All language subtitles for 6. Easter Island - Where Giants Walked

In the early 18th century, a Dutch
explorer named Admiral Jacob Roggeveen

was sailing across the vast blue expanse
of the South Pacific Ocean. He had been

on the sea for 17 days, searching the
southern ocean for a mythical continent

known as Terra Australis. When he saw
a small island on the horizon, his heart

must have skipped a beat, as Roggeveen
recounts in his diary. There was a great

rejoicing among the people and everyone
hoped that this low land might prove to

be a foretoken of the unknown
southern continent. But as their ships

approached, it became clear that this was
no vast continent, only a small island; a

dot of land in the middle of the ocean.
Nevertheless, Roggeveen was curious and

he ordered his three ships to prepare
for landing.

It was Easter Day, 1722. As the Dutch got
closer, it became clear that the island

ahead of them was inhabited. They saw
smoke rising from the villages along the

coast, but it was a seemingly barren land.
We originally, from a further distance,

considered Easter Island to be sandy. The
reasons for that is 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. As they sailed
closer, the islands' inhabitants came out

on canoes to meet them, greeting them
with friendly astonishment. This was much

like other islands that Roggeveen had
visited before. But when he got ashore,

what he found on this island amazed him.
Along the beaches, lined up in rows with

their backs to the sea, was a line of
stone statues. They were carved from

black volcanic stone, some of them
standing 10 meters high, wearing crowns

of
red sandstone. But Roggeveen and his men

couldn't understand how these statues
had got there. Stone images at first

caused us to be struck with astonishment
because we couldn't comprehend how it

was possible that these people, who were
devoid of heavy thick timber for making

any machines as well as strong ropes,
nevertheless had been able to erect such

images which were fully 30 feet high and
thick in proportion. Roggeveen and his

men didn't stay long. They soon set sail
away from the island and on across the

Pacific, but the remarkable image stayed
with them and they must have asked

themselves how did those people
construct so many vast stone statues

when so little building material seemed
available to them? Why had they built so

many, and if such an advanced
civilization had once lived on this

island, where on earth had it vanished to?

My name's Paul Cooper and you're
listening to The Fall of Civilizations

podcast. Each episode, I look at a
civilization of the past that rose to

glory and then collapsed into the ashes
of history. I want to ask what did they

have in common? What led to their fall,
and what did it feel like to be a person

alive at the time who witnessed the end
of their world? In this episode, I want to

tell the story of one of archaeology's
most enduring puzzles; the mystery of

Easter Island. I want to explore why it's
not actually much of a mystery at all. I

want to examine how this unique
community grew up in complete isolation,

how it survived the tests of centuries
against overwhelming odds, and I want to

take you through the evidence about what
happened to finally bring this society

and its enormous statues crashing down.

The Pacific Ocean is the largest and
deepest of Earth's oceans. At over 165

million square kilometers,
it covers one-third of the Earth's total

surface. It's so vast that if you were to
look at Earth from outer space, it's just

about possible to position yourself so
that only the Pacific Ocean is visible,

and you could imagine that you were
looking at a planet completely composed

of water. But the Pacific is not an
unbroken sea. Across its blue expanse,

there are over 25,000 islands of varying
size, many of them thrown up by volcanic

eruptions that burst from the lively
tectonics

of the Pacific Plate. Easter Island is at
the eastern corner of an area we call

the Polynesian Triangle, a vast region of
the Pacific Ocean broken by over a

thousand volcanic islands. Easter
Island itself is a loosely triangular

shape too, made up of three extinct
volcanoes at each of its points. The

largest of these volcanoes is called
Terevaka. It's a young volcano bursting

out of the sea less than four hundred
thousand years ago, its lava gushing out

and raising a peak that looms half a
kilometre above the ocean. When it first

erupted, Terevaka's lava pooled so that
it joined up to older volcanoes on

either side of it, and the landmass that
today we call Easter Island was born. The

people who have lived on Easter Island
for centuries call it by the name Tepito

ote henua, which translates literally to
'the center of the world'. Other names for

it are translated as 'the land's end' or
'fragment of the earth.' Today's

Polynesians call the island Rapa Nui.

Rapa Nui is a small island, only about 24
kilometers end-to-end and 12 kilometers

wide. It's one of the most remote and
isolated places on earth. From the coasts

of Easter Island, it would take 3,200
kilometers to reach the nearest

continent of South America, about the
distance from Paris to Damascus, and even

the nearest inhabited island is over
2,000 kilometers away. The Polynesians

who first settled the island arrived
from the west.

Sometime before the year 3,000 BC, they
had left the mainland of the Asian

continent. Since that time, these
hardy sailors had perfected their craft

until they were the most successful
ocean-going settlers in history. They

built large, sturdy canoes with two hulls,
in fact, effectively two canoes joined by

a deck and with two masts with sails. The
catamaran design of these ships was

incredibly sophisticated, and in fact,
they look like a modern sailing boat

used for racing.
They were both stable and fast, and they

allowed the Polynesians to gradually
settle the entire Pacific Ocean. These

early settlers navigated the oceans
without any physical navigation devices.

