In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island
wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw
their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow
their lead?
Among the most riveting mysteries of human history
are those posed by vanished civilizations. Everyone who has seen the abandoned
buildings of the Khmer, the Maya, or the Anasazi is immediately moved to ask
the same question: Why did the societies that erected those structures
disappear?
Their vanishing touches us as the disappearance of
other animals, even the dinosaurs, never can. No matter how exotic those lost
civilizations seem, their framers were humans like us. Who is to say we won't
succumb to the same fate? Perhaps someday New York's skyscrapers will stand
derelict and overgrown with vegetation, like the temples at Angkor Wat and
Tikal.
Among all such vanished civilizations, that of the
former Polynesian society on Easter Island remains unsurpassed in mystery and
isolation. The mystery stems especially from the island's gigantic stone
statues and its impoverished landscape, but it is enhanced by our associations
with the specific people involved: Polynesians represent for us the ultimate in
exotic romance, the background for many a child's, and an adult's, vision of
paradise. My own interest in Easter was kindled over 30 years ago when I read
Thor Heyerdahl's fabulous accounts of his Kon-Tiki voyage.
But my interest has been revived recently by a much
more exciting account, one not of heroic voyages but of painstaking research
and analysis. My friend David Steadman, a paleontologist, has been working with
a number of other researchers who are carrying out the first systematic
excavations on Easter intended to identify the animals and plants that once
lived there. Their work is contributing to a new interpretation of the island's
history that makes it a tale not only of wonder but of warning as well.
Easter Island, with an area of only 64 square miles,
is the world's most isolated scrap of habitable land. It lies in the Pacific
Ocean more than 2,000 miles west of the nearest continent (South America),
1,400 miles from even the nearest habitable island (Pitcairn). Its subtropical
location and latitude-at 27 degrees south, it is approximately as far below the
equator as Houston is north of it-help give it a rather mild climate, while its
volcanic origins make its soil fertile. In theory, this combination of blessings
should have made Easter a miniature paradise, remote from problems that beset
the rest of the world.
The island derives its name from its
"discovery" by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, on Easter (April
5) in 1722. Roggeveen's first impression was not of a paradise but of a
wasteland: "We originally, from a further distance, have considered the
said Easter Island as sandy; the reason for that is this, that we counted as
sand the withered grass, hay, or other scorched and burnt vegetation, because
its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a singular poverty
and barrenness."
The island Roggeveen saw was a grassland without a
single tree or bush over ten feet high. Modern botanists have identified only
47 species of higher plants native to Easter, most of them grasses, sedges, and
ferns. The list includes just two species of small trees and two of woody
shrubs. With such flora, the islanders Roggeveen encountered had no source of
real firewood to warm themselves during Easter's cool, wet, windy winters.
Their native animals included nothing larger than insects, not even a single
species of native bat, land bird, land snail, or lizard. For domestic animals,
they had only chickens. European visitors throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries estimated Easter's human population at about 2,000, a modest number
considering the island's fertility. As Captain James Cook recognized during his
brief visit in 1774, the islanders were Polynesians (a Tahitian man
accompanying Cook was able to converse with them). Yet despite the Polynesians'
well-deserved fame as a great seafaring people, the Easter Islanders who came
out to Roggeveen's and Cook's ships did so by swimming or paddling canoes that
Roggeveen described as "bad and frail." Their craft, he wrote, were
"put together with manifold small planks and light inner timbers, which
they cleverly stitched together with very fine twisted threads. . . . But as
they lack the knowledge and particularly the materials for caulking and making
tight the great number of seams of the canoes, these are accordingly very
leaky, for which reason they are compelled to spend half the time in
bailing." The canoes, only ten feet long, held at most two people, and
only three or four canoes were observed on the entire island.
