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FATE magazine Covers Easter Island

FATE January, 1951

Easter Island: Land Of The Dead Gods

FATE January 1951, Mysteries of Easter Island

They line the rocky shores facing away from the sea, and haunt the distant slopes—these strange stone ghosts of a vanished civilization.

EASTER ISLAND is a land of the dead. The natives live under the shadow of extinct volcanoes which stand as sentinels at the corners of the island. Vaults of burial terraces surround the land and enormous stone gods brood timelessly from the slopes of the mountains. Mystery rules the surface while underfoot the land quivers continuously as if in fear of some dread unknown.

Easter Island is the top of a basalt pinnacle which rises sheer and steep 10,000 or 12,000 feet from the ocean floor. And the pressure from surf and sea seems to cause this tall shaft to sway like a giant skyscraper.

The first known sighting of the island was in 1687 when an English pirate named Davis sailed past Easter Island in outrunning a hurricane. Davis reported it as a “fair high island” with sandy beaches and high mountains, and for many years it was called “Davis Land,” and was believed to lie in 27′ latitude approximately 500 miles west of South America.

After Davis sighted it the island disappeared for 50 years. Other sailors searched in vain for the mysterious “fair high island,” and it was not seen again until Easter Sunday, 1722. This time a Dutch sea captain named Roggeween landed on the island and renamed it Easter Island in honor of the day.

Perhaps “renamed” is not just correct, for the island did not fit Davis’ description, and it did not lie where he had charted it. As late as 1928 a tourist ship reported she had sailed over the latitude and longitude of Easter Island and found no trace of it. Yet when the next ship came along, a Chilean gunboat, there was the island, safe and snug in its usual place. It has been charted 300 to 500 miles from its present location. Some believe that, like the mysterious sand shoals off West Africa, Easter Island is on the move.

The coast of Easter rises sheer from the ocean surf. The sea cliffs tower 1,000 feet in some places and there are none of the sand beaches that Davis reported. The island is shaped like an imperfect triangle 35 miles in circumference and there is no harbor. The headlands of the three corners are unusually high. Rano Aroi on the north has an altitude of 1,767 feet; the eastern cape, Poike, is more than 1,000 feet high, and Rano Kao, on the southwest corner, is 1,327 feet high. Between these three points, the seacoast slopes down and is comparatively low, though there are other high points in the interior of the island.

Ships must stand away from the ominous shores, and landings are made with small surf boats which feel their way between the jagged volcanic rocks. The first sign of habitation to the visitor riding in on the surf boats is a ring of gigantic burial vaults which border the coast entirely surrounding the island. Some are merely piles of rough stone while others are well constructed and obviously were built by skilled engineers and vast amounts of labor.

The vaults are covered over with stone terraces and platforms and their interiors are filled with the bones of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children. Two hundred and thirty burial platforms are located on the shores of Easter Island -an average of one every 800 feet. Thirty good-sized vaults are found farther inland. Apparently a second ring of crypts had been started before the building ceased forever.

If Easter ever had the charm and verdant green of a typical South Sea Island, it has it no longer. There are few trees on the island today, and the only commercial industry is the raising of poor quality wool. The Polynesian natives raise yams, plantain, poultry, and there is some fishing.

But once it must have been different. . . .

Today the stone burial vaults, the vast brooding statues, and mysterious indecipherable tablets of writing depict a great civilization of which Easter may have been only a fragment. It is a civilization unknown and awesome, a riddle which the best scientists have not yet been able to solve.

No one knows where the people of Easter Island came from. They seem to be Polynesians with a strong admixture of Negroid blood. They undoubtedly obtained this from mixture with Melanesians, but whether the Melanesians – or mixed Polynesian-Melanesian peoples were on Easter Island first or came later no one today can say for sure.

There is little evidence of a succession of different cultures on Easter Island, however. It all seems to be part of one mysterious and sweeping whole with strange and inexplicable sidelights.