They knew the stars well enough that
they could make astonishing calculations

about latitude and longitude using only
the night sky. They didn't write this

detailed knowledge down, but used only
songs and stories to memorize the

properties and positions of the stars,
islands, and known sea routes. The

Polynesians also used the natural world
as an aid to their navigation. They

followed the flight paths of seabirds
like the black tern, and this ancient

Polynesian sailor song shows the
significance of these birds.

The black tern, the black tern is my bird.
Burden whom my eyes are gifted with

unbounded vision. These epic voyages were
all the more impressive because the

winds in the South Pacific blow
westwards against the direction of the

Polynesian's expansion. To travel these
vast distances against the winds, the

explorers developed a sailing technique
known as tacking where the craft zigzags

against a prevailing wind in order to
catch some forward motion. Storms in

the Pacific could be deadly to these
early explorers. It's been recorded that

when a severe typhoon struck, these
sailors had a method of surviving that

seems unthinkable to a modern sailor;
they would actually purposefully flood

the hulls of their canoes and because
the wooden hulls provided enough

flotation, the ship would stay afloat. But
with most of its body submerged, it would

survive being buffeted about in the gale-
-force winds. While the storm went on, the

sailors would climb inside their flooded
hulls, keeping their heads above water,

and wait for the winds to pass. There has
long been a debate about when exactly

these intrepid Polynesian adventurers
arrived on Easter Island.

It was long assumed that they had
arrived sometime in the fourth or fifth

centuries, but studies of the islanders'
language and radiocarbon dating recently

revised that estimate to somewhere
around the eighth century, and even more

modern analysis has pushed that date
forward even further. Many scientists

today believe that Rapa Nui wasn't
settled until sometime around the Year

1200 AD. At this time around the world,
the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan were

finalizing their conquest of Northern
China.

The notorious Fourth Crusade, headed for
Jerusalem,

instead sacked and burned the Christian
capital of Constantinople.

An exotic import from Arabia called
sugar was mentioned for the first time

in an English text, and on the other side
of the world, in the middle of the vast

expanse of the Pacific, a small band of
Polynesian sailors landed their boats on

the shores of a new land. An ancient
piece of Rapa Nui folklore credits the

settlement of the island to a Polynesian
king called Hotu Matua. In Hiva, Hau Maka

had a dream in which his spirit traveled
to a far country, looking for a new home

for his King Hotu. His spirit arrived at
three small islands, and another with a

larger one with a crater on the
southwest corner. The island was the

eighth or last island in the dim
twilight of the rising sun. The spirit

traveled counter-clockwise around the
island,

naming twenty-eight places including
Anakena, a landing place on the north

coast of the island and future residence
of the king. When Hau Maka awoke, he told

his brother Hua Tava about the dream.
After hearing about the dream, Hotu

Matua
ordered Hau Maka to send some young men

to explore the island.
Hotu Matua told his two sons to build

a canoe and search for the island of Hau
Maka's dream. So, the seven men left in a

canoe stocked with yams, sweet potatoes,
bananas, and other foods. They left on the

25th day of April and arrived on the
first day of June, a voyage of five weeks.

These settlers brought everything that
was required for the traditional

Polynesian lifestyle. They brought their
most crucial foods; bananas, a root

vegetable called taro with broad
elephant ear leaves, as well as sweet

potatoes and sugar cane.
They also brought saplings of the paper

mulberry tree, the fibers of which they
used to weave clothes. They brought

animals with them too, although only
those small enough to be transported.

They brought chickens and also the
Polynesian rat which was an everyday

food for common people. This was an
entire ecological system in-waiting,

packed up in the holes of their canoes,
optimized for transport, and ready to be

transplanted to a new land. Hotu Matua
may not have realized it, but his arrival

on Easter Island was of profound
significance, not just for him and his

people but for all of mankind.
That's because Easter Island was the

final stop on a journey of sixty
thousand years that had taken mankind

out of Africa, through Asia, and onto the
Americas. The final chapter of this

journey was the gradual colonization of
the Polynesian islands, and Easter Island

was the furthest and final piece of
uninhabited land. Mankind's journey out

of Africa ended on the shores of Easter
Island and with that step, a new phase of

humanity's history began.

I think it's worth noting at this point
that apart from the evidence we can find

in the archaeological record, we have
essentially two sources of information

about the history of Easter Island, and
each of them has their problems. Firstly,

there were the accounts of European
visitors to the island, like the Dutchman

Roggeveen. These accounts come down to us
either in the form of ships' logs or in

the form of memoirs written down when
these explorers returned to their

homelands. The biggest problem for
researchers of Rapa Nui's history is

that these early visitors to the island
left behind accounts that are extremely

limited in their content and their
reliability, and that sometimes directly

contradict each other.
Most of them stayed for only a few days.

