Original subtitles

In the early 18th century, a Dutch explorer named Admiral Jacob Roggeveen

was sailing across the vast blue expanse of the South Pacific Ocean. He had been

on the sea for 17 days, searching the southern ocean for a mythical continent

known as Terra Australis. When he saw a small island on the horizon, his heart

must have skipped a beat, as Roggeveen recounts in his diary. There was a great

rejoicing among the people and everyone hoped that this low land might prove to

be a foretoken of the unknown southern continent. But as their ships

approached, it became clear that this was no vast continent, only a small island; a

dot of land in the middle of the ocean. Nevertheless, Roggeveen was curious and

he ordered his three ships to prepare for landing.

It was Easter Day, 1722. As the Dutch got closer, it became clear that the island

ahead of them was inhabited. They saw smoke rising from the villages along the

coast, but it was a seemingly barren land. We originally, from a further distance,

considered Easter Island to be sandy. The reasons for that is that we counted as

sand the withered grass, hay, or other scorched and burnt vegetation, because

its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a singular

poverty and barrenness. As they sailed closer, the islands' inhabitants came out

on canoes to meet them, greeting them with friendly astonishment. This was much

like other islands that Roggeveen had visited before. But when he got ashore,

what he found on this island amazed him. Along the beaches, lined up in rows with

their backs to the sea, was a line of stone statues. They were carved from

black volcanic stone, some of them standing 10 meters high, wearing crowns

of red sandstone. But Roggeveen and his men

couldn't understand how these statues had got there. Stone images at first

caused us to be struck with astonishment because we couldn't comprehend how it

was possible that these people, who were devoid of heavy thick timber for making

any machines as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such

images which were fully 30 feet high and thick in proportion. Roggeveen and his

men didn't stay long. They soon set sail away from the island and on across the

Pacific, but the remarkable image stayed with them and they must have asked

themselves how did those people construct so many vast stone statues

when so little building material seemed available to them? Why had they built so

many, and if such an advanced civilization had once lived on this

island, where on earth had it vanished to?

My name's Paul Cooper and you're listening to The Fall of Civilizations

podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to

glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask what did they

have in common? What led to their fall, and what did it feel like to be a person

alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to

tell the story of one of archaeology's most enduring puzzles; the mystery of

Easter Island. I want to explore why it's not actually much of a mystery at all. I

want to examine how this unique community grew up in complete isolation,

how it survived the tests of centuries against overwhelming odds, and I want to

take you through the evidence about what happened to finally bring this society

and its enormous statues crashing down.

The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceans. At over 165

million square kilometers, it covers one-third of the Earth's total

surface. It's so vast that if you were to look at Earth from outer space, it's just

about possible to position yourself so that only the Pacific Ocean is visible,

and you could imagine that you were looking at a planet completely composed

of water. But the Pacific is not an unbroken sea. Across its blue expanse,

there are over 25,000 islands of varying size, many of them thrown up by volcanic

eruptions that burst from the lively tectonics

of the Pacific Plate. Easter Island is at the eastern corner of an area we call

the Polynesian Triangle, a vast region of the Pacific Ocean broken by over a

thousand volcanic islands. Easter Island itself is a loosely triangular

shape too, made up of three extinct volcanoes at each of its points. The

largest of these volcanoes is called Terevaka. It's a young volcano bursting

out of the sea less than four hundred thousand years ago, its lava gushing out

and raising a peak that looms half a kilometre above the ocean. When it first

erupted, Terevaka's lava pooled so that it joined up to older volcanoes on

either side of it, and the landmass that today we call Easter Island was born. The

people who have lived on Easter Island for centuries call it by the name Tepito

ote henua, which translates literally to 'the center of the world'. Other names for

it are translated as 'the land's end' or 'fragment of the earth.' Today's

Polynesians call the island Rapa Nui.

Rapa Nui is a small island, only about 24 kilometers end-to-end and 12 kilometers

wide. It's one of the most remote and isolated places on earth. From the coasts

of Easter Island, it would take 3,200 kilometers to reach the nearest

continent of South America, about the distance from Paris to Damascus, and even

the nearest inhabited island is over 2,000 kilometers away. The Polynesians

who first settled the island arrived from the west.

Sometime before the year 3,000 BC, they had left the mainland of the Asian

continent. Since that time, these hardy sailors had perfected their craft

until they were the most successful ocean-going settlers in history. They

built large, sturdy canoes with two hulls, in fact, effectively two canoes joined by

a deck and with two masts with sails. The catamaran design of these ships was

incredibly sophisticated, and in fact, they look like a modern sailing boat

used for racing. They were both stable and fast, and they

allowed the Polynesians to gradually settle the entire Pacific Ocean. These

early settlers navigated the oceans without any physical navigation devices.

They knew the stars well enough that they could make astonishing calculations

about latitude and longitude using only the night sky. They didn't write this

detailed knowledge down, but used only songs and stories to memorize the

properties and positions of the stars, islands, and known sea routes. The

Polynesians also used the natural world as an aid to their navigation. They

followed the flight paths of seabirds like the black tern, and this ancient

Polynesian sailor song shows the significance of these birds.

The black tern, the black tern is my bird. Burden whom my eyes are gifted with

unbounded vision. These epic voyages were all the more impressive because the

winds in the South Pacific blow westwards against the direction of the

Polynesian's expansion. To travel these vast distances against the winds, the

explorers developed a sailing technique known as tacking where the craft zigzags

against a prevailing wind in order to catch some forward motion. Storms in

the Pacific could be deadly to these early explorers. It's been recorded that

when a severe typhoon struck, these sailors had a method of surviving that

seems unthinkable to a modern sailor; they would actually purposefully flood

the hulls of their canoes and because the wooden hulls provided enough

flotation, the ship would stay afloat. But with most of its body submerged, it would

survive being buffeted about in the gale- -force winds. While the storm went on, the

sailors would climb inside their flooded hulls, keeping their heads above water,

and wait for the winds to pass. There has long been a debate about when exactly

these intrepid Polynesian adventurers arrived on Easter Island.

It was long assumed that they had arrived sometime in the fourth or fifth

centuries, but studies of the islanders' language and radiocarbon dating recently

revised that estimate to somewhere around the eighth century, and even more

modern analysis has pushed that date forward even further. Many scientists

today believe that Rapa Nui wasn't settled until sometime around the Year

1200 AD. At this time around the world, the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan were

finalizing their conquest of Northern China.

The notorious Fourth Crusade, headed for Jerusalem,

instead sacked and burned the Christian capital of Constantinople.

An exotic import from Arabia called sugar was mentioned for the first time

in an English text, and on the other side of the world, in the middle of the vast

expanse of the Pacific, a small band of Polynesian sailors landed their boats on

the shores of a new land. An ancient piece of Rapa Nui folklore credits the

settlement of the island to a Polynesian king called Hotu Matua. In Hiva, Hau Maka

had a dream in which his spirit traveled to a far country, looking for a new home

for his King Hotu. His spirit arrived at three small islands, and another with a

larger one with a crater on the southwest corner. The island was the

eighth or last island in the dim twilight of the rising sun. The spirit

traveled counter-clockwise around the island,

naming twenty-eight places including Anakena, a landing place on the north

coast of the island and future residence of the king. When Hau Maka awoke, he told

his brother Hua Tava about the dream. After hearing about the dream, Hotu

Matua ordered Hau Maka to send some young men

to explore the island. Hotu Matua told his two sons to build

a canoe and search for the island of Hau Maka's dream. So, the seven men left in a

canoe stocked with yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, and other foods. They left on the

25th day of April and arrived on the first day of June, a voyage of five weeks.

These settlers brought everything that was required for the traditional

Polynesian lifestyle. They brought their most crucial foods; bananas, a root

vegetable called taro with broad elephant ear leaves, as well as sweet

potatoes and sugar cane. They also brought saplings of the paper

mulberry tree, the fibers of which they used to weave clothes. They brought

animals with them too, although only those small enough to be transported.