There was bird worship, for example – similar to that in the far distant Solomon Islands, and curly haired Melanesian admixtures may help to explain that.

But to get at the strange Easter Island writing which no man is able to read today, one must turn to the Polynesian origins of the people. The Polynesians are generally believed to be an ancient branch of the Mediterranean race – the long-headed, dark-eyed, olive-skinned people of the Mediterranean basin, Arabia, and most of India. And this is where the significance of the Easter Island writing may come in.

It is a curious form of pictographic communication which no one can read today. It consists of a script engraved on wooden tablets and taking the form of pictographs re presenting stylized figures of men, animals, fish and so on. Every other line is inverted, so that when one line was read the reader had to turn the tablet upside down to read the following line, and so on. Even though some of the stories which the tablets record have been obtained from ancient natives, the exact meaning of the symbols and the secret of interpreting them. has been lost forever.

Now here is the mysterious part of this odd script. The only other place in the world where similar writings have been found are at Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley in the desert country of western India, near to Arabia.

Today we cannot know where the original Easter islanders came from, but we can repeat the legends of their origin that have been recorded. The story runs like this:

A king named Hotu Matua lost a great battle for mastery of an island named Marae Renga to his brother. At the end of a day’s fierce fighting a hurricane swept over the island and when it had subsided Hotu Matua put out to the open sea with his few remaining followers.

Haumaka, the soothsayer, had had a dream. His talisman had shown him an island to the east where Hotu Alatzia could build a new empire. Three canoes set out. Six warriors went ahead in one canoe. They took with them slips of cane and ti and yams to be planted in “the big hole” to be found in the new land.

The king embarked with his. wife, his wise men, and his people

in the two remaining canoes. These were 80 feet long, and deep and broad, with outriggers and fibre sails large enough to carry 150 persons each, together with supplies, plants, and seeds. They also carried a few fowl.

For many days and nights the six who had gone on ahead sailed .toward the sunrise. And at last they reached the predicted high island flanked by two smaller islands.

The six warriors landed and planted seeds and waited for the coming of their king and people. But the yams and plantain they had planted did not do well. The tall grasses choked them and when the king came and saw the boulderstrewn meadows, and the tall grass, he felt that fate had indeed tricked him.

But he could not turn back. His brother was now the king of Marae Renga and the soothsayer refused to predict more land ahead. So Hotu Matua had to make the barren land produce.

Yams were again planted and tended so that the tall grasses were kept down. They found places where wild bananas would grow. They planted sugar cane and arrowroot. And the people of Hotu Matua were saved from starvation and multiplied. On this forbidding island he could not found an empire but he could found a civilization that remains the despair of modern archeologists.

But many things can be understood. A great and fecund people could not grow indefinitely upon poor Easter Island. They had to find some way to limit their population. There was no natural enemy to fight, and so the islanders invented elaborate war games to keep the population down.

The young men were trained in war games. The population was divided into villages and clans. And they fought each other with wooden spears tipped with sharp obsidian points. The battles were followed by great feasts on the roasted bodies of the vanquished dead. Cannibalism ceased on Easter Island only comparatively recently.

The legends are quite explicit in regard to the divisions of the clans. Those with the long ears were of Hotu’s ruling family and the short ears belonged to subsidiary clans. There is in these legends a hint that two main groups of clans may have been founded on differences between the Melanesian mixtures and the Polynesians

Long ears were made by piercing the lobes and filling the holes with wooden plugs to force them to grow in long loops. Note that in Melanesia the distended ear lobe was common. This suggests that the longears were victorious in the early struggles for the island.

They were certainly the rulers when Easter Island reached its peak of glory. For the mysterious giant statues which dot the slopes of

Rano Rara Ku and mount guard over the tombs all have distended ear lobes. These images are so alike, with sneering disdainful expressions, that they are thought to be portraits of a single man or god, perhaps of Easter’s civilizationbuilder, Hotu Matua.