They rarely wandered far from their
landing spot and they commented little

on the culture, language, or society of
the islanders. In the debate that has

raged over what happened on Easter
Island, many writers have tried to use a

selective reading of these accounts in
order to support their own favored

argument, and that's something we should
be very careful about as we go forward

and assess the evidence. But these
written records do provide us with some

useful information; at times, as you'll
see, they give us fixed points in time

around which we can build our story. The
second source of information is the oral

folklore of the islanders themselves.
This was passed down by word-of-mouth

through the generations, often in the
form of songs and stories. This can

give us a wonderful sense of how the
islanders view their own history and

their own sense of identity.
But this source of information can also

be very difficult to rely on when trying
to sort historical fact from fiction. The

different strands of the island's
folklore is also often extremely

contradictory and the reason for that
isn't hard to imagine. Detailed

observations of these songs and stories
weren't written down until the 1880s and

by that time, the culture of Rapa Nui had
already undergone drastic change. By this

point, they'd been in contact with the
outside world for more than 150 years

and their population was reduced to a
tiny fraction of what it had once been.

Now, only a few survivors passed down the
stories they remembered and to add

another level of confusion, these stories
were written down by early European

explorers who may have mistranslated,
as well as added and embellished

elements that didn't exist in the
original. One example of this is the

question of the name of the island's
first king who we've already mentioned,

Hotu Matua. But his name is so similar
to the folk hero of another nearby

island, Mangareva, that some researchers
have questioned whether this name isn't

a foreign import to Easter Island. If
we can't trust this important detail to

have been faithfully transmitted, perhaps
we can't be too sure about the rest.

These stories, refracted through these
various mirrors, are now connected to the

true facts of the distant past by only
the most fragile of threads. This is all

to make it very clear to you that the
history of Easter Island is not even

close to being a settled matter and it
often relies on fragmentary and

contradictory evidence. Today, new
research has begun to challenge the

familiar narrative we've all grown up
with, and we will have to deal with a lot

of uncertainty as we forge ahead through
the tragic story of this most remarkable

island.

According to tradition, the first
Polynesian settlers arrived on Easter

Island at a point called Anakena, a
white coral sand beach on the north of

the island that forms a natural harbor.
It's worth mentioning that the

landscape these first settlers would
have seen was very different to the one

we see today on Rapa Nui. The bare, grassy
slopes first spied by Roggeveen in the

18th century and which we know from
images today, would have been nowhere to

be seen.
In fact, they would have been covered by

a thick forest of tropical palm trees. If
you dig down into the earth of Easter

Island today, you can still see the
hollow molds left by the roots of these

trees. Studies of these root molds, as
well as pollen analysis, shows that when

humans arrived on Rapa Nui, the island
was home to over 21 species of trees.

Some of these were large, including at
least 3 which grew up to 15 meters or

more. One species of palm tree, the Easter
Island or Rapa Nui Palm, may even have

been among the largest species of palm
tree in the world. This now-extinct tree,

known as Paschalococos, seems to have
once been the most numerous species on

the island. Its closest relative
today,

Jubaea Chilensis, or the Chilean Wine
Palm, can reach heights of over 25 meters,

its bulbous trunk the thickest in the
world, reaching a diameter of more than a

metre. The soil of Easter Island has
never been rich but the forest would

have provided a small amount of food for
the new settlers; palm nuts, and fruits, too,

along with the birds in the trees that
could be trapped.

Luckily for archaeologists, the sand of
Anakena beach, the site of that first

settlement, is particularly good at
preserving bone and human remains.

Because of this, skeletons examined here
have given scientists insight into the

lives of the ancient Rapa Nui. Studies
have shown that as well as these plant

crops, people supplemented their diet
with a mix of marine animals including

dolphins they trapped in the Bay of
Anakena, seals, sea turtles, and fish that

they caught with hooks carved from bone.
In fact, bone chemistry analysis has

shown that the people here got about
half of their diet from the sea. They

cooked all of these foods in earth ovens
known as umu, cavities dug into the

ground which then had burning grass and
leaves placed on top of them so that the

heat radiated downwards.
These people were ingenious and

inherited knowledge from their ancestors.
They made textiles from the fibers of

the paper mulberry tree and spun rope
from a tree known as the Hau tree.

With this healthy and diverse mix of
foodstuffs and resources, their

settlement became incredibly successful.
From there, using slash-and-burn

agricultural methods, the original
settlers spread quickly across the small

land mass of the island, and they soon
began to clear the forest in order to

plant their crops until the whole of
Rapa Nui was fully populated with around

3,000 people. Slowly, that primeval palm
forest began to disappear from Easter

Island.

