• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Organizing the carving, transport, and erection of the statues required a complex populous society living in an environment rich enough to support it. The statues’ sheer number and size suggest a population much larger than the estimated one of just a few thousand people encountered by European visitors in the 18th and early 19th centuries: what had happened to the former large population? Carving, transporting, and erecting statues would have called for many specialized workers: how were they all fed, when the Easter Island seen by Roggeveen had no native land animals larger than insects, and no domestic animals except chickens? A complex society is also implied by the scattered distribution of Easter’s resources, with its stone quarry near the eastern end, the best stone for making tools in the southwest, the best beach for going out fishing in the northwest, and the best farmland in the south. Extracting and redistributing all of those products would have required a system capable of integrating the island’s economy: how could it ever have arisen in that poor barren landscape, and what happened to it?

All those mysteries have spawned volumes of speculation for almost three centuries. Many Europeans were incredulous that Polynesians, “mere savages,” could have created the statues or the beautifully constructed stone platforms. The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, unwilling to attribute such abilities to Polynesians spreading out of Asia across the western Pacific, argued that Easter Island had instead been settled across the eastern Pacific by advanced societies of South American Indians, who in turn must have received civilization across the Atlantic from more advanced societies of the Old World. Heyerdahl’s famous Kon-Tiki expedition and his other raft voyages aimed to prove the feasibility of such prehistoric transoceanic contacts, and to support connections between ancient Egypt’s pyramids, the giant stone architecture of South America’s Inca Empire, and Easter’s giant stone statues. My own interest in Easter was kindled over 40 years ago by reading Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki account and his romantic interpretation of Easter’s history; I thought then that nothing could top that interpretation for excitement. Going further, the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken, a believer in visits to Earth by extraterrestrial astronauts, claimed that Easter’s statues were the work of intelligent spacelings who owned ultramodern tools, became stranded on Easter, and were finally rescued.

The explanation of these mysteries that has now emerged attributes statue-carving to the stone picks and other tools demonstrably littering Rano Raraku rather than to hypothetical space implements, and to Easter’s known Polynesian inhabitants rather than to Incas or Egyptians. This history is as romantic and exciting as postulated visits by Kon-Tiki rafts or extraterrestrials—and much more relevant to events now going on in the modern world. It is also a history well suited to leading off this series of chapters on past societies, because it proves to be the closest approximation that we have to an ecological disaster unfolding in complete isolation.

Easter is a triangular island consisting entirely of three volcanoes that arose from the sea, in close proximity to each other, at different times within the last million or several million years, and that have been dormant throughout the island’s history of human occupation. The oldest volcano, Poike, erupted about 600,000 years ago (perhaps as much as 3,000,000 years ago) and now forms the triangle’s southeast corner, while the subsequent eruption of Rano Kau formed the southwest corner. Around 200,000 years ago, the eruption of Terevaka, the youngest volcano centered near the triangle’s north corner, released lavas now covering 95% of the island’s surface.

Easter’s area of 66 square miles and its elevation of 1,670 feet are both modest by Polynesian standards. The island’s topography is mostly gentle, without the deep valleys familiar to visitors to the Hawaiian Islands. Except at the steep-sided