They brought chickens and also the Polynesian rat which was an everyday

food for common people. This was an entire ecological system in-waiting,

packed up in the holes of their canoes, optimized for transport, and ready to be

transplanted to a new land. Hotu Matua may not have realized it, but his arrival

on Easter Island was of profound significance, not just for him and his

people but for all of mankind. That's because Easter Island was the

final stop on a journey of sixty thousand years that had taken mankind

out of Africa, through Asia, and onto the Americas. The final chapter of this

journey was the gradual colonization of the Polynesian islands, and Easter Island

was the furthest and final piece of uninhabited land. Mankind's journey out

of Africa ended on the shores of Easter Island and with that step, a new phase of

humanity's history began.

I think it's worth noting at this point that apart from the evidence we can find

in the archaeological record, we have essentially two sources of information

about the history of Easter Island, and each of them has their problems. Firstly,

there were the accounts of European visitors to the island, like the Dutchman

Roggeveen. These accounts come down to us either in the form of ships' logs or in

the form of memoirs written down when these explorers returned to their

homelands. The biggest problem for researchers of Rapa Nui's history is

that these early visitors to the island left behind accounts that are extremely

limited in their content and their reliability, and that sometimes directly

contradict each other. Most of them stayed for only a few days.

They rarely wandered far from their landing spot and they commented little

on the culture, language, or society of the islanders. In the debate that has

raged over what happened on Easter Island, many writers have tried to use a

selective reading of these accounts in order to support their own favored

argument, and that's something we should be very careful about as we go forward

and assess the evidence. But these written records do provide us with some

useful information; at times, as you'll see, they give us fixed points in time

around which we can build our story. The second source of information is the oral

folklore of the islanders themselves. This was passed down by word-of-mouth

through the generations, often in the form of songs and stories. This can

give us a wonderful sense of how the islanders view their own history and

their own sense of identity. But this source of information can also

be very difficult to rely on when trying to sort historical fact from fiction. The

different strands of the island's folklore is also often extremely

contradictory and the reason for that isn't hard to imagine. Detailed

observations of these songs and stories weren't written down until the 1880s and

by that time, the culture of Rapa Nui had already undergone drastic change. By this

point, they'd been in contact with the outside world for more than 150 years

and their population was reduced to a tiny fraction of what it had once been.

Now, only a few survivors passed down the stories they remembered and to add

another level of confusion, these stories were written down by early European

explorers who may have mistranslated, as well as added and embellished

elements that didn't exist in the original. One example of this is the

question of the name of the island's first king who we've already mentioned,

Hotu Matua. But his name is so similar to the folk hero of another nearby

island, Mangareva, that some researchers have questioned whether this name isn't

a foreign import to Easter Island. If we can't trust this important detail to

have been faithfully transmitted, perhaps we can't be too sure about the rest.

These stories, refracted through these various mirrors, are now connected to the

true facts of the distant past by only the most fragile of threads. This is all

to make it very clear to you that the history of Easter Island is not even

close to being a settled matter and it often relies on fragmentary and

contradictory evidence. Today, new research has begun to challenge the

familiar narrative we've all grown up with, and we will have to deal with a lot

of uncertainty as we forge ahead through the tragic story of this most remarkable

island.

According to tradition, the first Polynesian settlers arrived on Easter

Island at a point called Anakena, a white coral sand beach on the north of

the island that forms a natural harbor. It's worth mentioning that the

landscape these first settlers would have seen was very different to the one

we see today on Rapa Nui. The bare, grassy slopes first spied by Roggeveen in the

18th century and which we know from images today, would have been nowhere to

be seen. In fact, they would have been covered by

a thick forest of tropical palm trees. If you dig down into the earth of Easter

Island today, you can still see the hollow molds left by the roots of these

trees. Studies of these root molds, as well as pollen analysis, shows that when

humans arrived on Rapa Nui, the island was home to over 21 species of trees.

Some of these were large, including at least 3 which grew up to 15 meters or

more. One species of palm tree, the Easter Island or Rapa Nui Palm, may even have

been among the largest species of palm tree in the world. This now-extinct tree,

known as Paschalococos, seems to have once been the most numerous species on

the island. Its closest relative today,

Jubaea Chilensis, or the Chilean Wine Palm, can reach heights of over 25 meters,

its bulbous trunk the thickest in the world, reaching a diameter of more than a

metre. The soil of Easter Island has never been rich but the forest would

have provided a small amount of food for the new settlers; palm nuts, and fruits, too,

along with the birds in the trees that could be trapped.

Luckily for archaeologists, the sand of Anakena beach, the site of that first

settlement, is particularly good at preserving bone and human remains.

Because of this, skeletons examined here have given scientists insight into the

lives of the ancient Rapa Nui. Studies have shown that as well as these plant

crops, people supplemented their diet with a mix of marine animals including

dolphins they trapped in the Bay of Anakena, seals, sea turtles, and fish that

they caught with hooks carved from bone. In fact, bone chemistry analysis has

shown that the people here got about half of their diet from the sea. They

cooked all of these foods in earth ovens known as umu, cavities dug into the

ground which then had burning grass and leaves placed on top of them so that the

heat radiated downwards. These people were ingenious and

inherited knowledge from their ancestors. They made textiles from the fibers of

the paper mulberry tree and spun rope from a tree known as the Hau tree.

With this healthy and diverse mix of foodstuffs and resources, their

settlement became incredibly successful. From there, using slash-and-burn

agricultural methods, the original settlers spread quickly across the small

land mass of the island, and they soon began to clear the forest in order to

plant their crops until the whole of Rapa Nui was fully populated with around

3,000 people. Slowly, that primeval palm forest began to disappear from Easter

Island.

I think at this point, it's worth running you through that traditional story of

what happened on Easter Island. It has been the dominant narrative about this

island for decades, perhaps even centuries. It was begun by early European

explorers, propagated by Victorian and 20th century anthropologists, and finally

popularized by authors like the popular science writer Jared Diamond, and you

might find it familiar. In this narrative, the inhabitants of Easter Island were

the architects of their own demise. The story goes that their population boomed

until the island could no longer support it. They cut down their trees to use as

firewood for construction material and to use as rollers to transport their

enormous statues. The loss of trees on the island resulted in an ecological

collapse that destroyed the fertility of the soil and the productive potential of

the island fell apart. Along with the collapse of the islands ecology, the

complex and centralized society that had built the hundreds of stone statues on

the coast began to collapse, too. Resources became scarce, starvation ran rampant, and

this led to a period of violent civil war. Shortly before the arrival of the

Europeans in 1722, the whole of Rapa Nui society had come apart and only a few

thousand survivors were left. Jared Diamond, perhaps the greatest champion of

this theory today, puts it bluntly. In just a few centuries, the people of

Easter Island wiped out their forests, drove their plants and animals to

extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos. This story has a

widespread appeal for a number of reasons. In the latter half of the 20th

century, as we became increasingly concerned about our own society's

destructive impact on our environment, the story of Easter Island became

irresistible as an example of the fate that might befall

us if we fail to respect the environment around us. The stone statues, too, have

proved irresistible as emblems of human folly, our desire to always build bigger

and better than our neighbors. In his book, Jared Diamond even makes the

comparison to his neighbors in Hollywood building ever bigger and better mansions

in an effort to prove their status. The islanders was so obsessed with these

statues, the narrative goes, that they cut down all their trees to transport them.

This single-minded obsession drove them to starvation, then cannibalism, and

finally to the edge of extinction. But there are a number of problems with this

narrative, a number of seriously questionable assumptions, and over the

course of this episode I'm going to try to unpick three of the most glaring of

these assumptions so that you can assess the evidence for yourself. Firstly,

there's the assumption that the Easter Islanders deforested their island due to

greed, overpopulation, or even a maniacal obsession with statue-building. Secondly,

there's the assumption that the loss of the forest led to a societal collapse,

and thirdly, there's the assumption that Easter Island society collapsed at all,

at least before contact with the outside world.

As we'll see, each of these assumptions has significant problems. Once we've

dealt with them, we can get down to what actually happened to decimate the

islanders of Rapa Nui, to strip the island of its plant life, and to leave

those famous stone statues moldering on the lone grassy hills of Easter Island.