I think at this point, it's worth running
you through that traditional story of

what happened on Easter Island. It has
been the dominant narrative about this

island for decades, perhaps even
centuries. It was begun by early European

explorers, propagated by Victorian and
20th century anthropologists, and finally

popularized by authors like the popular
science writer Jared Diamond, and you

might find it familiar. In this narrative,
the inhabitants of Easter Island were

the architects of their own demise. The
story goes that their population boomed

until the island could no longer support
it. They cut down their trees to use as

firewood for construction material and
to use as rollers to transport their

enormous statues. The loss of trees on
the island resulted in an ecological

collapse that destroyed the fertility of
the soil and the productive potential of

the island fell apart. Along with the
collapse of the islands ecology, the

complex and centralized society that had
built the hundreds of stone statues on

the coast began to collapse, too. Resources
became scarce, starvation ran rampant, and

this led to a period of violent civil
war. Shortly before the arrival of the

Europeans in 1722, the whole of Rapa Nui
society had come apart and only a few

thousand survivors were left. Jared
Diamond, perhaps the greatest champion of

this theory today, puts it bluntly. In
just a few centuries, the people of

Easter Island wiped out their forests,
drove their plants and animals to

extinction, and saw their complex society
spiral into chaos. This story has a

widespread appeal for a number of
reasons. In the latter half of the 20th

century, as we became increasingly
concerned about our own society's

destructive impact on our environment,
the story of Easter Island became

irresistible as
an example of the fate that might befall

us if we fail to respect the environment
around us. The stone statues, too, have

proved irresistible as emblems of human
folly, our desire to always build bigger

and better than our neighbors. In his
book, Jared Diamond even makes the

comparison to his neighbors in Hollywood
building ever bigger and better mansions

in an effort to prove their status. The
islanders was so obsessed with these

statues, the narrative goes, that they cut
down all their trees to transport them.

This single-minded obsession drove them
to starvation, then cannibalism, and

finally to the edge of extinction. But
there are a number of problems with this

narrative, a number of seriously
questionable assumptions, and over the

course of this episode I'm going to try
to unpick three of the most glaring of

these assumptions so that you can assess
the evidence for yourself. Firstly,

there's the assumption that the Easter
Islanders deforested their island due to

greed, overpopulation, or even a maniacal
obsession with statue-building. Secondly,

there's the assumption that the loss of
the forest led to a societal collapse,

and thirdly, there's the assumption that
Easter Island society collapsed at all,

at least before contact with the outside
world.

As we'll see, each of these assumptions
has significant problems. Once we've

dealt with them, we can get down to what
actually happened to decimate the

islanders of Rapa Nui, to strip the
island of its plant life, and to leave

those famous stone statues moldering on
the lone grassy hills of Easter Island.

Virtually as soon as they arrived on the
island, probably around the year 1200, the

islanders began carving the monuments
that would one day make them famous

around the world. Stone statues are
common on islands across the Polynesian

world, but no other island can compete
with the size of the Easter Island

statues or with the incredible number
carved. These statues are called Moai. The

Moai are known for their large, broad
noses and strong chins, along with

rectangle-shaped ears and deep eye
slits. For the Easter Islanders, these

statues were what they called aringa
ora ata tepuna, that is the living

faces of the holy ancestors. These are
stone representations of the islanders

that have gone before. Of the Moai that
were successfully moved into place, the

vast majority stand on the coast of the
island on monolithic stone platforms

called Ahu.
While most people's eyes are drawn by

the statues, these Ahu are themselves
impressive undertakings. They are built

of enormous stones cut so precisely that
they fit together in a perfect jigsaw,

with not even enough room to fit a razor
blade between the stones. The largest of

them, Ahu Tongariki, holds 15 Moai lined
up in perfect order.

Nearly all Moai stand with their backs
to the sea, staring inland over the

fields and hills of Rapa Nui with their
deep, expressive eyes.