The sphinx-like figures stand in rows on the west slope of the volcano, looking out over the barren landscape, as they have for centuries. Some are large, and some small, some still smooth and preserved and others eroded by time. But one model has served for them all.

These images have no counterparts in the world. Their foreheads are high with protruding brows. Their eyes lie in deep shadow. Their noses are long and thin, chins square and heavy and the ears reach to the lower curve of the jaw.

Their weight is 20 to 40 tons and the problem of moving them was enormous. They were quarried from the crater of Rano Rara Ku of volcanic tufa. The material is soft and easily worked with stone chisels and obsidian tools. The niches from which they were cut still show on the walls of the crater, and one monster statue, 50 feet high and weighing 60 tons is still attached to its rocky bed-completely carved but never cut loose and moved.

In the centuries, dirt has sifted down over the statues so that those on the mountainside are buried almost to the shoulders. Originally they were complete from the hips upward, with detailed and prominent male sex organs.

Smaller statues were transported as much as 10 miles across the island to stand guard over the tombs. One strange feature of mystic significance marks them – they all faced away from the sea.

Some students claim that the population of Easter Island could never have moved these enormous blocks of stone over such distances. They believe that Easter was once, part of the vanished continent of Lemuria, but evidence does not support such a theory.

Though the enormous statues have long excited most of the interest in Easter Island, far greater effort must have gone into building the 230 tombs and platforms. The most impressive were made of squared stones fitted closely together. One of these platforms at Tongariki and one at Vinapu are as smooth and closely fitted as anything produced by the Mayas. The rock is columnar basalt which is far harder than the rock used for the statues.

The tombs bear no markings or ornamentation. The natives say they were built by the Gods of long ago, and there is the suggestion that some, at least, may have been built by a people which preceded the statue carvers.

Styling of the tombs is similar. The wall toward the sea is about15 feet high and the length differs with the importance of the tomb. The platform slopes away from the top of the sea wall for 30 feet and in some cases extends still further inland to form a sort of paved terrace.

The stone statues which guarded the tombs have one marked difference from the gods of Rano Rara Ku, besides being somewhat smaller. All wear red stone hats. These red hats were carved from the crater of Punapau. The heads of the statues were flattened and the hats balanced upon them.

All these statues have been knocked over and lie face downward. Those in the south which I faced south lie with their heads to the south. Those in the north, which faced north, lie to the north. Why? No one knows.

Another strange thing is that every statue has been mutilated. Each originally had large male sexual organs. Later every one of these organs was chiseled off – even on the statues that now lie buried to the shoulders.

Again, why?

If the statues were originally intended as phallic symbols, it is possible that the people of Easter knocked the parts off to discourage greater fertility. The island could support no more people. Something had to be done to cut down the population. What better idea to a primitive mind than to destroy the fertility symbols?

Today the natives of Rapa Nui will tell you that the old gods and the old people have been dead a long, long time. Burials are no longer made in the ancient vaults. A cemetery behind the Christian church now receives the bodies of the islanders.

But the secrets of Easter could have been saved if the white man had not destroyed them.

The platforms were in repair and the images brooded over them within the past 150 years. Men could read the script then. They remembered the old legends. They knew why the statues were built.

Even the memory of that is gone today. The why, and wherefrom, and whither of the Easter Islanders is lost forever.

In 1862, slave ships carried them to work the guano fields of Peru. When the French who claimed the island interceded, nearly all of the original 1,000 or more were dead. Only 15 persons lived to return, and they took back with them the scourge of smallpox which just about finished the rest. Then some of the remainder were impressed to work in Tahiti, and these brought back leprosy.

Today less than 150 of the original thousands remain, a poor folk, diseased, ignorant, drifting without culture. They do not even know that the white man destroyed them and obliterated even the memory of a greatness that might have unlocked a major key to the past.

