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By Root 1901 0

to Mangarevan and Pitcairn tool styles, and the correspondence of Easter Island skulls to two Henderson Island skulls even more closely than to Marquesan skulls all suggest use of Mangareva, Pitcairn, and Henderson as stepping-stones. In 1999 the reconstructed Polynesian sailing canoe Hokule’a succeeded in reaching Easter from Mangareva after a voyage of 17 days. To us modern landlubbers, it is literally incredible that canoe voyagers sailing east from Mangareva could have had the good luck to hit an island only nine miles wide from north to south after such a long voyage. However, Polynesians knew how to anticipate an island long before land became visible, from the flocks of nesting seabirds that fly out over a radius of a hundred miles from land to forage. Thus, the effective diameter of Easter (originally home to some of the largest seabird colonies in the whole Pacific) would have been a respectable 200 miles to Polynesian canoe-voyagers, rather than a mere nine.

Easter Islanders themselves have a tradition that the leader of the expedition to settle their island was a chief named Hotu Matu’a (“the Great Parent”) sailing in one or two large canoes with his wife, six sons, and extended family. (European visitors in the late 1800s and early 1900s recorded many oral traditions from surviving islanders, and those traditions contain much evidently reliable information about life on Easter in the century or so before European arrival, but it is uncertain whether the traditions accurately preserve details about events a thousand years earlier.) We shall see (Chapter 3) that the populations of many other Polynesian islands remained in contact with each other through regular interisland two-way voyaging after their initial discovery and settlement. Might that also have been true of Easter, and might other canoes have arrived after Hotu Matu’a? Archaeologist Roger Green has suggested that possibility for Easter, on the basis of similarities between some Easter tool styles and the styles of Mangarevan tools at a time several centuries after Easter’s settlement. Against that possibility, however, stands Easter’s traditional lack of dogs, pigs, and some typical Polynesian crops that one might have expected subsequent voyagers to have brought if those animals and crops had by chance failed to survive in Hotu Matu’a’s canoe or had died out soon after his arrival. In addition, we shall see in the next chapter that finds of numerous tools made of stone whose chemical composition is distinctive for one island, turning up on another island, unequivocally prove interisland voyaging between the Marquesas, Pitcairn, Henderson, Mangareva, and Societies, but no stone of Easter origin has been found on any other island or vice versa. Thus, Easter Islanders may have remained effectively completely isolated at the end of the world, with no contact with outsiders for the thousand years or so separating Hotu Matu’a’s arrival from Roggeveen’s.

Given that East Polynesia’s main islands may have been settled around A.D. 600-800, when was Easter itself occupied? There is considerable uncertainty about the date, as there is for the settlement of the main islands. The published literature on Easter Island often mentions possible evidence for settlement at A.D. 300-400, based especially on calculations of language divergence times by the technique known as glottochronology, and on three radiocarbon dates from charcoal in Ahu Te Peu, in the Poike ditch, and in lake sediments indicative of forest clearance. However, specialists on Easter Island history increasingly question these early dates. Glottochronological calculations are considered suspect, especially when applied to languages with as complicated histories as Easter’s (known to us mainly through, and possibly contaminated by, Tahitian and Marquesan informants) and Mangareva’s (apparently secondarily modified by later Marquesan arrivals). All three of the early radiocarbon dates were obtained on single samples dated by older methods now superseded, and there is no proof that the charcoal objects