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By Root 1873 0

modern societies. For the past societies that I shall discuss, half of which lack writing, we know far less about individual people’s values and goals than we do for Montana. For the modern societies, information about values and goals is available, but I myself have more experience of them in Montana than elsewhere in the modern world. Hence as you read this book, and as you consider environmental problems posed mostly in impersonal terms, please think of the problems of those other societies as viewed by individual people like Stan Falkow, Rick Laible, Chip Pigman, Tim Huls, John Cook, and the Hirschy brothers and sisters. When we discuss Easter Island’s apparently homogeneous society in the next chapter, imagine an Easter Island chief, farmer, stone carver, and porpoise fisherman each relating his or her particular life story, values, and goals, just as my Montana friends did for me.

PART TWO

PAST SOCIETIES

CHAPTER 2

Twilight at Easter

The quarry’s mysteries ■ Easter’s geography and history ■ People and food ■ Chiefs, clans, and commoners ■ Platforms and statues ■ Carving, transporting, erecting ■ The vanished forest ■ Consequences for society ■ Europeans and explanations ■ Why was Easter fragile? ■ Easter as metaphor ■

No other site that I have visited made such a ghostly impression on me as Rano Raraku, the quarry on Easter Island where its famous gigantic stone statues were carved (Plate 5). To begin with, the island is the most remote habitable scrap of land in the world. The nearest lands are the coast of Chile 2,300 miles to the east and Polynesia’s Pitcairn Islands 1,300 miles to the west (map, pp. 84-85). When I arrived in 2002 by jet plane from Chile, my flight took more than five hours, all spent over the Pacific Ocean stretching endlessly between the horizons, with nothing to see below us except water. By the time, towards sunset, that the small low speck that was Easter Island finally did become dimly visible ahead in the twilight, I had become concerned whether we would succeed in finding the island before nightfall, and whether our plane had enough fuel to return to Chile if we overshot and missed Easter. It is hardly an island that one would expect to have been discovered and settled by any humans before the large swift European sailing ships of recent centuries.

Rano Raraku is an approximately circular volcanic crater about 600 yards in diameter, which I entered by a trail rising steeply up to the crater rim from the low plain outside, and then dropping steeply down again toward the marshy lake on the crater floor. No one lives in the vicinity today. Scattered over both the crater’s outer and inner walls are 397 stone statues, representing in a stylized way a long-eared legless human male torso, mostly 15 to 20 feet tall but the largest of them 70 feet tall (taller than the average modern 5-story building), and weighing from 10 up to 270 tons. The remains of a transport road can be discerned passing out of the crater through a notch cut into a low point in its rim, from which three more transport roads about 25 feet wide radiate north, south, and west for up to 9 miles towards Easter’s coasts. Scattered along the roads are 97 more statues, as if abandoned in transport from the quarry. Along the coast and occasionally inland are about 300 stone platforms, a third of them formerly supporting or associated with 393 more statues, all of which until a few decades ago were not erect but thrown down, many of them toppled so as to break them deliberately at the neck.

From the crater rim, I could see the nearest and largest platform (called Ahu Tongariki), whose 15 toppled statues the archaeologist Claudio Cristino described to me re-erecting in 1994 by means of a crane capable of lifting 55 tons. Even with that modern machinery, the task proved challenging for Claudio, because Ahu Tongariki’s largest statue weighed 88 tons. Yet Easter Island’s prehistoric Polynesian population had owned no cranes, no wheels, no machines, no metal tools, no draft animals, and no means other than human muscle