Virtually as soon as they arrived on the island, probably around the year 1200, the

islanders began carving the monuments that would one day make them famous

around the world. Stone statues are common on islands across the Polynesian

world, but no other island can compete with the size of the Easter Island

statues or with the incredible number carved. These statues are called Moai. The

Moai are known for their large, broad noses and strong chins, along with

rectangle-shaped ears and deep eye slits. For the Easter Islanders, these

statues were what they called aringa ora ata tepuna, that is the living

faces of the holy ancestors. These are stone representations of the islanders

that have gone before. Of the Moai that were successfully moved into place, the

vast majority stand on the coast of the island on monolithic stone platforms

called Ahu. While most people's eyes are drawn by

the statues, these Ahu are themselves impressive undertakings. They are built

of enormous stones cut so precisely that they fit together in a perfect jigsaw,

with not even enough room to fit a razor blade between the stones. The largest of

them, Ahu Tongariki, holds 15 Moai lined up in perfect order.

Nearly all Moai stand with their backs to the sea, staring inland over the

fields and hills of Rapa Nui with their deep, expressive eyes.

Almost all of the statues are carved from a volcanic stone known as tuff. Tuff

is formed when ash from a volcanic eruption falls thickly on the ground and

is then slowly compacted into solid rock. Tuff is relatively soft and easy to

carve, so it has been used for construction since ancient times. It

commonly occurs in Italy, for instance, and the Romans often used it in their

buildings. Most of the Moai statues were carved in

a quarry on the outer cliff edge of the Rano Raraku crater. This quarry is an

eerie sight today. Here and there, the faces of half-finished giants still peer

out of the stone. The Rano Raraku crater is 700 meters across, formed of ash and

volcanic tuff thrown up in an ancient explosion and ringed by cliffs 160 metres

high. The wide volcanic bowl is one of the three places on Easter Island where

fresh water pools to form a lake. Here, a kind of bullrushes called totora grow

on the water's edge, nodding in the breeze, and the Rapa Nui

people once collected them to weave thatched roofs for their houses. But it's

on the outer slopes of the crater's cliffs that the truly important activity

took place. Here, the islanders chipped their statues directly from the bedrock

using a kind of stone chisel known as a toki that was made of dense basalt,

perfectly suited for carving the softer volcanic tuff. This would have been

incredibly slow work. Work that might take a modern craftsman with a steel

chisel one hour might take an Easter Islander with a stone toki a whole day

or two days to complete. Although estimates vary, it's thought that an

entire statue could take over a year for a team of 12 people to carve. One

fascinating aspect of this quarry is that there are a huge number of

incomplete Moai abandoned here, 397 in total. That's nearly half of the island's

total population of 887, and this shows just how difficult the carving of these

statues was. These abandoned Moai have been discarded for different reasons,

some more obvious than others. On some statues it's clear that the workmen dis-

-covered a seam of hard rock somewhere on the Moai's body which would have been

virtually impossible to carve with their stone tools. Others have obvious flaws or

cracks in them, while some Moai have fallen over while raising them. Other

Moai simply seemed to have been too ambitious in size; the largest of these,

nicknamed El Gigante, is nearly 22 meters in height.

That's twice the height of a telephone pole

or the size of a six story building. El Gigante, still lying on his back in the

cliff face, is almost twice the size of any Moai ever completed. This enormous

statue would have weighed an estimated 270 tons and it's hard to imagine how

the islanders ever intended to move it. We might imagine an ambitious ancient

craftsman overseeing the carving of this vast statue, determined to create the

largest Moai that the island has ever seen, or perhaps as we'll find out later,

the islanders believed they had to summon a truly enormous protective

spirit to defend their island against a threat. To get a sense for how these

people must have felt about these statues, let's imagine ourselves into the

role of a team of Moai carvers during the Golden Age of Rapa Nui statue-

-carving. The work would have been slow and painstaking but it would also have

carried a great deal of responsibility. While you were carving a Moai, you

weren't working in the fields, and so your community was investing in your

work. There must have been a lot of pride tied up in the creation of these statues,

too. Before the carving could even begin, there would likely have been ceremonies

and rites that had to take place, chants and incantations designed to summon the

protective spirit of the ancestor to inhabit the stone. There's an apocryphal

quote often attributed to the sculptor Michelangelo. Every block of stone has a

statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

Whether or not he actually said this, this must have been something like what

the people of Rapa Nui felt as the months passed and the great statue, its

head and arms and body, slowly materialized from the cliff face in

front of them.

The days would have been hard. Many traditional Rapa Nui working songs

survived today, and we can imagine the workers singing while they chipped away

at the cliff. One surviving folk song even derives its rhythm from the

striking together of two stones, emulating the sounds of the toki tools

napping away at the statue. Here it is, recorded especially for this podcast by

children from the Toki School of Music on Easter Island.

The workers' hands must have been covered in the blackish dust of the stone, and

they would take breaks to eat meals of sweet potato and taro along with the

chicken, baked white in earth ovens nearby. After much arduous work, the whole

outline of the Moai would be carved out. They would then deepen the cuts and

hollow out the cliff behind the statue, too, clambering into the narrow space and

lying on their bellies as they carved. But even with the back carved out, the

statue would still be attached to the bedrock below with a narrow keel that

ran the length of its spine. So, the final and most painstaking stage of the

process would begin. They would gather up stones and earth in order to support the

Moai so that it didn't fall, and then this spine of stone would slowly be

chipped away. It must have been an incredible moment when that last stone

umbilical cord was cut. It was the culmination of so much time

and sweat of course, but it must have sent shivers down their spines, too, as the

great statue of their ancestor broke free of its stony slumber and was

finally filled with a living spirit. It's likely that more ceremonies surrounded

this moment; the chanting of holy men who wore white plugs in their ears, and the

beating of drums. Over what must have been days,

the Moai was edged clear of its quarry resting place with huge teams of workers

pulling ropes spun from the Hau tree. When the statue was clear, they slid it

down the grassy slope of the volcano so that it could be stood upright at the

bottom of the slope. This was one of the most dangerous parts of the Moai's

journey, as the great number of cracked and abandoned statues on the slope below

the quarry shows us. They look like an army of stony wanderers marching down

from the volcano. Somewhat ironically, these abandoned statues, buried up to

their necks in the refuse from the quarry, form some of the most iconic

images of Easter Island today, more familiar to the layman than the

completed ones that stand on the Ahu platforms on the coast. This is why

people talk about the stone heads of Easter Island, ignoring the fact that

most of the Moai have bodies. At the bottom of the hill, the workmen would

raise the Moai up to a standing position so they could finish carving the details

on its back using soft pumice to wear it smooth. Then they would prepare

to transport the statue into its final resting place on its Ahu. The carvers

could wipe the sweat from their foreheads and share congratulations, but

this was just the beginning of another long and arduous chapter in the Moai's

journey.

At this point, I think it's worth noting that we don't actually know for sure how

the ancient islanders moved these vast statues. This question was something that

obsessed early visitors to the island. They looked around at the seemingly

barren landscape of Rapa Nui, at its grassy slopes seemingly devoid of large

trees, and asked how a people without metal tools, pulleys, or wheels could

transport nearly 500 of these vast statues. The largest successfully

transported Moai, nicknamed Paro, was 10 metres tall which is longer than a

London bus. It's estimated that this statue weighed about 82 tons, heavier

than a Boeing 737 aircraft when fully loaded with passengers and fuel. The

ancient islanders would sometimes transport these statues for distances of

20 kilometers across the island's rough, undulating terrain. It's a question that

has been asked of the islanders since Europeans first arrived. How did your

ancestors move these statues? For a long time, the islanders would always

give the same reply; they would simply say they walked. Foreign visitors would

always roll their eyes at this answer. They assumed this must be a piece of

local folklore, a kind of magical thinking that imagined the statues to be

the living spirits of the ancestors. Some may even have thought that the Rapa Nui

were making fun of them, but researchers today have discovered that there may be

more truth to this legend than it seems. Early archaeologists believed that the

Rapa Nui moved the great stone statues into place using logs as rollers. In 1998,

archaeologist Jo Anne van Tilburg successfully tested this theory using a

large number of hard wood rollers to transport a statue for a short distance.