With such flimsy craft, Polynesians could never have
colonized Easter from even the nearest island, nor could they have traveled far
offshore to fish. The islanders Roggeveen met were totally isolated, unaware
that other people existed. Investigators in all the years since his visit have
discovered no trace of the islanders' having any outside contacts: not a single
Easter Island rock or product has turned up elsewhere, nor has anything been
found on the island that could have been brought by anyone other than the
original settlers or the Europeans. Yet the people living on Easter claimed
memories of visiting the uninhabited Sala y Gomez reef 260 miles away, far
beyond the range of the leaky canoes seen by Roggeveen. How did the islanders'
ancestors reach that reef from Easter, or reach Easter from anywhere else?
Easter Island's most famous feature is its huge
stone statues, more than 200 of which once stood on massive stone platforms
lining the coast. At least 700 more, in all stages of completion, were
abandoned in quarries or on ancient roads between the quarries and the coast,
as if the carvers and moving crews had thrown down their tools and walked off
the job. Most of the erected statues were carved in a single quarry and then
somehow transported as far as six miles-despite heights as great as 33 feet and
weights up to 82 tons. The abandoned statues, meanwhile, were as much as 65
feet tall and weighed up to 270 tons. The stone platforms were equally
gigantic: up to 500 feet long and 10 feet high, with facing slabs weighing up
to 10 tons.
Roggeveen himself quickly recognized the problem the
statues posed: "The stone images at first caused us to be struck with
astonishment," he wrote, "because we could not comprehend how it was
possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber for making any
machines, as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such
images." Roggeveen might have added that the islanders had no wheels, no
draft animals, and no source of power except their own muscles. How did they
transport the giant statues for miles, even before erecting them? To deepen the
mystery, the statues were still standing in 1770, but by 1864 all of them had
been pulled down, by the islanders themselves. Why then did they carve them in
the first place? And why did they stop?
The statues imply a society very different from the
one Roggeveen saw in 1722. Their sheer number and size suggest a population
much larger than 2,000 people. What became of everyone? Furthermore, that
society must have been highly organized. Easter's resources were scattered
across the island: the best stone for the statues was quarried at Rano Raraku
near Easter's northeast end; red stone, used for large crowns adorning some of
the statues, was quarried at Puna Pau, inland in the southwest; stone carving
tools came mostly from Aroi in the northwest. Meanwhile, the best farmland lay
in the south and east, and the best fishing grounds on the north and west
coasts. Extracting and redistributing all those goods required complex
political organization. What happened to that organization, and how could it
ever have arisen in such a barren landscape?
Easter Island's mysteries have spawned volumes of
speculation for more than two and a half centuries. Many Europeans were
incredulous that Polynesians-commonly characterized as "mere
savages"-could have created the statues or the beautifully constructed
stone platforms. In the 1950s, Heyerdahl argued that Polynesia must have been
settled by advanced societies of American Indians, who in turn must have
received civilization across the Atlantic from more advanced societies of the
Old World. Heyerdahl's raft voyages aimed to prove the feasibility of such
prehistoric transoceanic contacts. In the 1960s the Swiss writer Erich von
Daeniken, an ardent believer in Earth visits by extraterrestrial astronauts,
went further, claiming that Easter's statues were the work of intelligent
beings who owned ultramodern tools, became stranded on Easter, and were finally
rescued.
Heyerdahl and Von Daeniken both brushed aside
overwhelming evidence that the Easter Islanders were typical Polynesians
derived from Asia rather than from the Americas and that their culture
(including their statues) grew out of Polynesian culture. Their language was
Polynesian, as Cook had already concluded. Specifically, they spoke an eastern
Polynesian dialect related to Hawaiian and Marquesan, a dialect isolated since
about A.D. 400, as estimated from slight differences in vocabulary. Their
fishhooks and stone adzes resembled early Marquesan models. Last year DNA
extracted from 12 Easter Island skeletons was also shown to be Polynesian. The
islanders grew bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, and paper
mulberry-typical Polynesian crops, mostly of Southeast Asian origin. Their sole
domestic animal, the chicken, was also typically Polynesian and ultimately
Asian, as were the rats that arrived as stowaways in the canoes of the first
settlers.
