Where giants walked

"Easter Island: Where Giants Walked" is a combined pod cast and visual documentary available on YouTube. It was posted there in 2020. 

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in the Pacific Ocean is mostly known for its mysterious stone statues (moai). For centuries, Europeans have speculated about their origins, often refusing to believe that the native Easter Islanders themselves (who are of Polynesian stock) could have raised them. One example is Thor Heyerdahl´s somewhat wild idea (mentioned in passing in the docu) that the moai must have been built by White-skinned people from South America! Another (not mentioned) is the speculation about a connection to Mu or Lemuria (a kind of Pacific Atlantis). "Where Giants Walked" isn´t particularly interested in these alternative ideas, however. Rather, it´s main target is the "official" narrative, popularized by Jared Diamond in his bestselling book "Collapse", according to which the islanders destroyed their own complex society long before the arrival of Europeans by a combination of ecocide, warfare and rampant cannibalism. The narrator, Paul M M Cooper, believes that there is essentially no real evidence for this standard narrative, and that it really represents a projection of our own modern fears of environmental destruction. One obvious example is the claim that the natives cut down all the island´s trees in order to transport the gigantic stone statues from the quarries to the coast (perhaps by using the logs as rollers or to build sledges), and that this project in turn was completely irrational in nature, being essentially a status-driven conflict between different tribal war chiefs. This, of course, is how a certain kind of moralist sees *our own* present predicament...

So what actually happened, then? 

First, even Cooper has to admit that the Polynesian settlement on the island (which recent research estimates at around 1200 AD, much later than hitherto believed) wasn´t a particularly "harmonious" affair, ecologically speaking. Polynesian settlers introduced their own favored flora and fauna at the islands they settled. At Easter Island, rats were introduced quite deliberately, since they were eaten by the common people! (I always assumed the rats were accidental stove aways rather than an inplanted food source.) The rats - which bred exponentially -  probably destroyed the palm tree forests, by simply eating the palm nuts. Also, slash and burn agriculture was practiced, with similar devastating results. So yes, there really was an "ecocide" of sorts on Easter Island, although the narrator doesn´t want to use that term. However, since humans are resourceful creatures, the loss of forest vegetation didn´t kill their society. The Easter Islanders simply adapted to the new conditions, building a vast network of "rock gardens" across the island, which prevented the loss of top soil and captured rain water. When the first Europeans arrived on the island, they spotted large fruit orchards, and the natives even gave them food to eat, which doesn´t exactly sound like a starving remnant population. As for the moai, they could be transported to their intended locations on the coast by rocking them forward in standing position with the help of ropes, so no trees were needed. (This is why the islanders said that the statues "walked".) As for warfare, no real archeological evidence for such seems to exist: no hill forts, weapons, skeletons with spear marks, and so on (such evidence can be found on other Polynesian islands). This, obviously, suggests that no war took place. The obsidian "spear points" (mata´a) found all over the island probably weren´t used for war, according to recent research, but mostly for agriculture. 

Thus, the real "pre-contact" history of Rapa Nui is a story of a devastating human impact on the local environment - quite similar to that on many other islands, or indeed mainlands, around the world already before modern civilization - but also of human ingenuity and resilience in the face of adversity (whether or not it´s caused by humans). What makes Easter Island fairly unique is that it seems to have been relatively peaceful. Cooper suggests that there were two reasons for this peacefulness. One was that the islanders may have been closely related, being descended from a relatively small group of original settlers (note the socio-biologic slant of this explanation). Another is ingenious ways to "blow off steam" and let people (mostly males, by the look of it) compete against each other in other ways than through warfare. The carving, transportation and raising of the moai might have been a peaceful way of gaining status. Another was the curious "birdman cult", an annual ritual during which the young men were supposed to swim to a small island off the coast and steal eggs from the nests of terns. 

So why did the Easter Island society eventually collapse, then? The story turns out to be an over-familiar one: yes, it was European (and Euro-South American) colonization, more specifically a combination of introduced diseases and slave-raiding. The most devastating slave raid took place in 1862, when 1,500 natives were forced into slavery in Peru. This triggered a chain of events that destroyed the last remnants of the old Rapa Nui culture. For instance, the entire priestly class was wiped out, and with them the only people who could read the unique Rongorongo script, the only writing system developed by Polynesians. When the island came under Chilean control, most of it was turned into a gigantic sheep farm. The bizarre semi-barren landscape characteristic of Easter Island today is the result of relatively recent sheep grazing, not some ancient ecocide. The surviving natives were forced to live in a town cordoned off from the rest of the island, and work for the capitalist agri-business that had taken over their homeland...

Cooper ends by pointing out that if Easter Island´s fate has some kind of lesson to teach us, or warning to convey, maybe we should be very careful about what that warning might be! 

I admit that he has a point there...