Almost all of the statues are carved
from a volcanic stone known as tuff. Tuff

is formed when ash from a volcanic
eruption falls thickly on the ground and

is then slowly compacted into solid rock.
Tuff is relatively soft and easy to

carve, so it has been used for
construction since ancient times. It

commonly occurs in Italy, for instance,
and the Romans often used it in their

buildings.
Most of the Moai statues were carved in

a quarry on the outer cliff edge of the
Rano Raraku crater. This quarry is an

eerie sight today. Here and there, the
faces of half-finished giants still peer

out of the stone. The Rano Raraku crater
is 700 meters across, formed of ash and

volcanic tuff thrown up in an ancient
explosion and ringed by cliffs 160 metres

high. The wide volcanic bowl is one of
the three places on Easter Island where

fresh water pools to form a lake. Here, a
kind of bullrushes called totora grow

on the water's edge,
nodding in the breeze, and the Rapa Nui

people once collected them to weave
thatched roofs for their houses. But it's

on the outer slopes of the crater's
cliffs that the truly important activity

took place. Here, the islanders chipped
their statues directly from the bedrock

using a kind of stone chisel known as a
toki that was made of dense basalt,

perfectly suited for carving the softer
volcanic tuff. This would have been

incredibly slow work. Work that might
take a modern craftsman with a steel

chisel one hour might take an Easter
Islander with a stone toki a whole day

or two days to complete. Although
estimates vary, it's thought that an

entire statue could take over a year for
a team of 12 people to carve. One

fascinating aspect of this quarry is
that there are a huge number of

incomplete Moai abandoned here, 397 in
total. That's nearly half of the island's

total population of 887, and this shows
just how difficult the carving of these

statues was. These abandoned Moai have
been discarded for different reasons,

some more obvious than others. On some
statues it's clear that the workmen dis-

-covered a seam of hard rock somewhere on
the Moai's body which would have been

virtually impossible to carve with their
stone tools. Others have obvious flaws or

cracks in them, while some Moai have
fallen over while raising them. Other

Moai simply seemed to have been too
ambitious in size; the largest of these,

nicknamed El Gigante, is nearly 22 meters
in height.

That's twice the height of a telephone
pole

or the size of a six story building. El
Gigante, still lying on his back in the

cliff face, is almost twice the size of
any Moai ever completed. This enormous

statue would have weighed an estimated
270 tons and it's hard to imagine how

the islanders ever intended to move it.
We might imagine an ambitious ancient

craftsman overseeing the carving of this
vast statue, determined to create the

largest Moai that the island has ever
seen, or perhaps as we'll find out later,

the islanders believed they had to
summon a truly enormous protective

spirit to defend their island against
a threat. To get a sense for how these

people must have felt about these
statues, let's imagine ourselves into the

role of a team of Moai carvers during
the Golden Age of Rapa Nui statue-

-carving. The work would have been slow
and painstaking but it would also have

carried a great deal of responsibility.
While you were carving a Moai, you

weren't working in the fields, and so
your community was investing in your

work. There must have been a lot of pride
tied up in the creation of these statues,

too. Before the carving could even begin,
there would likely have been ceremonies

and rites that had to take place, chants
and incantations designed to summon the

protective spirit of the ancestor to
inhabit the stone. There's an apocryphal

quote often attributed to the sculptor
Michelangelo. Every block of stone has a

statue inside it and it is the task of
the sculptor to discover it.

Whether or not he actually said this,
this must have been something like what

the people of Rapa Nui felt as the
months passed and the great statue, its

head and arms and body, slowly
materialized from the cliff face in

front of them.

The days would have been hard. Many
traditional Rapa Nui working songs

survived today, and we can imagine the
workers singing while they chipped away

at the cliff. One surviving folk song
even derives its rhythm from the

striking together of two stones,
emulating the sounds of the toki tools

napping away at the statue. Here it is,
recorded especially for this podcast by

children from the Toki School of Music
on Easter Island.

The workers' hands must have been covered
in the blackish dust of the stone, and

they would take breaks to eat meals of
sweet potato and taro along with the

chicken, baked white in earth ovens
nearby. After much arduous work, the whole

outline of the Moai would be carved out.
They would then deepen the cuts and

hollow out the cliff behind the statue, too,
clambering into the narrow space and

lying on their bellies as they carved.
But even with the back carved out, the

statue would still be attached to the
bedrock below with a narrow keel that

ran the length of its spine. So, the
final and most painstaking stage of the

process would begin. They would gather up
stones and earth in order to support the

Moai so that it didn't fall, and then
this spine of stone would slowly be

chipped away. It must have been an
incredible moment when that last stone

umbilical cord was cut.
It was the culmination of so much time

and sweat of course, but it must have
sent shivers down their spines, too, as the

great statue of their ancestor broke
free of its stony slumber and was

finally filled with a living spirit. It's
likely that more ceremonies surrounded

this moment; the chanting of holy men who
wore white plugs in their ears, and the

beating of drums. Over what must have
been days,

the Moai was edged clear of its quarry
resting place with huge teams of workers

pulling ropes spun from the Hau tree.
When the statue was clear, they slid it

down the grassy slope of the volcano so
that it could be stood upright at the

bottom of the slope. This was one of the
most dangerous parts of the Moai's

journey, as the great number of cracked
and abandoned statues on the slope below

the quarry shows us. They look like an
army of stony wanderers marching down

from the volcano. Somewhat ironically,
these abandoned statues, buried up to

their necks in the refuse from the
quarry, form some of the most iconic

images of Easter Island today, more
familiar to the layman than the

completed ones that stand on the Ahu
platforms on the coast. This is why

people talk about the stone heads of
Easter Island, ignoring the fact that

most of the Moai have bodies. At the
bottom of the hill, the workmen would

raise the Moai up to a standing position
so they could finish carving the details

on its back using soft pumice to wear
it smooth. Then they would prepare

to transport the statue into its final
resting place on its Ahu. The carvers

could wipe the sweat from their
foreheads and share congratulations, but

this was just the beginning of another
long and arduous chapter in the Moai's

journey.