November 1956, I See By the Papers

LIKE EASTER ISLAND

Search into the antiquity of man continues at a faster pace than ever before. Old mysteries are explained, new ones are constantly being uncovered.

In Colombia, S. A., near the head of the Magdalena River, in the Valley of Stone Demons, stand about 100 grotesque man-cat statues ranging from six to 12 feet in height and cut by an unknown racd from blocks of volcanic rock.

Nowhere else in the world does this kind of sculpture exist except on Easter lsland.

The statues have been identified as belonging to the “San Augustin” culture, which explains nothing because no one knows anything about the San Augustin people except that they preceded the Chibchin empire which the Spanish found in Colombia when they came conquering.

Perhaps the statues represent gods. They include a flute player and a figure holding a child by the heels, probably as a human sacrifice. All in all, about 250 of the statues are known. The San Augustins were probably a warlike people. They were in the polished stone age of human culture. Unfortunately the whole area is sealed off now. It is the homeland of the Paez Indians who are in semi-revolt – and are armed with machine guns and rifles.

January 1957, I See By the Papers

EASTER ISLAND EXPLORATION

In, a world which is, theoretically, well explored and where archeologists have literally moved mountains in their searches it is fantastic that there never were any excavations on Easter Island until this year. Yet such is the case, according to Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian scientist who is now studying a shipload of artifacts he gathered on Easter.

Heyerdahl, who gained fame by his Kon-Tiki expedition, says it will take about two years to develop complete reports on his Easter Island expedition. But he has already revealed some of the results of his findings.

“When we started digging,” Heyerdahl told Edmond J. Bartnett of the New York Times, “we dscovered a dozen statues which differed completely from those found before on the island. They formed a missing link with ancient statues found in the Andes mountains on, Peru.

“When we unearthed one of the statues, we found engraved on the stomach a crescent-shaped, three-masted sailing vessel. Small types of such vessels, made of reeds lashed together, are still in use on Lake Titicaca in Peru.”

This is a sensational discovery, says Heyerdahl, because the Easter Island natives make small rafts of a reed of the same type still used on Lake Titicaca. The reed is called totora and is known only in the Western Hemisphere and not in Asia, whence conventional archeology claims the Easter Islanders came. The Easter Islanders still grow the reeds in volcanic lakes and Heyerdahl believes they planted them there after coming from Peru.

The Secret Caves of Easter

Heyerdahl told Bartnett that his own expedition, whichincluded 26 associates, was the first to get into secret caves on the islands known only to natives. Thy were of “fabulous stone sculptures” of ancestors, thre-masted vessels, fish, lobsters, whales, monsters and other objects carved by the islanders over many centuries.

Heyerdahl also uncovered masonry walls similar to those of the Andes, where huge blocks, weighing several tons, were cut, polished and fitted so closely together it was often impossible to insert a knife blad in the cracks.

The expedition traced civilization on Easter Island in three epochs, the second of which ended a few centuries before the first Europeans arrived in 1722. It was the second eopch, apparently, that created most of the huge stone statues which have become a worldwide mystery.

June 1957, I See By the Papers

THE STATUES OF EASTER

Some time ago a French explorer, Compte D. de Chasseloup Labat, stood in a canyon in the Hogger Mountains of North Africa. The river which had cut the canyon was dry. High on a cliff overhead were carved two gigantic figures of men which seemed strangely familiar.

“Where have I seen similar figures before?” Labat asked himself. And then he knew: they looked like the statues of Easter Island. Ahead of the carved figures, as if leading the way, was a good luck bird.

Based on a chain of such coincidences, Anthropolgist Thor Heyerdahl, who last year ended nearly a year of excavation and exploration on Easter island, has come up with what he believes is a unique theory on the migration of the residents of Easter.

Heyerdahl has by no means finalized his theory. He is still waiting for correlation of the data he produced, including results of the Carbon 14 tests. And in all probability he will announce the findings of his expedition in a forthcoming book.

