Reconsidering Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its monumental statues (moai).  For several hundred years it has captured the public's imagination because of its mind-staggering physical remoteness and the seemingly incredible feat of humans locating and colonizing the island, located 2,000 miles from the nearest island in East Polynesia:

Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island is a new book recently acquired by our library system, which I borrowed after reading that the author offered a new vision of the history of the island.  It is indeed an awesome book, which I have no doubt will become a standard reference citation, but it is probably TMI for the average reader because it examines every single detail about the history of the island, giving new emphasis to original ethnographic research conducted a century ago and debunking many modern interpretations.

"Conventional wisdom" (repeated in pop science articles and television shows) suggests as follows:

"That theory argues that Islanders let their population outgrow their home's capacity to support them.   In the quest for food they overfished the sea and destroyed soils, and in desperate religious tumoil they cut down all the trees to move statues.  Society collapsed in a fit of war and cannibalism.  When Europeans first saw Rapa Nui, it is said, they witnessed the result: a devastated land with few people, who could not have created the island's spectacular archaeological legacy." (xix)  

Thor Heyerdahl speculated and tried to prove that Rapa Nui had been colonized by white people who had crossed the Atlantic, built the South American civilizations and then continued west across the Pacific. 

The book convincingly debunks previous speculations.  The author notes for example that the population was not starving when the first Europeans arrived.  In fact, they offered food to the sailors.  They had an elaborate system for harvesting intermittent rainfall and had developed farming techniques suitable to the terrain.  The state of their society in modern times is in part a reflection of their more recent history:

"Lost in the haunting seduction of this eco-collapse theory was the true history of what the Islanders had endured at the hands of colonial imperialists.  Within a century and a half of having been found by Dutch sailors, Rapa Nui's people had been kidnapped, sold into slavery, killed off by new diseases, and removed to other islands.  They were all but extinguished.  Survivors were housed in a walled settlement, forbidden to return to their traditional homes and gardens and their sacred places, which were overrun by sheep and cattle making money for businesses half a world away.  Their history was written by outsiders who could not credit them with the abilities their monuments revealed... Those abandoned monuments were plundered and restored to make a museum for tourists... Their ancestors were an example to the world of the worst imaginable negligence, of behavior so lacking in respect for life, for the very soils that nurtured their existence, that they brought down their own future in a violent orgy of self-destruction..." (143)

An interesting book to browse.