Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [67]
Ahu themselves were desecrated by pulling out some of the fine slabs in order to construct garden walls (manavai) next to the ahu, and by using other slabs to create burial chambers in which to place dead bodies. As a result, today the ahu that have not been restored (i.e., most of them) look at first sight like mere piles of boulders. As Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Claudio Cristino, Sonia Haoa, Barry Rolett, and I drove around Easter, saw ahu after ahu as a rubble pile with its broken statues, reflected on the enormous effort that had been devoted for centuries to constructing the ahu and to carving and transporting and erecting the moai, and then remembered that it was the islanders themselves who had destroyed their own ancestors’ work, we were filled with an overwhelming sense of tragedy.
Easter Islanders’ toppling of their ancestral moai reminds me of Russians and Romanians toppling the statues of Stalin and Ceauşescu when the Communist governments of those countries collapsed. The islanders must have been filled with pent-up anger at their leaders for a long time, as we know that Russians and Romanians were. I wonder how many of the statues were thrown down one by one at intervals, by particular enemies of a statue’s owner, as described for Paro; and how many were instead destroyed in a quickly spreading paroxysm of anger and disillusionment, as took place at the end of communism. I’m also reminded of a cultural tragedy and rejection of religion described to me in 1965 at a New Guinea highland village called Bomai, where the Christian missionary assigned to Bomai boasted to me with pride how one day he had called upon his new converts to collect their “pagan artifacts” (i.e., their cultural and artistic heritage) at the airstrip and burn them—and how they obeyed. Perhaps Easter Island’s matatoa issued a similar summons to their own followers.
I don’t want to portray social developments on Easter after 1680 as wholly negative and destructive. The survivors adapted as best they could, both in their subsistence and in their religion. Not only cannibalism but also chicken houses underwent explosive growth after 1650; chickens had accounted for less than 0.1% of the animal bones in the oldest middens that David Steadman, Patricia Vargas, and Claudio Cristino excavated at Anakena. The matatoa justified their military coup by adopting a religious cult, based on the creator god Makemake, who had previously been just one of Easter’s pantheon of gods. The cult was centered at Orongo village on the rim of Rano Kau caldera, overlooking the three largest offshore islets to which nesting seabirds had become confined. The new religion developed its own new art styles, expressed especially in petroglyphs (rock carvings) of women’s genitals, birdmen, and birds (in order of decreasing frequency), carved not only on Orongo monuments but also on toppled moai and pukao elsewhere. Each year the Orongo cult organized a competition between men to swim across the cold, shark-infested, one-mile-wide strait separating the islets from Easter itself, to collect the first egg laid in that season by Sooty Terns, to swim back to Easter with the unbroken egg, and to be anointed “Birdman of the year” for the following year. The last Orongo ceremony took place in 1867 and was witnessed by Catholic missionaries, just as the residue of Easter Island society not already destroyed by the islanders themselves was being destroyed by the outside world.
The sad story of European impacts on Easter Islanders may be quickly summarized. After Captain Cook’s brief sojourn in 1774, there was a steady trickle of European visitors. As documented for Hawaii, Fiji, and many other Pacific islands, they must be assumed to have introduced European diseases and thereby to have killed many previously unexposed islanders, though our first specific mention of such an epidemic is of