However, he has already revealed enough to indicate the broad outlines of his revolutionary ideas.

Heyerdahl believes that more than 2,000 years ago a strange race of tall, red-haired, bearded, thin-nostrilled white men set forth from the vicinity of the Canary Islands and either sailed or drifted across the Atlantic to America.

Legend traces them in Mexico, where they were welcomed as gods. Heyerdahl thinks he has traced them down through South America to Peru and beyond. He believes they crossed the Pacific in balsa rafts and colonized Polynesia.

The gigantic ruins of Tiahuanaco near Lake Titicaca in the Andes were left by this race, Heyerdahl believes. Inca legends say they were built by “white men.”

He points out that the only decoration of the Easter Island figures is a belt which is invariably carved around the figure’s stomach. The same belt is also carved around every statue in the Titicaca ruins, Heyerdahl declares.

He points out the similarity of the statues to the huge monoliths left in the South American jungles. He says the narrow noses and thin lips of the Easter statues were obviously modeled on Caucasian ideals. He thinks the pointed chins indicated beards, and believes that the red hats or wigs, which all the statues originally wore were meant to indicate reddish hair.

Heyerdahl also reports that when the Dutch Admiral Jacob Roggeveen discovered Easter Island in 1722 he found many “white men” among the natives.

Fate, July 1984

The Majestic Moai of Easter Island

Their function remains an enigma today. Do the monumental statues represent gods or are they simply gigantic amulets?

Reprinted from AMERICAS, The Inter-American Magazine published by The Organization of American States Photograph courtesy Smithsonian Institution

HUGE, majestic, proud, yet benevolent, Easter Island moai are the unmistakable symbols of that Pacific island. Standing silently gazing out to sea or abandoned on the slopes of Rano Raraku Volcano, where they were carved, the giant statues bear witness to a society that abruptly ceased to exist many years ago.

Of the 276 statues found at Rano Rarakau Volcano, 193 had been virtually finished. They lacked only the final polishing and their stone topknots, which were to be added at the ahu, or ceremonial centers, where they were to have been erected. The remaining 83 were left in various stages of completion, some of them no more than blocked-out stones. Some lie fallen, with their heads beside them, toppled and broken by violence. Others stand on the sides of the volcano, their torsos buried by years of natural accumulation of sand and vegetation until only their heads still show.

Majestic Moai

The most solitary of all the statues in the volcano quarry was uncovered by Thor Heyerdahl’s expedition in 1955. It is different from the others; instead of resembling its companions’ form with an erect bust, arms at its sides and hands held over the lower part of its abdomen, it is kneeling back on its heels in a posture thought to belong to a later era, when work had already ceased at the Rano Raraku quarries.

Scattered about the island, along the roads and at the ahu are 394 other statues, some of great artistic merit and others less well sculptured, but all appealingly enigmatic, even though most are broken and damaged by erosion. All are similar in style, although each exhibits a hint of individual personality. Their faces are elongated, their noses sharp and thin; their earlobes stretch almost halfway down their necks and their lips curl in an expression that each viewer will interpret for himself: angry, haughty, pleased or amused, peevish, content, dissatisfied. I thought they appeared to be pleasant, attractive and kindly, but not everyone agrees.

The enigma of their function and purpose persists today. They may have been gods to whom homage was paid and before whom religious ceremonies were held, or perhaps they were simply decorative figures, gigantic amulets or symbols of power designed to intimidate the enemy. It is possible they were simply the artistic expression of talented sculptors.

If Poike Volcano is seen in profile from a certain angle, one can trace a figure suggestive of the lateral lines of a reclining moai. That profile may have been the inspiration for the first artists to carve those figures, so alike in concept and in pose, truncated at the top of the buttocks, with arms always carved in the same position and hands folded over a slightly curving stomach, as if portrayed after a good meal.