But recent research has cast doubt on this theory and proposed

an incredible alternate possibility. The key to discovering how the statues

were actually moved lies in the ones that never made it to their intended

locations.

Littered across Easter Island are the sad shapes of statues that broke during

their transportation. Only about 1/5 of the Moai ever carved would reach their

destination on the Ahu platforms, and these total about 200. The rest, some 700

more, were either abandoned in the quarry or along the roads. Stone heads are

cracked from bodies, decapitated statues lie moldering and moss-covered in the

long grass. For the ancient islanders, this must have been a heartrending

sight. A whole team had worked for a year or more, then successfully slid this

statue down the slope of the volcano. Then, somewhere along its journey it had

cracked, and the broken statue would have to be abandoned by the side of the road.

These so-called road Moai have a number of interesting features. For instance, we

know that the islanders waited to carve the eyes of the Moai until the statues

were in place on their platforms. This may have had a ceremonial purpose which

has parallels around the world. For instance, in Sri Lanka when new statues

of the Buddha are built, the eyes are always the last part to be painted, and

only the painter is allowed in the shrine room while doing their work.

But a team of archaeologists led by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo also found

something else interesting about these abandoned statues; they noticed that when

abandoned road Moai were found on uphill paths they usually lay on their backs,

and when the cracked statues were abandoned on downhill paths, they usually

lay on their fronts. On flat ground, it was more like 50/50. So, a theory

began to emerge. Is it possible that the statues were transported upright? Once

this detail had been noticed, other details about the road Moai seemed to

fall into place. For instance, the road Moai had bulkier

lower-halfs and rounder bellies. This had puzzled archaeologists for a long

time, but Hunt and Lipo's theory seemed to make sense of this. The

islanders were designing the Moai in two phases. In the first, the transportation

phase, the Moai were bottom-heavy like a bowling pin. Once it had been rocked

into place on its platform, it was then carved into its more slender and elegant

final shape. So, Lipo and Hunt proposed that the statues were rocked

back and forth by teams of islanders with ropes so that the statues actually

seemed to walk over the ground. Their team caused an international sensation

when they were able to successfully walk a scale model of a Moai cast in concrete,

rocking it back and forth along the road with three teams holding ropes. In this

way, the statue could literally walk down the path just as the ancient folklore

recounted.

The team managed to move the statue at a rate of about a hundred meters in an

hour, meaning it could have walked around a kilometer in a day. If this is indeed

how the statues were moved, it must have been an incredible sight to see. The

tallest Moai weighed over 80 tonnes and each one of the statues footsteps would

have thundered on the earth so that it really seemed like a giant was stamping

its way towards the platform. There would have likely been a huge amount of

ceremonial activity around the walking of these statues, too, people coming from

all over the island to watch singing and dancing and all kinds of activity. For

the days and weeks it took to transport one of these statues, it would have

really felt like a god had come down to earth.

I love the romance and imagination behind Lipo and Hunt's theory, and I think

they build a convincing case that this was indeed how the statues were moved.

But you might ask, well, why does it matter how the statues were moved? Isn't

this a minor detail of the story of this society's collapse?

Well actually, this question has come to take on an enormous significance for the

mystery of what happened on Easter Island. The traditional narrative, if you

remember, was that the Rapa Nui islanders became so obsessed with building their

statues that they destroyed their environment to do so. The islanders cut

down all their trees, the theory says, in order to use as scaffolds and rollers to

transport them. If this was the case, then each statue must have taken hundreds if

not thousands of trees to transport, and this seemed the obvious answer to why

the island was so deforested, why its ecology collapsed and its society

followed. But if Lipo and Hunt were correct and the statues were walked into

place, then very little wood was needed, and the whole narrative of the Moai

causing the collapse of the island's ecology comes into question.

So, the whole mystery of Easter Island seems to hinge on this question

of whether the statues rolled or whether they walked. So, what do we know about the

loss of trees on Easter Island? One thing we can say for sure; the subtropical palm

forest that the first settlers found on the island wouldn't long survive the

arrival of humans. One of the earliest casualties of this deforestation was the

largest of the island's trees, the Rapa Nui Palm. If we want to guess at how this

enormous tree grew, we can look at its closest surviving relative, the Chilean

Wine Palm. This tree takes 50 years to reach its full height and until then, it

doesn't produce a single fruit. This slow- -growing and slow-reproducing tree would

have been one of the most affected by the arrival of humans. Some theorists,

Jared Diamond included, have argued that the Easter Island Palm would have been

in high demand for use as rollers to transport the giant Moai across the

island. But experiments have found that the palm would have been exceptionally

badly-suited for this job. The hard outer shell of the palm trunk conceals a soft

center that would have been instantly crushed beneath the heavy stone statues.

Diamond has even argued that the palm may have been cut down in order to build

large canoes, but nowhere else in Polynesia are canoes built from palm

trunks, and they would be very unsuitable for this purpose. So, what did happen to

Easter Island's trees? Well, undoubtedly, much of the forest was cut down by

humans but they didn't do this unconsciously or foolishly. They did it

for the same reason that people in Iceland or England cut down their

forests, because they were farmers.

The Rapa Nui, like all Polynesians, farmed energy-rich foods like sweet potatoes,

taro, and sugarcane. These abundant foods were vastly more productive than whatever

food they could have gathered from the forest. So, much of this deforestation was

controlled and conscious, and actually improved the quality of these people's

lives. But that isn't to say there wasn't an ecological collapse on Easter Island.

Pollen analysis shows that virtually all large trees were lost from the island

within a matter of centuries and by far the largest factor appears to have been

something very small, that's one of the animal companions that the original

settlers brought with them; the Polynesian rat. Wherever these pacific

explorers went, they brought animals with them. Each Polynesian island got some

combination of these four animals; pigs, dogs, chickens, and rats. On Rapa Nui, only

rats and chickens were introduced. Some argued that these rats may have stowed

away on the canoes just as they do on larger vessels, but rat has actually been

a foodstuff that Polynesians have relied on throughout history. It was never a

delicacy and seems to have been considered a food of the common people,

as rat bones are rarely found in the rubbish dumps of high-status houses.

However, they were a good and reliable source of protein on long voyages. I

can't speak to personal experience, but accounts I've read say that rat tastes

oily and gamey, a little like rabbit. Another advantage to this source of food

is that rats reproduce incredibly quickly. Once the Polynesian rat was

introduced to Easter Island, its spread would have been unstoppable. The millions

of giant palm trees covering the island would have provided them with an almost

unlimited supply of their favorite food, palm nuts. Recent lab studies have shown

that the reproductive potential of rats under these

ideal conditions can be enormous. In fact, the rat population could have doubled

every 47 days until they reached a population of up to 3 million, and the

island was completely overrun. The rats would have quickly eaten the seeds and

palm nuts from the trees, preventing the forests from regenerating.

In Anakena beach and certain caves, archeologists have found the earliest

remnants of palm nut shells showing the tooth marks of rats. As well as damaging

the forests, rats would also have eaten the eggs of seabirds, finishing off those

the islanders hadn't trapped and eaten. Since the seabirds fertilized the

soil with their droppings, this would have spelled disaster for the

biodiversity of Easter Island. But the question is, did this loss of trees

caused a societal collapse on Rapa Nui? The answer to that question is

almost certainly not.