What happened to those settlers? The fanciful
theories of the past must give way to evidence gathered by hardworking
practitioners in three fields: archeology, pollen analysis, and paleontology.
Modern archeological excavations on Easter have continued since Heyerdahl's
1955 expedition. The earliest radiocarbon dates associated with human
activities are around A.D. 400 to 700, in reasonable agreement with the
approximate settlement date of 400 estimated by linguists. The period of statue
construction peaked around 1200 to 1500, with few if any statues erected thereafter.
Densities of archeological sites suggest a large population; an estimate of
7,000 people is widely quoted by archeologists, but other estimates range up to
20,000, which does not seem implausible for an island of Easter's area and
fertility.
Archeologists have also enlisted surviving islanders
in experiments aimed at figuring out how the statues might have been carved and
erected. Twenty people, using only stone chisels, could have carved even the
largest completed statue within a year. Given enough timber and fiber for
making ropes, teams of at most a few hundred people could have loaded the
statues onto wooden sleds, dragged them over lubricated wooden tracks or
rollers, and used logs as levers to maneuver them into a standing position.
Rope could have been made from the fiber of a small native tree, related to the
linden, called the hauhau. However, that tree is now extremely scarce on
Easter, and hauling one statue would have required hundreds of yards of rope.
Did Easter's now barren landscape once support the necessary trees? That
question can be answered by the technique of pollen analysis, which involves
boring out a column of sediment from a swamp or pond, with the most recent
deposits at the top and relatively more ancient deposits at the bottom. The
absolute age of each layer can be dated by radiocarbon methods. Then begins the
hard work: examining tens of thousands of pollen grains under a microscope,
counting them, and identifying the plant species that produced each one by
comparing the grains with modern pollen from known plant species. For Easter
Island, the bleary-eyed scientists who performed that task were John Flenley,
now at Massey University in New Zealand, and Sarah King of the University of
Hull in England.
Flenley and King's heroic efforts were rewarded by
the striking new picture that emerged of Easter's prehistoric landscape. For at
least 30,000 years before human arrival and during the early years of
Polynesian settlement, Easter was not a wasteland at all. Instead, a subtropical
forest of trees and woody bushes towered over a ground layer of shrubs, herbs,
ferns, and grasses. In the forest grew tree daisies, the rope-yielding hauhau
tree, and the toromiro tree, which furnishes a dense, mesquite-like firewood.
The most common tree in the forest was a species of palm now absent on Easter
but formerly so abundant that the bottom strata of the sediment column were
packed with its pollen. The Easter Island palm was closely related to the
still-surviving Chilean wine palm, which grows up to 82 feet tall and 6 feet in
diameter. The tall, unbranched trunks of the Easter Island palm would have been
ideal for transporting and erecting statues and constructing large canoes. The
palm would also have been a valuable food source, since its Chilean relative
yields edible nuts as well as sap from which Chileans make sugar, syrup, honey,
and wine.
What did the first settlers of Easter Island eat
when they were not glutting themselves on the local equivalent of maple syrup?
Recent excavations by David Steadman, of the New York State Museum at Albany,
have yielded a picture of Easter's original animal world as surprising as
Flenley and King's picture of its plant world. Steadman's expectations for
Easter were conditioned by his experiences elsewhere in Polynesia, where fish
are overwhelmingly the main food at archeological sites, typically accounting
for more than 90 percent of the bones in ancient Polynesian garbage heaps.
Easter, though, is too cool for the coral reefs beloved by fish, and its cliff-girded
coastline permits shallow-water fishing in only a few places. Less than a
quarter of the bones in its early garbage heaps (from the period 900 to 1300)
belonged to fish; instead, nearly one-third of all bones came from porpoises.
Nowhere else in Polynesia do porpoises account for
even 1 percent of discarded food bones. But most other Polynesian islands
offered animal food in the form of birds and mammals, such as New Zealand's now
extinct giant moas and Hawaii's now extinct flightless geese. Most other
islanders also had domestic pigs and dogs. On Easter, porpoises would have been
the largest animal available-other than humans. The porpoise species identified
at Easter, the common dolphin, weighs up to 165 pounds. It generally lives out
at sea, so it could not have been hunted by line fishing or spearfishing from
shore. Instead, it must have been harpooned far offshore, in big seaworthy
canoes built from the extinct palm tree.