The saga of making the statues and placing them in the ceremonial centers is another still unsolved mystery. To judge by the labor required today to raise the fallen statues, it must have been a tremendous task.

Father Sebastian Englert, a Chilean priest who spent 30 years on Easter Island, describes his studies of the monoliths in his book La Tierra de Hotu Matu (The Land of Hotu Matu). The tuff from which they are made is found on the rocky slopes of Rano Raraku’s southern and southeastern sides. The work was done with chisels made of basalt, no easy task despite the softness of the tuff, since the largest moai ever transported to an altar is more than 30 feet tall and weighs more than 80 tons. Much larger ones remain unfinished.

Thanks to their size, most of the moai have remained on Easter Island, although some of the smallest have been carted off to museums. There is a medium-sized one in the Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. One of the handsomest, called Hoa Haka Nana la, has symbols connected with the birdman ceremony carved on its back. That moai was probably kept inside a house; it stands less than six feet high and is the only one with a back carved in great detail. It is on exhibit at the Mankind Museum in London, England.

The task of sculpturing always began at the Rano Raraku quarry where the statue was actually carved almost entirely in situ. A group of sculptors would work together and a statue was probably completed in 20 to 30 days. If that estimate is correct, all the moai on the island could have been sculptured within a century. Except for those that remained at Rano Raraku or along the road to their destined ahus, almost all the statues found on the island when it was discovered by the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen on Easter Sunday in 1722 were lying on the ground, most of them in pieces. Several of the ahu and their statues have recently been restored.

Engraving by a 1768 French expedition to Easter Island

One of the best-made statues is at Ahu Huri a Urenga. It stands alone on a magnificent ceremonial platform. The figure has four hands, placed like those of the other statues on its lower abdomen. The most popular theory concerning its extra hands is that the sculptor was dissatisfied with the first pair so he carved two more on top of them and then tried, unsuccessfully, to obliterate the bottom pair. The statue’s expression is serene; it seems to be contemplating the countryside around it and to be pleased with the comings and goings at its base.

The moai at the ceremonial centers were originally capped with pukao (topknots) made of red scoria quarried at Punapau, where a number of these are still to be found abandoned on the hillside. Each topknot was meant for a particular moai and was finished at the ahu to fit its statue perfectly. During the work on Ahu Nau Nau in Ana Kena, the archaeologists were able to restore three moai with the topknot belonging to each one. This was possible only because these moai were buried in the sand of the Ana Kena beaches and were therefore much better preserved than usual.

Also during the restoration of that ahu the Chilean archaeologist Sergio Rapu found part of a moai eye. It can currently be seen at the Hanga Roa Museum, a white coral sphere with a well-polished red scoria pupil. Rapu asked one of the best sculptors on the island to reproduce the eye found in the excavations. Then, with great pomp and circumstance, the new eyes were set into one of the moai at Ahu Nau Nau. However, the eyeless moai have a much more agreeable expression, for the enormous restored eyes give them a rather dreadful relentless stare.

The saddest and most moving ahu is at Tongariki, which originally boasted 15 majestic statues. When the island was discovered those statues, like almost all of the others, had been toppled face down, undoubtedly the victims of the tribe that overthrew their creators. But all were still on the ahu. In 1960 the terrible earthquake that struck Chile produced a tidal wave which hit the beach with great force and swept the gigantic statues more than 400 feet inland. The head of one is still to be seen beside its trunk, a pathetic example of the uncontainable forces of nature—although these are ultimately less devastating than the human hatreds that destroyed all the other ahu.

Whatever functions of the moai may have been as religious figures or artistic achievements, the sculptural talent of their creators has been inherited by their descendants. There are many carvers on Easter Island, some of course better than others but all highly creative. Twice a week during the tourist season and once a week the rest of the year the arrival and departure of the LAN Chile plane is a great event. The whole town goes out to the airport (a euphemistic description of one runway and a shed), some to pick up merchandise brought from the mainland, others to sell their crafts. The most popular memento, as might be expected, is a small wooden or stone moai, more or less artistically wrought, depending on the inspiration and gifts of the sculptor.

