If They Could Only Talk
“The statues walked,” Easter Islanders say. Archaeologists are still trying to figure out how—and whether their story is a cautionary tale of environmental disaster or a celebration of human ingenuity.
On a winter night last June, José Antonio Tuki, a 30-year-old
artist on Easter Island, did one of the things he loves best: He left
his one-room home on the southwest coast and hiked north across the
island to Anakena beach. Legend has it the earliest Polynesian settlers
hauled their canoes ashore at Anakena a thousand years ago or so, after
navigating more than a thousand miles of open Pacific. Under the same
moon and stars Tuki sat on the sand and gazed directly before him at the
colossal human statues—the moai.
Carved centuries ago from volcanic tuff, they’re believed to embody the deified spirits of ancestors.
Sleepless roosters crowed; stray dogs barked. A frigid wind gusted
in from Antarctica, making Tuki shiver.
He’s a Rapanui, an indigenous
Polynesian resident of Rapa Nui, as the locals call Easter Island; his
own ancestors probably helped carve some of the hundreds of statues that
stud the island’s grassy hills and jagged coasts. At Anakena seven
potbellied moai stand at attention on a 52-foot-long stone
platform—backs to the Pacific, arms at their sides, heads capped with
tall pukao of red scoria, another volcanic rock. They watch over
this remote island from a remote age, but when Tuki stares at their
faces, he feels a surge of connection. “It’s something strange and
energetic,” he says. “This is something produced from my culture. It’s
Rapanui.”
He shakes his head. “How did they do it?”
Easter Island covers just 63 square miles. It lies 2,150 miles
west of South America and 1,300 miles east of Pitcairn, its nearest
inhabited neighbor. After it was settled, it remained isolated for
centuries. All the energy and resources that went into the moai—which
range in height from four to 33 feet and in weight to more than 80
tons—came from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed on
Easter Sunday in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture. The moai were
carved with stone tools, mostly in a single quarry, then transported
without draft animals or wheels to massive stone platforms, or ahu, up to 11 miles away. Tuki’s question—how did they do it?—has vexed legions of visitors in the past half century.
But lately the moai have been drawn into a larger debate, one that
opposes two distinct visions of Easter Island’s past—and of humanity in
general. The first, eloquently expounded by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared
Diamond, presents the island as a cautionary parable: the most extreme
case of a society wantonly destroying itself by wrecking its
environment. Can the whole planet, Diamond asks, avoid the same fate? In
the other view, the ancient Rapanui are uplifting emblems of human
resilience and ingenuity—one example being their ability to walk giant
statues upright across miles of uneven terrain.
When the Polynesian settlers arrived at Rapa Nui, they had
been at sea for weeks in open canoes. There were probably only a few
dozen of them. Nowadays 12 flights arrive every week from Chile, Peru,
and Tahiti, and in 2011 those planes delivered 50,000 tourists, ten
times the island’s population. Just three decades ago, cars,
electricity, and phone service were scarce; now Hanga Roa, the only
town, buzzes with Internet cafés, bars, and dance clubs, and cars and
pickup trucks clog the streets on Saturday nights. Wealthy tourists drop
a thousand dollars a night at the poshest of scores of hotels. A
Birkenstock shop caters to footsore ramblers. “The island is not an
island anymore,” says Kara Pate, 40, a Rapanui sculptor. She’s married
to a German she met here 23 years ago.
Chile annexed Easter Island in 1888, but until 1953 it allowed a
Scottish company to manage the island as a giant sheep ranch. The sheep
ranged freely, while the Rapanui were penned into Hanga Roa. In 1964
they revolted, later obtaining Chilean citizenship and the right to
elect their own mayor.
Ambivalence toward el conti (the continent) runs high.
Easter Islanders depend on Chile for fuel and daily air shipments of
food. They speak Spanish and go to the mainland for higher education.
Meanwhile, Chilean migrants, lured in part by the island’s income tax
exemption, gladly take jobs that Rapanui spurn. “A Rapanui will say,
What, you think I’m going to wash dishes?” says Beno Atán, a 27-year-old
tour guide and a native himself. Though many Rapanui have married
mainlanders, some worry their culture is being diluted. The population
is now around 5,000, nearly double what it was 20 years ago, and fewer
than half the people are Rapanui.
Just about every job on Easter Island depends on tourism. “Without
it,” says Mahina Lucero Teao, head of the tourism chamber, “everyone
would be starving on the island.” The mayor, Luz Zasso Paoa, says, “Our
patrimony is the base of our economy. You’re not here for us, but for
that patrimony.” That is, for the moai.
Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer
whose Pacific expeditions helped ignite the world’s curiosity about
Easter Island, thought the statues had been created by pre-Inca from
Peru, not by Polynesians. Erich von Däniken, the best-selling Swiss
author of Chariots of the Gods, was sure the moai were built by
stranded extraterrestrials. Modern science—linguistic, archaeological,
and genetic evidence—has proved the moai builders were Polynesian but
not how they moved their creations.
Researchers have tended to assume
the ancestors dragged the statues somehow, using a lot of ropes and
wood. “The experts can say whatever they want,” says Suri Tuki, 25, José
Tuki’s half brother. “But we know the truth. The statues walked.” In
the Rapanui oral tradition, the moai were animated by mana, a spiritual force transmitted by powerful ancestors.
There are no reports of moai building after Europeans arrived in
the 18th century. By then Easter Island had only a few scrawny trees. In
the 1970s and 1980s, though, biogeographer John Flenley of New
Zealand’s Massey University found evidence—pollen preserved in lake
sediments—that the island had been covered in lush forests, including
millions of giant palm trees, for thousands of years. Only after the
Polynesians arrived around A.D. 800 had those forests given way to grasslands.
Jared Diamond drew heavily on Flenley’s work for his assertion in Collapse,
his influential 2005 book, that ancient Easter Islanders committed
unintentional ecocide. They had the bad luck, Diamond argues, to have
settled an extremely fragile island—dry, cool, and remote, which means
it’s poorly fertilized by windblown dust or volcanic ash. (Its own
volcanoes are quiescent.) When the islanders cleared the forests for
firewood and farming, the forests didn’t grow back. As wood became
scarce and the islanders could no longer build seagoing canoes for
fishing, they ate the birds. Soil erosion decreased their crop yields.
Before Europeans showed up, the Rapanui had descended into civil war and
cannibalism. The collapse of their isolated civilization, Diamond
writes, is “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by
overexploiting its own resources” and “a worst-case scenario for what
may lie ahead of us in our own future.”
The moai, he thinks, accelerated the self-destruction. Diamond
interprets them as power displays by rival chieftains who, trapped on a
remote little island, lacked other ways of strutting their stuff. They
competed by building ever bigger statues. Diamond thinks they laid the
moai on wooden sledges, hauled over log rails—a technique successfully
tested by UCLA archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Easter
Island Statue Project—but that required both a lot of wood and a lot of
people. To feed the people, even more land had to be cleared. When the
wood was gone and civil war began, the islanders began toppling the
moai. By the 19th century none were standing. Easter Island’s landscape
acquired the aura of tragedy that, in the eyes of Diamond and many
others, it retains today.
Rearrange and reinterpret the scattered shards of fact,
though, and you get a more optimistic vision of the Rapa Nui past—that
of archaeologists Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo
of California State University Long Beach, who have studied the island
for the past decade. It’s a vision peopled by peaceful, ingenious moai
builders and careful stewards of the land. Hunt and Lipo agree that
Easter Island lost its lush forests and that it was an “ecological
catastrophe”—but the islanders themselves weren’t to blame. And the moai
certainly weren’t. There is indeed much to learn from Easter Island,
Hunt says, “but the story is different.”
His and Lipo’s controversial new version, based on their research
and others’, begins with their own excavation at Anakena beach. It has
convinced them that the Polynesians didn’t arrive until A.D.
1200, about four centuries later than is commonly understood, which
would leave them only five centuries to denude the landscape. Slashing
and burning wouldn’t have been enough, Hunt and Lipo think. Anyway,
another tree killer was present. When archaeologists dig up nuts from
the extinct Easter Island palm, the nuts are often marred by tiny
grooves, made by the sharp teeth of Polynesian rats.
The rats arrived in the same canoes as the first settlers.
Abundant bones in the Anakena dig suggest the islanders dined on them,
but otherwise the rodents had no predators. In just a few years, Hunt
and Lipo calculate, they would have overrun the island. Feasting on palm
nuts, they would have prevented the reseeding of the slow-growing trees
and thereby doomed Rapa Nui’s forest, even if humans hadn’t been
slashing and burning. No doubt the rats ate birds’ eggs too.
Of course, the settlers bear responsibility for bringing the rats;
Hunt and Lipo suspect they did so intentionally. (They also brought
chickens.) But like invasive species today, the Polynesian rats did more
harm to the ecosystem than to the humans who transported them. Hunt and
Lipo see no evidence that Rapanui civilization collapsed when the palm
forest did; based on their own archaeological survey of the island, they
think its population grew rapidly after settlement to around 3,000 and
then remained more or less stable until the arrival of Europeans.
