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The person who pored through 6,433 bones of birds and other vertebrates from early middens at Anakena Beach, probably the site of the first human landing and first settlement on Easter, was zooarchaeologist David Steadman. As an ornithologist myself, I bow in awe before Dave’s identification skills and tolerance of eye strain: whereas I wouldn’t know how to tell a robin’s bone from a dove’s or even from a rat’s, Dave has learned how to distinguish even the bones of a dozen closely related petrel species from each other. He thereby proved that Easter, which today supports not a single species of native land bird, was formerly home to at least six of them, including one species of heron, two chicken-like rails, two parrots, and a barn owl. More impressive was Easter’s prodigious total of at least 25 nesting seabird species, making it formerly the richest breeding site in all of Polynesia and probably in the whole Pacific. They included albatross, boobies, frigatebirds, fulmars, petrels, prions, shearwaters, storm-petrels, terns, and tropicbirds, attracted by Easter’s remote location and complete lack of predators that made it an ideal safe haven as a breeding site—until humans arrived. Dave also recovered a few bones of seals, which breed today on the Galápagos Islands and the Juan Fernández Islands to the east of Easter, but it is uncertain whether those few seal bones on Easter similarly came from former breeding colonies or just vagrant individuals.

The Anakena excavations that yielded those bird and seal bones tell us much about the diet and lifestyle of Easter’s first human settlers. Out of those 6,433 vertebrate bones identified in their middens, the most frequent ones, accounting for more than one-third of the total, proved to belong to the largest animal available to Easter Islanders: the Common Dolphin, a porpoise weighing up to 165 pounds. That’s astonishing: nowhere else in Polynesia do porpoises account for even as much as 1% of the bones in middens. The Common Dolphin generally lives out to sea, hence it could not have been hunted by line-fishing or spear-fishing from shore. Instead, it must have been harpooned far offshore, in big seaworthy canoes built from the tall trees identified by Catherine Orliac.

Fish bones also occur in the middens but account there for only 23% of all bones, whereas elsewhere in Polynesia they were the main food (90% or more of all the bones). That low contribution of fish to Easter diets was because of its rugged coastline and steep drop-offs of the ocean bottom, so that there are few places to catch fish by net or handline in shallow water. For the same reason the Easter diet was low in molluscs and sea urchins. To compensate, there were those abundant seabirds plus the land birds. Bird stew would have been seasoned with meat from large numbers of rats, which reached Easter as stowaways in the canoes of the Polynesian colonists. Easter is the sole known Polynesian island at whose archaeological sites rat bones outnumber fish bones. In case you’re squeamish and consider rats inedible, I still recall, from my years of living in England in the late 1950s, recipes for creamed laboratory rat that my British biologist friends who kept them for experiments also used to supplement their diet during their years of wartime food rationing.

Porpoises, fish, shellfish, birds, and rats did not exhaust the list of meat sources available to Easter’s first settlers. I already mentioned a few seal records, and other bones testify to the occasional availability of sea turtles and perhaps of large lizards. All those delicacies were cooked over firewood that can be identified as having come from Easter’s subsequently vanished forests.

Comparison of those early garbage deposits with late prehistoric ones or with conditions on modern Easter reveals big changes in those initially bountiful food sources. Porpoises, and open-ocean fish like tuna, virtually disappeared from the islanders’ diet, for reasons to be mentioned below. The fish that continued to be caught