. Forty restored figures have been erected at 11 sites. Others lie in ruin, apparent victims of rage meted out long ago by warring factions. The statues, or moai, painstakingly were carved with rudimentary basalt tools from the 11th to 17th centuries. Almost 400 remain in various stages of completion where they werec......