Cleared fields were more valuable to the Rapanui than palm forests
were. But they were wind-lashed, infertile fields watered by erratic
rains. Easter Island was a tough place to make a living. It required
heroic efforts. In farming, as in moai moving, the islanders shifted
monumental amounts of rock—but into their fields, not out. They built
thousands of circular stone windbreaks, called manavai, and
gardened inside them. They mulched whole fields with broken volcanic
rocks to keep the soil moist and fertilized it with nutrients that the
volcanoes were no longer spreading. In short, Hunt, Lipo, and others
contend, the prehistoric Rapanui were pioneers of sustainable farming,
not inadvertent perpetrators of ecocide. “Rather than a case of abject
failure, Rapa Nui is an unlikely story of success,” Hunt and Lipo argue
in their recent book.
It’s called The Statues That Walked, and the Rapanui enjoy better spin in it than they do in Collapse.
Hunt and Lipo don’t trust oral history accounts of violent conflict
among the Rapanui; sharp obsidian flakes that other archaeologists see
as weapons, they see as farm tools. The moai helped keep the peace, they
argue, not only by signaling the power of their builders but also by
limiting population growth: People raised statues rather than children.
What’s more, moving the moai required few people and no wood, because
they were walked upright. On that issue, Hunt and Lipo say, evidence
supports the folklore.
Sergio Rapu, 63, a Rapanui archaeologist and former Easter Island
governor who did graduate work with Hunt, took his American colleagues
to the ancient quarry on Rano Raraku, the island’s southeastern volcano.
Looking at the many moai abandoned there in various stages of
completion, Rapu explained how they were engineered to walk: Fat bellies
tilted them forward, and a D-shaped base allowed handlers to roll and
rock them side to side. Last year, in experiments funded by National
Geographic’s Expeditions Council, Hunt and Lipo showed that as few as 18
people could, with three strong ropes and a bit of practice, easily
maneuver a 10-foot, 5-ton moai replica a few hundred yards. In real
life, walking miles with much larger moai would have been a tense
business. Dozens of fallen statues line the roads leading away from the
quarry. But many more made it to their platforms intact.
No one knows for sure when the last statue was carved. The moai
cannot be dated directly. Many were still standing when the Dutch
arrived in 1722, and Rapanui civilization was peaceful and thriving
then, Hunt and Lipo argue. But the explorers introduced deadly diseases
to which islanders had no immunity, along with artifacts that replaced
the moai as status symbols. Snatching Europeans’ hats—Hunt and Lipo cite
many reports of this—became more appealing than hoisting a multiton red
pukao onto a moai. In the 19th century slave traders decimated the
population, which shriveled to 111 people by 1877.
As Hunt and Lipo tell it, Easter Island’s story is a parable of
genocide and culturecide, not ecocide. Their friend Sergio Rapu buys
some but not all of it. “Don’t tell me those obsidian tools were just
for agriculture,” he says, laughing. “I’d love to hear that my people
never ate each other. But I’m afraid they did.”
Today islanders confront a fresh challenge: exploiting
their cultural legacy without wrecking it. A growing population and
thousands of tourists are straining a limited water supply. The island
lacks a sewer system and a place to put the swelling volume of trash;
between 2009 and mid-2011 it shipped 230 tons to the mainland.
“So what
do we do?” asks Zasso Paoa, the mayor. “Limit migration? Limit tourism?
That’s where we are now.” The island recently started asking tourists to
take their trash home with them in their suitcases.
Tourists are forbidden to touch moai, but horses happily rub
against them, wearing away the porous tuff.
Though cars are now the
preferred mode of transport, more than 6,000 horses and cattle—“more
than people,” grumbles tour guide Atán—still run free, trampling ground
once trodden by Scottish-owned sheep and relieving themselves on once
sacred platforms. But the islanders’ own desire to develop their
ancestral lands may be a greater threat to their densely packed
heritage: more than 20,000 archaeological features in all, including
walled gardens and stone chicken houses as well as moai and ahu. More
than 40 percent of the island is a protected national park, which limits
available land. “People have to learn that archaeology isn’t their
enemy,” says Rapu.
Decades ago he himself helped get the moai at Anakena back
upright. In the process he and his colleagues also discovered how the
moai builders had breathed soul into their colossal statues after the
long trek from the quarry: As a finishing touch, they placed eyes of
white coral and pupils of obsidian or red scoria into the empty sockets.
A grove of coconut palms, imported from Tahiti, overlooks Anakena
beach today, reassuring sunbathers and Chilean newlyweds that they
really are in Polynesia, even if the wind is shrieking and the grassy
rolling hills behind them look like the Scottish Highlands. The moai are
eyeless now and not confiding—to the tourists, José Tuki, or anyone
else—how they got there or which story of Easter Island is true. Tuki,
for one, can handle the ambiguity. “I want to know the truth,” he says.
“But maybe the island doesn’t tell all its answers. And maybe knowing
everything would take its power away.”
