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By Root 2083 0

impacts. The further consequences start with starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism. Surviving islanders’ accounts of starvation are graphically confirmed by the proliferation of little statues called moai kavakava, depicting starving people with hollow cheeks and protruding ribs. Captain Cook in 1774 described the islanders as “small, lean, timid, and miserable.” Numbers of house sites in the coastal lowlands, where almost everybody lived, declined by 70% from peak values around 1400-1600 to the 1700s, suggesting a corresponding decline in numbers of people. In place of their former sources of wild meat, islanders turned to the largest hitherto unused source available to them: humans, whose bones became common not only in proper burials but also (cracked to extract the marrow) in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.”

Easter’s chiefs and priests had previously justified their elite status by claiming relationship to the gods, and by promising to deliver prosperity and bountiful harvests. They buttressed that ideology by monumental architecture and ceremonies designed to impress the masses, and made possible by food surpluses extracted from the masses. As their promises were being proved increasingly hollow, the power of the chiefs and priests was overthrown around 1680 by military leaders called matatoa, and Easter’s formerly complexly integrated society collapsed in an epidemic of civil war. The obsidian spear-points (termed mata’a) from that era of fighting still littered Easter in modern times. Commoners now built their huts in the coastal zone, which had been previously reserved for the residences (hare paenga) of the elite. For safety, many people turned to living in caves that were enlarged by excavation and whose entrances were partly sealed to create a narrow tunnel for easier defense. Food remains, bone sewing needles, woodworking implements, and tools for repairing tapa cloth make clear that the caves were being occupied on a long-term basis, not just as temporary hiding places.

What had failed, in the twilight of Easter’s Polynesian society, was not only the old political ideology but also the old religion, which became discarded along with the chiefs’ power. Oral traditions record that the last ahu and moai were erected around 1620, and that Paro (the tallest statue) was among the last. The upland plantations whose elite-commandeered production fed the statue teams were progressively abandoned between 1600 and 1680. That the sizes of statues had been increasing may reflect not only rival chiefs vying to outdo each other, but also more urgent appeals to ancestors necessitated by the growing environmental crisis. Around 1680, at the time of the military coup, rival clans switched from erecting increasingly large statues to throwing down one another’s statues by toppling a statue forwards onto a slab placed so that the statue would fall on the slab and break. Thus, as we shall also see for the Anasazi and Maya in Chapters 4 and 5, the collapse of Easter society followed swiftly upon the society’s reaching its peak of population, monument construction, and environmental impact.

We don’t know how far the toppling had proceeded at the time of the first European visits, because Roggeveen in 1722 landed only briefly at a single site, and González’s Spanish expedition of 1770 wrote nothing about their visit except in the ship’s log. The first semi-adequate European description was by Captain Cook in 1774, who remained for four days, sent a detachment to reconnoiter inland, and had the advantage of bringing a Tahitian whose Polynesian language was sufficiently similar to that of Easter Islanders that he could converse with them. Cook commented on seeing statues that had been thrown down, as well as others still erect. The last European mention of an erect statue was in 1838; none was reported as standing in 1868. Traditions