At this point, I think it's worth noting
that we don't actually know for sure how

the ancient islanders moved these vast
statues. This question was something that

obsessed early visitors to the island.
They looked around at the seemingly

barren landscape of Rapa Nui, at its
grassy slopes seemingly devoid of large

trees, and asked how a people without
metal tools, pulleys, or wheels could

transport nearly 500 of these vast
statues. The largest successfully

transported Moai, nicknamed Paro, was 10
metres tall which is longer than a

London bus. It's estimated that this
statue weighed about 82 tons, heavier

than a Boeing 737 aircraft when fully
loaded with passengers and fuel. The

ancient islanders would sometimes
transport these statues for distances of

20 kilometers across the island's rough,
undulating terrain. It's a question that

has been asked of the islanders since
Europeans first arrived. How did your

ancestors move these statues? For a
long time, the islanders would always

give the same reply; they would simply
say they walked. Foreign visitors would

always roll their eyes at this answer.
They assumed this must be a piece of

local folklore, a kind of magical
thinking that imagined the statues to be

the living spirits of the ancestors. Some
may even have thought that the Rapa Nui

were making fun of them, but researchers
today have discovered that there may be

more truth to this legend than it seems.
Early archaeologists believed that the

Rapa Nui moved the great stone statues
into place using logs as rollers. In 1998,

archaeologist Jo Anne van Tilburg
successfully tested this theory using a

large number of hard wood rollers to
transport a statue for a short distance.

But recent research has cast doubt on
this theory and proposed

an incredible alternate possibility.
The key to discovering how the statues

were actually moved lies in the ones
that never made it to their intended

locations.

Littered across Easter Island are the sad
shapes of statues that broke during

their transportation. Only about 1/5 of
the Moai ever carved would reach their

destination on the Ahu platforms, and
these total about 200. The rest, some 700

more, were either abandoned in the quarry
or along the roads. Stone heads are

cracked from bodies, decapitated statues
lie moldering and moss-covered in the

long grass. For the ancient islanders,
this must have been a heartrending

sight. A whole team had worked for a year
or more, then successfully slid this

statue down the slope of the volcano.
Then, somewhere along its journey it had

cracked, and the broken statue would have
to be abandoned by the side of the road.

These so-called road Moai have a number
of interesting features. For instance, we

know that the islanders waited to carve
the eyes of the Moai until the statues

were in place on their platforms. This
may have had a ceremonial purpose which

has parallels around the world. For
instance, in Sri Lanka when new statues

of the Buddha are built, the eyes are
always the last part to be painted, and

only the painter is allowed in the
shrine room while doing their work.

But a team of archaeologists led by
Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo also found

something else interesting about these
abandoned statues; they noticed that when

abandoned road Moai were found on uphill
paths they usually lay on their backs,

and when the cracked statues were
abandoned on downhill paths, they usually

lay on their fronts. On flat ground, it
was more like 50/50. So, a theory

began to emerge. Is it possible that the
statues were transported upright? Once

this detail had been noticed, other
details about the road Moai seemed to

fall into place.
For instance, the road Moai had bulkier

lower-halfs and rounder bellies. This
had puzzled archaeologists for a long

time, but Hunt and Lipo's theory
seemed to make sense of this. The

islanders were designing the Moai in two
phases. In the first, the transportation

phase, the Moai were bottom-heavy like a
bowling pin. Once it had been rocked

into place on its platform, it was then
carved into its more slender and elegant

final shape. So, Lipo and Hunt
proposed that the statues were rocked

back and forth by teams of islanders
with ropes so that the statues actually

seemed to walk over the ground. Their
team caused an international sensation

when they were able to successfully walk
a scale model of a Moai cast in concrete,

rocking it back and forth along the road
with three teams holding ropes. In this

way, the statue could literally walk down
the path just as the ancient folklore

recounted.

The team managed to move the statue at a
rate of about a hundred meters in an

hour, meaning it could have walked around
a kilometer in a day. If this is indeed

how the statues were moved, it must have
been an incredible sight to see. The

tallest Moai weighed over 80 tonnes and
each one of the statues footsteps would

have thundered on the earth so that it
really seemed like a giant was stamping

its way towards the platform. There would
have likely been a huge amount of

ceremonial activity around the walking
of these statues, too, people coming from

all over the island to watch singing and
dancing and all kinds of activity. For

the days and weeks it took to transport
one of these statues, it would have

really felt like a god had come down to
earth.

I love the romance and imagination
behind Lipo and Hunt's theory, and I think

they build a convincing case that this
was indeed how the statues were moved.

