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.”
Source : nationalgeographic.com