The islanders say that visitors who buy a moai and give it a place of affectionate honor in their homes will enjoy good fortune, be successful in life and lucky in love and prosper from that time on.

It is true that everyone who comes to Easter Island leaves it reluctantly, a slightly different person. For no one can feel the same after having visited the most remote inhabited island in the world, having seen the moai and having felt the enthralling effect of their charm and their magic. Fascinating and unforgettable, the moai remain an enigma.

ONE OF THE most isolated inhabited islands on earth, Easter Island in the South Pacific was once the setting of a complex culture with a written language, a class-organized, systematic knowledge of solar movements and an impressive religious architecture. The first settlers may have arrived 2000 years ago, probably from Polynesia, 1400 or more miles away, and others may have crossed the 2300 miles from South America. Their obsessive interest in monumental sculpture transformed the island into an outdoor museum.

The culture was almost destroyed by internal warfare about A.D. 1680, 40 years before the first European discoverers came, and the significance of the statues remains a mystery.

In 1955 the Norwegian archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl brought the first archaeological reconnaissance expedition to the island. His best-selling account, Aku-Aku, drew the world’s attention. Two members of the expedition, Professors William Mulloy of the United States and Gonzalo Figueroa of Chile, began systematic archaeology and restoration work there in 1960 for the government of Chile to which the island belongs. The work is continuing today under the Chilean archaeologist Sergio Rapu.-Flora L. Phelps, Managing Editor, Americas.

CAPTION:

Most of the moai remain on Easter Island although some small ones have been taken to museums. One of the handsomest is this one in the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History.

EASTER ISLAND

Fate  I See By the Papers, August 1984

TWO BRITISH investigators appear to have learned at least some of the reasons why Easter Islanders stopped carving their gigantic stone heads and fell apart culturally.

Sea peoples, probably Polynesians and possibly South Americans, first came to the tiny island only about 1000 years ago. They found a land that was heavily forested and proceeded to develop a rather complex civilizationan amazing accomplishment on a poor island only 14 miles long. They carved more than 600 huge stone heads; they developed their own form of writing and built public buildings, including a solar observatory. The stone blocks of their structures were so carefully fitted together that even today it is difficult to insert a knife between them.

But when Captain Cook arrived he found about 600 men and 30 women barely surviving on the island. The stone heads had been overturned. Many had been abandoned unfinished. When the first missionary arrived in 1864, no one alive even knew how to read the ancient writing.

Obviously the social order had been destroyed. Clan had fought clan. Cannibalism had flourished. The bulk of the population was cruelly exterminated.

And why did all this come about?

Two geographers from the University of Hull in the U.K.–J. R. Flenley and Sarah King–have studied the pollen distribution in layers of sediment in the island’s three volcanic craters. They have discovered that when the first settlers arrived, the island was forested with palms and a native tree Sophora toromiro which now may be extinct but was fairly abundant even when Captain Cook visited the island.

The vegetation began to decline shortly after the settlers arrived. Flenley and King suggest that deforestation may have led to food shortages because there were no longer fertile forest soils. The Easter Islanders were unable to build boats to fish because they had no materials and the meat of mammals was in extremely short supply. Their wars were catastrophically fierce and they were later subject to slave raids from the South American mainland. During the time they prospered they had made enormous advances for so tiny a group of people. But they had no knowledge of ecology or history and couldn’t foresee that overpopulation and spoilage of their environment would spell their doom.

FATE July-August 2008

FATE, July-August 2008

Visiting the Land Of The Stone Giants: Maoi, Manbirds, and Other Mysteries Of Easter Island

A first-hand account of exploring Easter Island, includes many photos. This article is available in our July-August 2008 issue. Limited copies are available.

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