In addition to porpoise meat, Steadman found, the
early Polynesian settlers were feasting on seabirds. For those birds, Easter's
remoteness and lack of predators made it an ideal haven as a breeding site, at
least until humans arrived. Among the prodigious numbers of seabirds that bred
on Easter were albatross, boobies, frigate birds, fulmars, petrels, prions,
shearwaters, storm petrels, terns, and tropic birds. With at least 25 nesting
species, Easter was the richest seabird breeding site in Polynesia and probably
in the whole Pacific. Land birds as well went into early Easter Island cooking
pots.
Steadman identified bones of at least six species,
including barn owls, herons, parrots, and rail. Bird stew would have been
seasoned with meat from large numbers of rats, which the Polynesian colonists
inadvertently brought with them; Easter Island is the sole known Polynesian
island where rat bones outnumber fish bones at archeological sites. (In case
you're squeamish and consider rats inedible, I still recall recipes for creamed
laboratory rat that my British biologist friends used to supplement their diet
during their years of wartime food rationing.)
Porpoises, seabirds, land birds, and rats did not
complete the list of meat sources formerly available on Easter. A few bones
hint at the possibility of breeding seal colonies as well. All these delicacies
were cooked in ovens fired by wood from the island's forests.
Such evidence lets us imagine the island onto which
Easter's first Polynesian colonists stepped ashore some 1,600 years ago, after
a long canoe voyage from eastern Polynesia. They found themselves in a pristine
paradise. What then happened to it? The pollen grains and the bones yield a
grim answer.
Pollen records show that destruction of Easter's
forests was well under way by the year 800, just a few centuries after the
start of human settlement. Then charcoal from wood fires came to fill the
sediment cores, while pollen of palms and other trees and woody shrubs
decreased or disappeared, and pollen of the grasses that replaced the forest
became more abundant. Not long after 1400 the palm finally became extinct, not
only as a result of being chopped down but also because the now ubiquitous rats
prevented its regeneration: of the dozens of preserved palm nuts discovered in
caves on Easter, all had been chewed by rats and could no longer germinate.
While the hauhau tree did not become extinct in Polynesian times, its numbers
declined drastically until there weren't enough left to make ropes from. By the
time Heyerdahl visited Easter, only a single, nearly dead toromiro tree
remained on the island, and even that lone survivor has now disappeared.
(Fortunately, the toromiro still grows in botanical gardens elsewhere.)
The fifteenth century marked the end not only for
Easter's palm but for the forest itself. Its doom had been approaching as
people cleared land to plant gardens; as they felled trees to build canoes, to
transport and erect statues, and to burn; as rats devoured seeds; and probably
as the native birds died out that had pollinated the trees' flowers and
dispersed their fruit. The overall picture is among the most extreme examples
of forest destruction anywhere in the world: the whole forest gone, and most of
its tree species extinct.
The destruction of the island's animals was as
extreme as that of the forest: without exception, every species of native land
bird became extinct. Even shellfish were overexploited, until people had to
settle for small sea snails instead of larger cowries. Porpoise bones
disappeared abruptly from garbage heaps around 1500; no one could harpoon
porpoises anymore, since the trees used for constructing the big seagoing
canoes no longer existed. The colonies of more than half of the seabird species
breeding on Easter or on its offshore islets were wiped out.
In place of these meat supplies, the Easter
Islanders intensified their production of chickens, which had been only an
occasional food item. They also turned to the largest remaining meat source
available: humans, whose bones became common in late Easter Island garbage
heaps. Oral traditions of the islanders are rife with cannibalism; the most
inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was "The flesh of
your mother sticks between my teeth." With no wood available to cook these
new goodies, the islanders resorted to sugarcane scraps, grass, and sedges to
fuel their fires.
