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By Root 2018 0

surveys, suggest that Easter’s land surface was divided into about a dozen (either 11 or 12) territories, each belonging to one clan or lineage group, and each starting from the seacoast and extending inland—as if Easter were a pie cut into a dozen radial wedges. Each territory had its own chief and its own major ceremonial platforms supporting statues. The clans competed peacefully by seeking to outdo each other in building platforms and statues, but eventually their competition took the form of ferocious fighting. That division into radially sliced territories is typical for Polynesian islands elsewhere in the Pacific. What is unusual in that respect about Easter is that, again according to both oral traditions and archaeological surveys, those competing clan territories were also integrated religiously, and to some extent economically and politically, under the leadership of one paramount chief. In contrast, on both Mangareva and the larger Marquesan islands each major valley was an independent chiefdom locked in chronic fierce warfare against other chiefdoms.

What might account for Easter’s integration, and how was it detectable archaeologically? It turns out that Easter’s pie does not consist of a dozen identical slices, but that different territories were endowed with different valuable resources. The most obvious example is that Tongariki territory (called Hotu Iti) contained Rano Raraku crater, the island’s only source of the best stone for carving statues, and also a source of moss for caulking canoes. The red stone cylinders on top of some statues all came from Puna Pau quarry in Hanga Poukura territory. Vinapu and Hanga Poukura territories controlled the three major quarries of obsidian, the fine-grained volcanic stone used for making sharp tools, while Vinapu and Tongariki had the best basalt for hare paenga slabs. Anakena on the north coast had the two best beaches for launching canoes, while Heki’i, its neighbor on the same coast, had the third best beach. As a result, artifacts associated with fishing have been found mainly on that coast. But those same north-coast territories have the poorest land for agriculture, the best land being along the south and west coasts. Only five of the dozen territories had extensive areas of interior uplands used for rock-garden plantations. Nesting seabirds eventually became virtually confined to a few offshore islets along the south coast, especially in Vinapu territory. Other resources such as timber, coral for making files, red ochre, and paper mulberry trees (the source of bark pounded into tapa cloth) were also unevenly distributed.

The clearest archaeological evidence for some degree of integration among the competing clan territories is that stone statues and their red cylinders, from quarries in the territories of the Tongariki and Hanga Poukura clans respectively, ended up on platforms in all 11 or 12 territories distributed all over the island. Hence the roads to transport the statues and crowns out of those quarries over the island also had to traverse many territories, and a clan living at a distance from the quarries would have needed permission from several intervening clans to transport statues and cylinders across the latter’s territories. Obsidian, the best basalt, fish, and other localized resources similarly became distributed all over Easter. At first, that seems only natural to us moderns living in large politically unified countries like the U.S.: we take it for granted that resources from one coast are routinely transported long distances to other coasts, traversing many other states or provinces en route. But we forget how complicated it has usually been throughout history for one territory to negotiate access to another territory’s resources. A reason why Easter may thus have become integrated, while large Marquesan islands never did, is Easter’s gentle terrain, contrasting with Marquesan valleys so steep-sided that people in adjacent valleys communicated with (or raided) each other mainly by sea rather than overland.

We now return to the subject