This isn't to say that the loss of palm forest on Rapa Nui didn't present a

number of challenges to the islanders. By around the Year 1650, pollen studies

show that the deforestation of Easter Island was complete. Without tree cover,

the ocean winds could now blow right across the island. The wind and storms

threatened to blow away the topsoil, and salt spray from the sea effectively

salted the earth in coastal regions, damaging the soil further. But in all

cases, the Rapa Nui islanders reacted to these challenges with ingenuity and

creativity. They transformed their island not into a desolate wasteland but into

an astonishingly effective system of gardens, orchards, and farmland. In fact,

archaeologists have found evidence of areas of the island where the islanders

planted groves of palm trees and cultivated them. Around this time,

they also began farming using a technique known as rock mulching. This

involved laying rock beds around the island which prevented the soil from

washing or blowing away. It also reduced the amount of water evaporated by the

sun and increased the amount of nutrients available to growing plants as

the rainwater flowed over the rocks and carried minerals to their roots. Rock

mulching has been used by cultures around the world who live in harsh, water-

poor environments. It's been observed in the Negev Desert in Israel, the pebbled

fields of Langzhou in China, the ash fields of the Canary Islands, and the

fields of the Anasazi culture in New Mexico. The Rapa Nui set about the

task of rock mulching with the same great energy that they used to carve and

transport the Moai. They would ultimately cover half the landmass of their island

in rock gardens of this kind. It was an enormous task. It's been calculated that

over the 400 years that the practice was engaged in, it would have taken over 150

men working daily to construct these vast assemblages

made up of billions of stones. There's strong evidence that the Rapa

Nui people also took advantage of the deep underground caverns of the island.

The caves of Easter Island were formed by lava tubes which developed during the

volcanic eruptions that raised the islands out of the sea. When lava flows

out of the mouth of a volcano, it forms vast underground rivers as the

lava on the surface cools and hardens into rock. When the eruption ends and the

lava stops flowing, the tubes drain their lava, leaving enormous caverns that look as

though a monstrous worm has eaten its way through the rock. These tubes are as

wide as a subway tunnel and Easter Island has one of the largest systems of

volcanic caves in the world. The islanders' relationship with these caves

goes back to the first known moment of their history, as this piece of Rapa Nui

folklore about King Hotu Matua shows. The explorers went to the west side of

the island and discovered a surfing spot. They rode a wave to the right and called

the place where they landed Hanga Roa. They rode a wave to the left and landed

at Apina Iti. They caught more waves, than went ashore and rested in a cave at Pu

Pakakina. Some of these caves can stretch for three or four kilometers

into the island's rock. As the forests of Rapa Nui retreated, its people

increasingly turned to these caves to provide cover for their crops. They

cultivated vast underground gardens where they could grow sweet potatoes and

yams to supplement their diet. They also constructed circular rock walls called

manavai that could be as much as six feet tall and where they could grow a

variety of crops. These kept plants safe from the destructive elements of the

weather, reduced the amount of water runoff, and concentrated nutrients.

Archeologists have identified over 2,500 of these rock gardens around the island,

but this is likely only a fraction of the original number. Studies have shown

that even today, with no active maintenance being done on them, these

rings of rock are still operating as designed by the ancient gardeners. Levels

of phosphorus and potassium, crucial minerals for plants, are much higher

inside the manavai than outside, with the concentrations being sometimes two

or three times as high. Simply put, with their rock gardening

techniques, the Rapa Nui were able to make the land much more productive after the

forest was cleared than it was before. Some of this great agricultural

potential is hinted at in the accounts of the first Dutch sailors to land on

the island, although I will once again caution about trusting too much in these

accounts. Although Roggeveen believed Rapa Nui to be a treeless, sandy

wasteland from a distance, when he actually landed on the island, he was

surprised to find it a productive landscape. We found it not only not sandy;

on the contrary, exceedingly fruitful, producing bananas,

potatoes, sugar cane of remarkable thickness, and many other kinds of the

fruits of the earth. This place, as far as its rich soil and good climate are concerned,

such that it might be made into an earthly paradise.

Another of Roggeveen's officers, a man named Karl Friedrich Behrens, seems also

to contradict this account of a treeless island and reported on a wide variety of

uses the islanders had for palm leaves. They gave us palm branches as peace

offerings. Their houses were set up on wooden stakes, daubed over with luting

and covered with palm leaves. In fact, Behrens paints a remarkably

positive impression of the island overall. This island is a suitable and

convenient place at which to obtain refreshment, as all the country is under

cultivation and we saw in the distance whole tracts of woodland.

Roggeveen himself also witnessed cultivated groves of fruit trees on the

island. It was now deemed advisable to go to the other side of the island, the

principal place of their plantations and fruit trees, for all the things they

brought to us of that kind were fetched from that quarter. So, here, a relatively

clear picture is beginning to emerge. We can say for sure that the arrival of

humans on Rapa Nui resulted in the disappearance of most of its forest, but

this is true of virtually every forested island on earth after the arrival of

people. No one has yet been able to draw a clear causative link between the

loss of the forests on Rapa Nui and the collapse of so-called complex society. In

fact, studies done on the skeletons of islanders from around this time showed

that they suffered from less malnutrition than the average European.

This all seems to be backed up by Roggeveen's account of his first visit to

the island. It's clear from his account that when he arrived, the Rapa Nui

islanders weren't starving. They didn't make any attempt to beg for food from

the newcomers. In fact, they were much more interested in the Europeans' hats.

One brave islander even climbed through a porthole on Roggeveen's ship to

steal a tablecloth. But there's no account of them stealing the Europeans'

food. In fact, it was the Dutch, malnutritioned on a diet of salt meat

and hard tack after weeks at sea, who begged the islanders for food, giving

them cloth and linen in exchange for 60 chickens and 30 bunches of bananas. None

of this sounds like the behavior of a people living on the edge of starvation.

With multiple abundant sources of food, alongside the efficient use of the land

around them, archaeological and written evidence begins to make that popular

scenario of starvation and even cannibalism look patently absurd.

Part and parcel of the starvation narrative is the assumption that the

society of the island descended into a period of brutal conflict once resources

ran scarce, but if resources were abundant, can we also question this

assumption? The folklore of the islanders does record a period of warfare, after

which the Moai-building culture faded into obscurity. But as we've seen, this

folklore can be unreliable at the best of times. Much more reliable is the

archaeological record. When a period of conflict occurs in such an

environment, the evidence is usually hard to miss. One great example of this is the

island of Fiji, another Pacific island 7,000 kilometers away. In Fiji,

archaeologists have found the remains of strong hilltop forts and fortified towns,

all pointing to a period of warfare. In Hawaii, it's well-documented that chiefs

fought each other in large battles featuring hundreds of warriors armed

with clubs. The signs of war in the archaeological record aren't difficult

to spot; increased number of weapons, increased building of defensive

structures, and skeletal remains that bear the marks of violence. First, let's

look at the evidence of weapons on Rapa Nui. The islanders did make blades from

the black volcanic glass obsidian. Obsidian forms in the vents of volcanic

eruptions when lava reaches the surface and cools quickly, forming a glassy

material that is brittle but has exceptionally sharp edges. In fact,

obsidian blades have been measured to be up to a thousand times sharper than a

steel scalpel. The Rapa Nui gave their blades names depending on their shape;

Fish Tail, Rat Spine, Banana Leaf are some examples. Some writers have argued that

the large amount of these blades found points to a mass production of weaponry

and a period of conflict. But studies of these blades have found

that their edges were mostly covered in vegetable matter;

that's sweet potato and taro. They were found in the highest concentrations

in the area of the islanders' rock gardens where they were most likely used

for everyday tasks like the preparation of food. Studies of skeletons have also

seemed to undermine this picture of conflict. In a historical zone of

conflict, we would expect to see skeletons missing their heads, for

instance, or skulls with arrowheads inside, broken bones, and bones bearing

scratches from blades glancing off them. But studies of skeletal remains on

Easter Island have shown that the islanders were, in fact, remarkable for

their mostly peaceful existence. Only around 2% of the skeletons studied have

been found to have suffered trauma from blunt and cutting weapons, and this isn't

a large proportion of the population. I do think here it's also worth

remembering Behrens's observation that the islanders were unarmed when they

first came to meet the Dutch explorers. In the search for defensive

structures, archeologists have also found themselves frustrated.