All these strands of evidence can be wound into a
coherent narrative of a society's decline and fall. The first Polynesian
colonists found themselves on an island with fertile soil, abundant food,
bountiful building materials, ample lebensraum, and all the prerequisites for
comfortable living. They prospered and multiplied.
After a few centuries, they began erecting stone
statues on platforms, like the ones their Polynesian forebears had carved. With
passing years, the statues and platforms became larger and larger, and the
statues began sporting ten-ton red crowns-probably in an escalating spiral of
one-upmanship, as rival clans tried to surpass each other with shows of wealth
and power. (In the same way, successive Egyptian pharaohs built ever-larger
pyramids. Today Hollywood movie moguls near my home in Los Angeles are
displaying their wealth and power by building ever more ostentatious mansions.
Tycoon Marvin Davis topped previous moguls with plans for a 50,000-square-foot
house, so now Aaron Spelling has topped Davis with a 56,000-square-foot house.
All that those buildings lack to make the message explicit are ten-ton red
crowns.) On Easter, as in modern America, society was held together by a
complex political system to redistribute locally available resources and to
integrate the economies of different areas.
Eventually Easter's growing population was cutting
the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used the
land for gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses-and, of course, for
lugging statues. As forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and
rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more
uncomfortable-springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available
for fires.
People also found it harder to fill their stomachs,
as land birds, large sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared. Because timber
for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises
disappeared from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation
allowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its
nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism
replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with sunken
cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving.
With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter
Island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a
complex society running. Surviving islanders described to early European
visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class
took over from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers,
made by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter
the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash
toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took to
living in caves for protection against their enemies. Around 1770 rival clans
started to topple each other's statues, breaking the heads off. By 1864 the
last statue had been thrown down and desecrated.
As we try to imagine the decline of Easter's
civilization, we ask ourselves, "Why didn't they look around, realize what
they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when
they cut down the last palm tree?"
I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not
with a bang but with a whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of
abandoned statues to consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers
and rope didn't simply disappear one day-it vanished slowly, over decades.
Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had
finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who
tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been
overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs
depended on continued deforestation. Our Pacific Northwest loggers are only the
latest in a long line of loggers to cry, "Jobs over trees!" The
changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect: yes,
this year we cleared those woods over there, but trees are starting to grow
back again on this abandoned garden site here. Only older people, recollecting
their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Their
children could no more have comprehended their parents' tales than my
eight-year-old sons today can comprehend my wife's and my tales of what Los Angeles
was like 30 years ago.
Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less
important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms
had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller
and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and
treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.
By now the meaning of Easter Island for us should be
chillingly obvious. Easter Island is Earth writ small. Today, again, a rising
population confronts shrinking resources. We too have no emigration valve,
because all human societies are linked by international transport, and we can
no more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean.
If we continue to follow our present course, we shall have exhausted the
world's major fisheries, tropical rain forests, fossil fuels, and much of our
soil by the time my sons reach my current age.
Every day newspapers report details of famished countries-Afghanistan, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Zaire-where soldiers have appropriated the wealth or where central government is yielding to local gangs of thugs. With the risk of nuclear war receding, the threat of our ending with a bang no longer has a chance of galvanizing us to halt our course. Our risk now is of winding down, slowly, in a whimper. Corrective action is blocked by vested interests, by well-intentioned political and business leaders, and by their electorates, all of whom are perfectly correct in not noticing big changes from year to year. Instead, each year there are just somewhat more people, and somewhat fewer resources, on Earth. It would be easy to close our eyes or to give up in despair. If mere thousands of Easter Islanders with only stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their society, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine power fail to do worse? But there is one crucial difference. The Easter Islanders had no books and no histories of other doomed societies. Unlike the Easter Islanders, we have histories of the past-information that can save us. My main hope for my sons' generation is that we may now choose to learn from the fates of societies like Easter's.
Obtained from: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/24/042.html