But you might ask, well, why does it
matter how the statues were moved? Isn't

this a minor detail of the story of this
society's collapse?

Well actually, this question has come to
take on an enormous significance for the

mystery of what happened on Easter
Island. The traditional narrative, if you

remember, was that the Rapa Nui islanders
became so obsessed with building their

statues that they destroyed their
environment to do so. The islanders cut

down all their trees, the theory says, in
order to use as scaffolds and rollers to

transport them. If this was the case, then
each statue must have taken hundreds if

not thousands of trees to transport, and
this seemed the obvious answer to why

the island was so deforested, why its
ecology collapsed and its society

followed. But if Lipo and Hunt were
correct and the statues were walked into

place, then very little wood was needed,
and the whole narrative of the Moai

causing the collapse of the island's
ecology comes into question.

So, the whole mystery of Easter
Island seems to hinge on this question

of whether the statues rolled or whether
they walked. So, what do we know about the

loss of trees on Easter Island? One thing
we can say for sure; the subtropical palm

forest that the first settlers found on
the island wouldn't long survive the

arrival of humans. One of the earliest
casualties of this deforestation was the

largest of the island's trees, the Rapa
Nui Palm. If we want to guess at how this

enormous tree grew, we can look at its
closest surviving relative, the Chilean

Wine Palm. This tree takes 50 years to
reach its full height and until then, it

doesn't produce a single fruit. This slow-
-growing and slow-reproducing tree would

have been one of the most affected by
the arrival of humans. Some theorists,

Jared Diamond included, have argued that
the Easter Island Palm would have been

in high demand for use as rollers to
transport the giant Moai across the

island. But experiments have found that
the palm would have been exceptionally

badly-suited for this job. The hard outer
shell of the palm trunk conceals a soft

center that would have been instantly
crushed beneath the heavy stone statues.

Diamond has even argued that the palm
may have been cut down in order to build

large canoes, but nowhere else in
Polynesia are canoes built from palm

trunks, and they would be very unsuitable
for this purpose. So, what did happen to

Easter Island's trees? Well, undoubtedly,
much of the forest was cut down by

humans but they didn't do this
unconsciously or foolishly. They did it

for the same reason that people in
Iceland or England cut down their

forests, because they were farmers.

The Rapa Nui, like all Polynesians, farmed
energy-rich foods like sweet potatoes,

taro, and sugarcane. These abundant foods
were vastly more productive than whatever

food they could have gathered from the
forest. So, much of this deforestation was

controlled and conscious, and actually
improved the quality of these people's

lives. But that isn't to say there wasn't
an ecological collapse on Easter Island.

Pollen analysis shows that virtually all
large trees were lost from the island

within a matter of centuries and by far
the largest factor appears to have been

something very small, that's one of the
animal companions that the original

settlers brought with them; the
Polynesian rat. Wherever these pacific

explorers went, they brought animals with
them. Each Polynesian island got some

combination of these four animals; pigs,
dogs, chickens, and rats. On Rapa Nui, only

rats and chickens were introduced. Some
argued that these rats may have stowed

away on the canoes just as they do on
larger vessels, but rat has actually been

a foodstuff that Polynesians have relied
on throughout history. It was never a

delicacy and seems to have been
considered a food of the common people,

as rat bones are rarely found in the
rubbish dumps of high-status houses.

However, they were a good and reliable
source of protein on long voyages. I

can't speak to personal experience, but
accounts I've read say that rat tastes

oily and gamey, a little like rabbit.
Another advantage to this source of food

is that rats reproduce incredibly
quickly. Once the Polynesian rat was

introduced to Easter Island, its spread
would have been unstoppable. The millions

of giant palm trees covering the island
would have provided them with an almost

unlimited supply of their favorite food,
palm nuts. Recent lab studies have shown

that the reproductive potential of rats
under these

ideal conditions can be enormous. In fact,
the rat population could have doubled

every 47 days until they reached a
population of up to 3 million, and the

island was completely overrun. The rats
would have quickly eaten the seeds and

palm nuts from the trees, preventing the
forests from regenerating.

In Anakena beach and certain caves,
archeologists have found the earliest

remnants of palm nut shells showing the
tooth marks of rats. As well as damaging

the forests, rats would also have eaten
the eggs of seabirds, finishing off those

the islanders hadn't trapped and eaten.
Since the seabirds fertilized the

soil with their droppings, this would
have spelled disaster for the

biodiversity of Easter Island. But the
question is, did this loss of trees

caused a societal collapse on Rapa Nui?
The answer to that question is

almost certainly not.