The small Pacific island of Rapa Iti, for instance, is five times smaller than

Easter Island and yet it has no fewer than 14 hilltop fortresses. On Rapa Iti,

life on the island actually did descend into a nightmare of violence and civil

war, and the signs of this are hard to miss. Fortifications on Rapa Iti involved

watchtowers and walls, ditches, and wooden palisade fences. We find weapons here and

human remains bearing the marks of violence, but on Easter Island no such

fortifications exist. One feature known as the Poike ditch was long assumed to

be a defensive structure, but recent investigations have shown that it's

actually a natural feature caused by the collision of two lava flows. Some walls

built at the entrances to caves have also been used as evidence of the

islanders fortifying themselves, but there's little other evidence of the

caves being used as military strongholds. In fact, they seem to be more

commonly used as hiding places. So, another one of our assumptions about

Easter Island has been taken away. Now we're left having to explain how Rapa

Nui's culture could actually have been less violent than many other comparable

societies, and certainly less violent than any city of Europe at the time. We

may never know what decides whether a small community will descend into a

violent hell like Rapa Iti or whether they will work together to maintain the

peace like on Rapa Nui. Some have suggested that the Rapa Nui islanders

all descended from that first colonisation attempt would have had many

family relations between tribes, and so it may have been unthinkable to escalate

conflict beyond the occasional feud or skirmish. When a rival chief is also the

husband of your wife's sister's aunt, for instance, you might try to avoid

excessive conflict and reach for peaceful compromises. That is, if you want

to avoid a frosty atmosphere at your dinner table.

On a small island, word travels fast and it doesn't pay to be viewed as

overly aggressive. Some historians have even argued that the construction of the

Moai themselves may have helped prevent conflict by allowing the island's

different communities to compete for dominance in a non-violent way.

Another way this may have occurred is through an incredible ritual known as

the bird man competition.

The later history of the island is dominated by the cult of a mysterious

figure known as the tangata manu or the bird man. Cave paintings on Easter Island

show this ceremonial figure with the body of a man but the head and wings of

a bird. Each year, the men of Rapa Nui took part in a ceremony that allowed

them to become the human embodiment of this figure for the next year. It was a

test of strength and daring that is astonishing to even contemplate today.

The contestants who competed to become the bird man had a simple enough task. Off

the southwest coast of Rapa Nui there is a small cluster of islands, and one of

these is a rocky outcrop known as Moto Nui which is home to several species of

nesting birds. Among these is the black tern which we've already seen held a

mystical significance for Polynesian sailors. These birds seem to be gifted

with a magical ability to lead sailors home, and it's not hard to see how they

would have assumed a powerful religious significance.

The bird man contest took place in the spring, during the laying season of the

black terns. Young men who wanted to become that year's bird man would have to

swim out to the rocky island of Moto Nui, a distance of about a kilometer, through

choppy seas and powerful currents. Once they reached the island, they had to

climb up through the flocks of cackling sea birds and search through their nests,

looking for the first egg of the season. Sometimes they would have to wait there

for days, but when they found their precious prize, they had to swim all the

way back to Rapa Nui. Then, dripping with cold saltwater, they had to climb the

sheer 300 meter cliff. The first man to complete this incredible triathlon event

would be crowned the bird man.

It's unclear how much power this figure actually had, but in terms of status

there was no higher honor. Allowing men to battle it out in this test of

strength every year may have played a role in reducing the violence of the

island. So, on Easter Island, the evidence seems to suggest that there was no

starvation, there was no widespread warfare. So, you might be left asking

did their society even collapse at all? The answer to that is yes, but not

when you think it did. For early European explorers, there was no greater mystery

than what they called the riddle of Easter Island.

The French seafarer and artist Pierre Loti wrote about it in the 19th century.

There exists in the midst of the great ocean, in a region where nobody goes, a

mysterious and isolated island. The island is planted with monstrous, great

statues, the work of I don't know what race, today degenerate or vanished, its

great remains an enigma. We've actually encountered this kind of thinking a

number of times over the course of this series. When European explorers

discovered the ruins of past civilizations, they often found it hard

to believe that so-called primitive people had a hand in their construction.

Whether it's assuming that the ruins of Angkor were built by the Romans or that

the Mayan ruins of Tikal were built by the citizens of Atlantis, European

writers have often struggled to believe that the indigenous people of other

lands were capable of great constructions. This kind of thinking

follows a circular logic; only a so-called advanced civilization could

have built these things, but the people I see living here don't look like an

advanced civilization, therefore these people can't

have built these monuments. The problems with this kind of thinking are obvious.

It deceives us into thinking that an advanced civilization can only look like

a European civilization; highly centralized and organized, and the very

notion of a society being advanced suggests that human progress follows a

fixed and inevitable path, and that our way of organizing our societies and

economies is the only one. It's this kind of thinking that made early explorers of

Easter Island look at the advanced rock mulching techniques of the Rapa Nui

people and see only a wasteland scattered with rocks. This belief system

found its logical conclusion in the Norwegian adventurer and archaeologist

Thor Heyerdahl. Heyerdahl believed that the Polynesian Islands had been

populated not by Polynesians hopping the islands from the west, but from people

from South America traveling by raft from the east. He also believed, curiously,

that these people must have been white- -skinned and European in origin. He simply

couldn't comprehend the idea that other peoples around the world could have

developed such artistic and architectural skills. So, what appeared to

be a puzzle to early European visitors wasn't actually a puzzle at all. The

stone statues of Easter Island hadn't been built by some vanished ancient

culture, but by the people who lived there already and seemed to those

Europeans to be so simple. This idea of a societal collapse happening on Easter

Island before contact with the Europeans has survived into our day, even though it

has very little basis in fact. But this doesn't mean that a collapse didn't

occur on Rapa Nui. In fact, the island would soon undergo one of the most

dramatic examples of societal and cultural destruction that can be found

in history. But it wasn't because they cut down the

trees. There is one event in Easter Island's history that I think encapsulates

the complete destruction that would soon rain down on it and its poor,

unsuspecting inhabitants. That's the toppling in only a few years

of every one of the island's statues. For centuries, the islanders had loved and

revered the Moai that their ancestors had spent generations carving and

transporting. In 1722, the Dutch sailor Behrens recounts what he saw of

the islanders' devotion to these statues. They kindle fire in front of certain

remarkably tall stone figures they set up, and thereafter squatting on their

heels with heads bowed down, they bring the palms of their hands together and

alternately raise and lower them. But with every subsequent European visitor

to the island, this situation seemed to change. On the 15th of November, 1770,

48 years after the first European visit, a second arrived.

Two Spanish ships landed there and spent five days on the island, performing a

very thorough survey of its coast. They renamed the island Isla de San Carlos

and claimed it on behalf of King Charles III of Spain. They also

ceremoniously erected three wooden crosses and a Spanish flag on a hill.

When they explored the island, it seems that all of the 200 erected

statues were still standing but four years later, the famous British explorer

Captain Cook sailed past the island and found a much different situation. Cook's

diary of Thursday the 17th of March, 1774, gives his account of the impoverished

state of the island. This is undoubtedly the same island as was seen by Roggeveen

in April 1722, although the description given of

it by the author of that voyage does by no means correspond with it now. No

nation will ever contend for the honor of the discovery of Easter Island, as

there is hardly an island in the sea which affords less refreshments and

conveniences for shipping than it does. Nature has hardly provided it with

anything fit for man to eat or drink, and the natives are but few and plant no

more than sufficient for themselves. If Cook's account is to be believed, the

population size of Easter Island also seems to have taken a serious hit. The

inhabitants of this isle, from what we have been able to see of them, do not

exceed six or seven hundred souls. There's another significant detail, too;

Cook noted that the islanders now carried weapons when approaching foreign

visitors. Their arms are wooden patta pattows and

clubs very much like those of New Zealand, and spears about six or eight

feet long which are pointed at one end with pieces of black flint. But the final

tragic detail is that in the four years since the Spanish expedition, virtually

all of the standing Moai on the island had been toppled over. On the east side

near the sea, they met with three platforms of stonework, or rather, the

ruins of them. On each had stood four of those large statues but they were all

fallen down. All except one were broken by the fall or in some measure defaced.

