Looking up “Easter Island” online will quickly bring up words like “disaster”, “catastrophe” and “ecocide”. The name “Easter Island” was given by Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who sighted it on Easter Sunday, 1722. It is an extremely remote island in the subtropical southeastern Pacific Ocean, more than 2,000 km (1250 mi) from the nearest island (Pitcairn), and over 3,500 km (1280 mi) from the nearest mainland, Chile.
Easter Island, at the southeastern tip of Polynesia.
The island consists of three coalesced, extinct volcanoes. It is debated when Polynesian settlers, the Rapa Nui, first arrived, but likely between 800-1200 CE. Their population reached about 15,000, concentrated mostly on the eastern side of the island, but was down to fewer than 200 by the late 1800’s. The island is now a territory of Chile.
Map of Easter Island (note the multiple craters).
Though it has a tropical rainforest climate, with warm, humid summers and mild winters, the island is virtually treeless. It is best known for the roughly 1,000 monumental statues—the moai—spread throughout it. Their purpose is unknown, but anthropologists theorize they are monuments to ancestors. (I question this, since there are no such monuments (that I’m aware of) anywhere else in Polynesia, and certainly not on this scale.)
Artist's concept of the island, pre-settlement.
Pollen studies indicate that the island was once forested with broadleaf tropical and subtropical trees, especially a large, now-extinct species of palm. However, Polynesian settlers brought their preferred food source, the Polynesian rat, which spread unimpeded. There is little evidence that the rats attacked the trees. Such remains as there are show human agency in the trees being felled, not teeth marks. The trees were cut for building and to create farmland. The rats meanwhile consumed smaller plants and insects, completing the destruction of the Easter Island ecosystem at multiple levels.
Moai on the slope of the crater near the water.
By the late 1800’s the Rapa Nui population had declined sharply to only a few thousand. European explorers cited the environmental ruin of the island, compared to others in the Pacific, and stated (denied by the natives) that the Rapa Nui had turned to cannibalism. Raiders from Chile took away more than 1500 islanders as slaves, leaving only 111 by 1872. From that time on the local population has staged a recovery, numbering about 4500 today (out of 7600 total). Though nominally the ethnic group has recovered, nearly all cultural knowledge of the original settlers is lost. The original Rapa Nui society is dead.
More moai, recently restored to standing position, lining the coast. These don't strike me as simple memorials to earlier generations. The moai found in their native positions face the water--only the modern restorations face inland. Half the statues were still being made in the quarry. This seems less like a gradual, generational practice to me, and more like a desperate rush. I suspect these huge, imposing faces were meant to be guards. Were they a collective pathological response, a panicked society's attempt to protect itself from collapse by means of an invented ritual? Critique away!
There are examples all across the globe of human societies rising, then exhausting their environments to the point that the society collapses. Some, as in the case of Easter Island, are entirely the fault of the people, who made their own home almost uninhabitable. In other cases, such as the Hittite Empire, natural disasters helped. But Easter Island is perhaps the world’s clearest, if tiniest, example of humanity running headlong into the limits to growth.
Rano Kau crater, southwestern tip of the island.
Tomorrow: introduction to Indonesia.
Be brave, and be well.
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