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Instead, what appear to be the most reliable dates for early occupation of Easter are the radiocarbon dates of A.D. 900 that paleontologist David Steadman and archaeologists Claudio Cristino and Patricia Vargas obtained on wood charcoal and on bones of porpoises eaten by people, from the oldest archaeological layers offering evidence of human presence at Easter’s Anakena Beach. Anakena is by far the best canoe landing beach on the island, the obvious site at which the first settlers would have based themselves. The dating of the porpoise bones was done by the modern state-of-the-art radiocarbon method known as AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry), and a so-called marine reservoir correction for radiocarbon dating of bones of marine creatures like porpoises was roughly estimated. These dates are likely to be close to the time of first settlement, because they came from archaeological layers containing bones of native land birds that were exterminated very quickly on Easter and many other Pacific islands, and because canoes to hunt porpoises soon became unavailable. Hence the current best estimate of Easter’s settlement is somewhat before A.D. 900.

What did the islanders eat, and how many of them were there?

At the time of European arrival, they subsisted mainly as farmers, growing sweet potatoes, yams, taro, bananas, and sugarcane, plus chickens as their sole domestic animal. Easter’s lack of coral reefs or of a lagoon meant that fish and shellfish made a smaller contribution to the diet than on most other Polynesian islands. Seabirds, land birds, and porpoises were available to the first settlers, but we shall see that they declined or disappeared later. The result was a high-carbohydrate diet, exacerbated by the islanders’ compensating for Easter’s limited sources of fresh water by copiously drinking sugarcane juice. No dentist would be surprised to learn that the islanders ended up with the highest incidence of cavities and tooth decay of any known prehistoric people: many children already had cavities by age 14, and everyone did by their 20s.

Easter’s population at its peak has been estimated by methods such as counting the number of house foundations, assuming 5 to 15 people per house, and assuming one-third of identified houses to have been occupied simultaneously, or by estimating the numbers of chiefs and their followers from the numbers of platforms or erected statues. The resulting estimates range from a low of 6,000 to a high of 30,000 people, which works out to an average of 90 to 450 people per square mile. Some of the island’s area, such as the Poike Peninsula and the highest elevations, was less suitable for agriculture, so that population densities on the better land would have been somewhat higher, but not much higher because archaeological surveys show that a large fraction of the land surface was utilized.

As usual anywhere in the world when archaeologists debate rival estimates for prehistoric population densities, those preferring the lower estimates refer to the higher estimates as absurdly high, and vice versa. My own opinion is that the higher estimates are more likely to be correct, in part because those estimates are by the archaeologists with the most extensive recent experience of surveying Easter: Claudio Cristino, Patricia Vargas, Edmundo Edwards, Chris Stevenson, and Jo Anne Van Tilburg. In addition, the earliest reliable estimate of Easter’s population, 2,000 people, was made by missionaries who took up residence in 1864 just after an epidemic of smallpox had killed off most of the population. And that was after the kidnapping of about 1,500 islanders by Peruvian slave ships in 1862-63, after two previous documented smallpox epidemics dating back to 1836, after the virtual certainty of other undocumented epidemics introduced by regular European visitors from 1770 onwards, and after a steep population crash that began in the 1600s and that we shall discuss below. The same ship that brought the third smallpox epidemic to Easter went on to the