The practice of statue-toppling is called huri mo'ai in the Rapa Nui

language, and it continued into the 1830s. By 1838, every single coastal Moai had

been taken down. Now, the only standing statues were those abandoned on the

slopes below the quarry at Rano Raraku. What happened to make the islanders

start to carry weapons? What caused their population to reduce so heavily, and what

made them turn so dramatically against their gods? Well, the answer to that may

lie in the very event that opened this episode, and which we've returned to a

number of times; that's the arrival of three Dutch sails

on the horizon on Easter Day, 1722. At the site of the enormous ships dropping

anchor some way off the coast, the Easter islanders gathered on the shore in

astonishment. They must have felt how we would feel if a vast alien spaceship

were to one day materialize over one of our cities. It must have been a mix of

fear and wonder, a sense that the world would never quite be the same again. They

selected one of their number who must have been the bravest

of them all. It's not unlikely, I think, that he would have been the winner of

the most recent bird man competition, the island's champion and protector. This man

got in his canoe and rode out to meet the strange vessels whose white sails

must have looked brilliant and dazzling in the sunlight. Perhaps he wouldn't have

immediately realized how large they were until he got up close and their prows

began to loom over his small canoe. When he approached, he saw that there were men

on board and he waved to them. The Dutch officer, Karl Friedrich Behrens, wrote

about this incredible encounter. During the morning, Captain Bouman brought an

Easter Islander on board, together with his craft. This hapless creature seemed

to be very glad to behold us and showed the greatest wonder at the build of our

ship. He took special notice of the tautness of our spars, the stoutness of

our rigging and running gear; the sails, the guns, which he felt all over with

minute attention and with everything else that he saw. When the image of his own

features was displayed before him in a mirror,

he started suddenly back and then looked towards the back of the glass, apparently

in the expectation of discovering there the cause of the apparition. After we had

sufficiently beguiled ourselves with him and he with us, we started him off again

in his canoe towards the shore. With this light-hearted encounter conceals a dark

truth about Roggeveen's visit. In fact, when Roggeveen and his men went ashore,

their visit would turn to tragedy. It's clear from both accounts that the

Europeans were nervous when they stepped ashore. They had heard stories of violent

encounters with indigenous people and it's worth noting that the novel Robinson

Crusoe had been published only three years before, full of garish stories of

cannibalism and murder. Despite their guns and cannons, it's

clear that the islanders frightened them, and the natural curiosity and boldness

of the Rapa Nui people seemed to make matters worse.

When the Dutchmen got ashore, the islanders pressed around them, grabbing

at their hats and clothes, and even touching the guns they carried. It's not

clear which Dutchman shot first, but the situation quickly spiraled out

of control. The Europeans fired into the unarmed

crowd of islanders. Their guns were flintlock pistols and rifles that would

have sent up puffs of smoke, and the cries of people shot would have rang out,

with the smell of gunpowder filling the air. Behrens recounts what happened next

as he recognized a familiar face among the murdered islanders. Many of them were

shot at this juncture, and among the slain lay the man who had been with us

before of which we were much grieved. In order to obtain possession of the bodies, they

congregated in great numbers, bringing with them presents of various kinds of

fruits and vegetables in order that we might the more readily surrender to them

their slain. The consternation of these people was by no means abated, even with

their children's children in that place will, in times to come, be able to recount

the story of it. We can assume that what Behrens said is true. The story of this

violent encounter must have reverberated through the history of the Rapa Nui

people. It would have destabilized their ancient beliefs and rocked their very

sense of the world around them. Remember that Behrens mentions that the islanders

didn't have any weapons at this point, that they only prayed to their gods for

protection. Now imagine what would happen to this belief system when visitors

arrived from the sea, killed multiple islanders with what must have appeared

to be magic weapons. Then when these visitors walked around the island, even

approaching the statues, and then sailed away unharmed. When you think about this

encounter through that lens, it becomes a lot clearer why the Rapa Nui

might have lost faith in their ancestors. But the sad truth is that the European

bullets were not the deadliest legacy they left behind. The true killer of the

Rapa Nui would have been something much smaller; invisible microbes, viruses, and

bacteria to which the islanders' immune systems had never been exposed. Europe

has always been a crossroads between many different peoples, sometimes

separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles.

Europe's constant wars and exchange of trade spread localized diseases across

the continent, and each year the Silk Road brought fresh shipments of disease

from China and India along with silks and spices. This all resulted in

Europeans becoming immune to a large variety of diseases, but although the

diseases didn't affect them, they could still carry them. For populations

that had not suffered the same exposure, these germs could be devastating. In

pathology, this phenomenon is known as the virgin soil effect. It's not recorded

what diseases may have been transmitted. In other parts of the uncontacted world,

cholera, measles, diphtheria, and even the bubonic plague swept through populations.

By even the lowest estimates, indigenous populations were reduced by 80% right

across the Americas. Four out of every five people died, and it's likely that in

the even more isolated environment of Easter Island, the effects could have

been even more devastating. On other better-observed Polynesian

islands, the reduction in population after first contact was as much as 90%.

So, in the decades after the Dutch visit, we can imagine disease ravaging

the helpless population of Rapa Nui. It's possible that the population of the

island may have crashed from a height of around 3,000 to only a few hundred. The

population may have only just recovered by the time 48 years later that the

Spanish arrived and delivered a whole new dose of invisible death to the

islanders. The Rapa Nui people wouldn't have been able to understand why this

was happening to them. In fact, if you'd asked the Europeans of the time what

caused these diseases, they wouldn't know either. They may have told you that they

were caused by miasmas or bad night air,

this being the prevailing theory at the time. As whole families of islanders died,

the Rapa Nui must have believed that the ancestors they had so laboriously

carved to protect the island had failed them. By the time the Spanish brought the

second wave of disease and it began ravaging the population all over again,

those looming monoliths on the coast may have begun to represent not protective

spirits but the very specters of death themselves, and the islanders, one by one,

began to bring them down.

Soon, these fallen giants would litter the landscape. Now, only those abandoned

Moai half-buried in the runoff from the quarry would remain upright, and the age

of Easter Island statues would come to an end. The loss of Easter Island's

culture was an incalculable tragedy for our understanding of humanity. One of the

reasons this is true is that Easter Island may have been one of the few

places on earth where writing was independently invented. A kind of script

called Rongorongo has been found on just a few dozen wooden objects and tablets

that have survived from Rapa Nui. Many of them are heavily weathered, burned, or

otherwise damaged, and they were all plundered by private collectors in the

19th century, now scattered in museums and private collections around the world.

Every modern attempt to decipher Rongorongo has failed and the script

stands as one of the true mysteries of Easter Island. Many of the glyphs that

make up the script are representations of things the islanders saw around them.

We can see the familiar shapes of sea turtles and birds,

for instance. The legends of the islanders say that the original founder,

the man they called Hotu Matua, had brought the wooden tablets with him when

he landed on Easter Island. But this seems unlikely; there is no known

tradition of writing anywhere else in Polynesia. So, it's thought that

Rongorongo must have been an invention of the islanders themselves. It doesn't

seem like literacy was ever widespread. In fact, early visitors to the island

were told that reading and writing was a privilege of the ruling families and

priests. Some have argued that Rongorongo must be a more modern

invention, that the islanders may have seen Europeans reading and writing,

thus inspiring them to create their own script. If this were the case, then the

written language of Rongorongo would have emerged, flourished, and then fallen

into oblivion all within a space of less than 100 years.

But I think one detail of the script makes me doubt this; that's the character

that shows clearly and unambiguously the distinctive wine bottle shape of a

Jubaea palm tree, a species that went extinct on the island before the year

1650, more than seventy years before first European contact. To my mind, this

alone shows that Rongorongo was developed on the island during a time

when giant palms still towered over its shores. In 1864, a French churchmen Eugene

Eyraud arrived on the island and described seeing a vast number of these

writing tablets, although it seemed to him that the islanders no longer valued

them as repositories of knowledge. In every hut, one finds wooden tablets or

sticks covered in several sorts of hieroglyphic characters. They are

depictions of animals unknown on the island which the natives draw with sharp

stones. Each figure has its own name, but the scant attention they pay to these

tablets leads me to think that these characters, remnants of some primitive

writing, are now for them a habitual practice which they keep without seeking

its meaning. European visitors in the following decades reported seeing the

islanders using these writing tablets as reels for their fishing lines and as

tools for fire-starting. By this time, none of the islanders

could agree on how to read the tablets. Whatever knowledge was held in the

Rongorongo script, the destruction of the island's society had caused it to be lost.

If attempts at deciphering it continue to be unsuccessful, we may

never know what the Rapa Nui people wrote down. This destruction occurred

more than anything due to the final tragic stage of the

collapse of Rapa Nui society. Once again, it's not because they cut down the

trees.

By 1789, maps were being printed that showed exactly where Easter Island was.

These maps meant that anyone with a ship could now make their way there and for

the remaining islanders, this would spell their doom. In the 19th century, the

island became a common stop for ships that wanted to pick up food and supplies,

and more than 50 recorded voyages are known to have stopped there. But the

number of unrecorded visits may have been much higher and as time went by,

people's reasons for visiting the island began to become more sinister. In 1805, a

ship full of American seal hunters found themselves short-handed. In need of

laborers, they made landfall on Easter Island and kidnapped 22 Rapa Nui people,

forcing them to work on their ship and keeping them in shackles below deck. When

the men were finally taken up on deck, every last one of them jumped overboard

into the sea and swam below the surface so the sealers couldn't recapture them.

This would be only the beginning of increasingly organized slave-taking

raids against the island. Soon, the Rapa Nui

were understandably hostile to any foreigner who tried to land there. A

Russian expedition was pelted with stones when they landed in 1816, and

traffic to the South Pacific was only to increase as whaling activity drove

the North Atlantic whale populations to the edge of extinction.

Now, more whalers ventured ever further into the South Pacific and it was common

for these ship crews to kidnap Rapa Nui men and women as slaves. These slave

raids reached their peak in the 1860s when large and well-equipped expeditions

began arriving from Peru with weapons. These teams, known as black birders, would

scour the whole island, searching through its caves and hollows, rounding up almost

every single adult they could find. In total, these raids kidnapped over 1500 of

the Rapa Nui people. Only a scattered bunch of survivors who had managed to hide

were spared. With their work done, the sailors voyaged home to Peru and the

kidnapped Rapa Nui people were put to work on plantations or as domestic

servants. When news of these kidnappings got out, there was a public outcry and a

campaign began to repatriate the kidnapped islanders, headed by a French

bishop. The Peruvian government was reluctant at first, but it was ultimately

forced by international pressure to comply. The islanders were rounded up and

transported back to the home they had been stolen from. But this only led to

further tragedy. Of the 1500 who had been taken, the vast majority had died in Peru,

leaving less than a hundred remaining. A further 85 died due to the harsh

conditions on the voyage back to Easter Island, leaving only about a dozen

survivors who ever made it home. Of these, some were infected with

smallpox and before long, this spread through the remaining population of the

island. This devastating event would be the final death knell for the island's

distinctive and beautiful culture. Among those taken as slaves were every single

one of the priestly class, the only people on the planet who could read the

Rongorongo script. The continuity of songs and folktales that had for

centuries carried the folk memory of the people of Rapa Nui was lost. By 1866

there were just a hundred and eleven adult islanders living on Rapa Nui, 68

men and 43 women. Of these, only 36 ever had any offspring, meaning that the

current indigenous population of the island is descended from only these 36

people. Two years later, in 1868, the HMS Topaze, a 51-gun British frigate of the

Royal Navy, landed on Easter Island to find a devastated population. The

islanders could no longer summon the energy even to throw stones at the

arriving Europeans. The British searched the island until they found what they

were looking for. It was the most beautiful example of a Moai ever carved.

This was one of the rare statues carved not from the soft volcanic tuff, but from

hard basalt, meaning that its surface details and contours have been

remarkably preserved. It must have been truly a labor of love for a team of

ancient artists to carve this hard stone. The British put ropes around it and

dragged it aboard their ship while the helpless Rapa Nui watched. When a British

sailor asked one of the islanders what the name of the statue was, they replied

that he was Hoa Hakananai'a. This translates to 'our stolen friend'. The

statue was eventually presented to Queen Victoria and it was placed in the

British Museum where it remains to this day despite repeated requests by the

modern Rapa Nui for it to be returned. As a final death blow, Rapa Nui was annexed

by Chile in 1888 and twelve years later, the whole island was bought to be used

as a sheep ranch. Capitalism arrived on Easter Island.

The tiny population of remaining Rapa Nui were moved into the town of Hanga

Roa on the west coast. They were ordered to build a nine-foot stone wall around

the town, and were then told they were not allowed to go beyond this wall.

Virtually, the whole island was now off-limits to them. The only way for the

Rapa Nui to survive was to work on the sheep ranch so that they could earn

wages to buy food. But the only food they could buy was from a shop owned by

their employer. They were effectively imprisoned laborers on their own island.

The island now became home to many thousands of sheep who grazed its slopes

for more than 60 years. This, more than anything the Rapa Nui had done,

destroyed the last remaining trees and stripped the island of its topsoil. One

American visitor to the island, a company man named William Thompson, recounted

seeing the ecological damage that the intensive sheep farming had done to the

islands ecology. In other parts of the island may be seen in places and

considerable numbers a hardwood tree called by the natives toromiro. These

must have flourished well at one time, but are now all or nearly all dead and

decaying by reason of being stripped of their bark by the flocks of sheep which

roam at will all over the island. Now, the buried statues of Easter Island

would stare out over the bleak and treeless landscape we've come to

recognize, so different to the rich cultivated gardens of the Rapa Nui.

A clear picture of this collapse does begin to emerge and we can see that the

mystery of Easter Island isn't much of a mystery at all. Rapa Nui wasn't the site

of an ecological suicide as we've been led to believe, but the site of a

genocide. Its unique and beautiful civilization did collapse but it did so

after contact with the outside world and not before. The Easter Islanders didn't

foolishly damage their environment and bring about their downfall. In fact, they

made their island garden flourish. They built one of the most remarkable visual

cultures in the world through ingenuity and hard work, and maintained peace on

their island community. So when we reach for Easter Island as a fable or

warning about our future, we should be very careful about what kind of fable we

turn it into. As we move forward in facing the challenges of our own time,

perhaps we should be asking not what warning we might take from the fate of

Easter Island but what its people may have to teach us.

I want to end the episode by listening to a piece of music we've heard a few

times already. It's an old piece of Rapa Nui folk music performed by students at

the Toki School of Music and Arts in Rapa Nui, which aims to preserve the

traditional culture of the Easter Islanders for the next generation. It's

the song that was once sung over the carving of the great Moai statues and

its rhythm comes from the striking together of two stones. As you listen, try

to imagine what it must have been like for these islanders to watch their

traditional way of life dissolve beneath the pressures of a cruel and unrelenting

outside world. Imagine what it must have felt like to have your faith in the

protective power of your ancestors shaken as disaster after disaster seems

to wash in like a summer storm from the sea. Imagine how they must have felt

standing on those grassy slopes and watching the sails of tall ships coming

in over the horizon, as the Pacific wind blew over the rolling grassy slopes

still scattered with the louring stone statues of a forgotten age.

Thank you for listening to The Fall of Civilizations Podcast. I'd like to thank

my voice actors for this episode Jacob Rollinson, Jake Barrett-Mills, Annie Kelly,

and Shem Jacobs. I'd love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so

please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me @PaulMMCooper.

If you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well

as images, maps, and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast @fall_of_

civ_pod with underscores separating the words. This is normally the part of

the podcast when I ask you to support me and my work on Patreon, and I would like

to give a heartfelt thank you to everybody who has subscribed to the

podcast so far. But I wanted to give that time on this episode to a project that I

find truly inspiring; that's the Toki School of Music and Arts

on Easter Island who kindly agreed to record some music especially for this

episode. Toki was set up after a successful crowdfunding campaign to

create a fully sustainable music school on Rapa Nui where the island's children

can learn the traditional songs of their ancestors and keep the culture of the

island alive for future generations. While the bid to build the school was

successful, it still needs funds to keep running to cover its costs and to pay

its teachers, so if you think you can spare anything please head to Toki Rapa

Nui.org. That's TOKI RAPA NUI.org to find out more and donate whatever you

can to keep this unique and beautiful initiative alive.

For now, goodbye and thanks for listening.