This isn't to say that the loss of palm
forest on Rapa Nui didn't present a

number of challenges to the islanders. By
around the Year 1650, pollen studies

show that the deforestation of Easter
Island was complete. Without tree cover,

the ocean winds could now blow right
across the island. The wind and storms

threatened to blow away the topsoil, and
salt spray from the sea effectively

salted the earth in coastal regions,
damaging the soil further. But in all

cases, the Rapa Nui islanders reacted to
these challenges with ingenuity and

creativity. They transformed their island
not into a desolate wasteland but into

an astonishingly effective system of
gardens, orchards, and farmland. In fact,

archaeologists have found evidence of
areas of the island where the islanders

planted groves of palm trees and
cultivated them. Around this time,

they also began farming using a
technique known as rock mulching. This

involved laying rock beds around the
island which prevented the soil from

washing or blowing away. It also reduced
the amount of water evaporated by the

sun and increased the amount of
nutrients available to growing plants as

the rainwater flowed over the rocks and
carried minerals to their roots. Rock

mulching has been used by cultures
around the world who live in harsh, water-

poor environments. It's been observed in
the Negev Desert in Israel, the pebbled

fields of Langzhou in China, the ash
fields of the Canary Islands, and the

fields of the Anasazi culture in New
Mexico. The Rapa Nui set about the

task of rock mulching with the same
great energy that they used to carve and

transport the Moai. They would ultimately
cover half the landmass of their island

in rock gardens of this kind. It was an
enormous task. It's been calculated that

over the 400 years that the practice was
engaged in, it would have taken over 150

men working daily to construct these
vast assemblages

made up of billions of stones.
There's strong evidence that the Rapa

Nui people also took advantage of the
deep underground caverns of the island.

The caves of Easter Island were formed
by lava tubes which developed during the

volcanic eruptions that raised the
islands out of the sea. When lava flows

out of the mouth of a volcano,
it forms vast underground rivers as the

lava on the surface cools and hardens
into rock. When the eruption ends and the

lava stops flowing, the tubes drain their
lava, leaving enormous caverns that look as

though a monstrous worm has eaten its
way through the rock. These tubes are as

wide as a subway tunnel and Easter
Island has one of the largest systems of

volcanic caves in the world. The
islanders' relationship with these caves

goes back to the first known moment of
their history, as this piece of Rapa Nui

folklore about King Hotu Matua shows.
The explorers went to the west side of

the island and discovered a surfing spot.
They rode a wave to the right and called

the place where they landed Hanga Roa.
They rode a wave to the left and landed

at Apina Iti. They caught more waves, than
went ashore and rested in a cave at Pu

Pakakina. Some of these caves can
stretch for three or four kilometers

into the island's rock. As the forests
of Rapa Nui retreated, its people

increasingly turned to these caves to
provide cover for their crops. They

cultivated vast underground gardens
where they could grow sweet potatoes and

yams to supplement their diet. They also
constructed circular rock walls called

manavai that could be as much as six
feet tall and where they could grow a

variety of crops. These kept plants safe
from the destructive elements of the

weather, reduced the amount of water
runoff, and concentrated nutrients.

Archeologists have identified over 2,500
of these rock gardens around the island,

but this is likely only a fraction of
the original number. Studies have shown

that even today, with no active
maintenance being done on them, these

rings of rock are still operating as
designed by the ancient gardeners. Levels

of phosphorus and potassium, crucial
minerals for plants, are much higher

inside the manavai than outside, with
the concentrations being sometimes two

or three times as high.
Simply put, with their rock gardening

techniques, the Rapa Nui were able to make
the land much more productive after the

forest was cleared than it was before.
Some of this great agricultural

potential is hinted at in the accounts
of the first Dutch sailors to land on

the island, although I will once again
caution about trusting too much in these

accounts. Although Roggeveen believed
Rapa Nui to be a treeless, sandy

wasteland from a distance, when he
actually landed on the island, he was

surprised to find it a productive
landscape. We found it not only not sandy;

on the contrary,
exceedingly fruitful, producing bananas,

potatoes, sugar cane of remarkable
thickness, and many other kinds of the

fruits of the earth. This place, as far as
its rich soil and good climate are concerned,

such that it might be made into an
earthly paradise.

Another of Roggeveen's officers, a man
named Karl Friedrich Behrens, seems also

to contradict this account of a treeless
island and reported on a wide variety of

uses the islanders had for palm leaves.
They gave us palm branches as peace

offerings. Their houses were set up on
wooden stakes, daubed over with luting

and covered with palm leaves.
In fact, Behrens paints a remarkably

positive impression of the island
overall. This island is a suitable and

convenient place at which to obtain
refreshment, as all the country is under

cultivation and we saw in the distance
whole tracts of woodland.

Roggeveen himself also witnessed
cultivated groves of fruit trees on the

island. It was now deemed advisable to go
to the other side of the island, the

principal place of their plantations and
fruit trees, for all the things they

brought to us of that kind were fetched
from that quarter. So, here, a relatively

clear picture is beginning to emerge. We
can say for sure that the arrival of

humans on Rapa Nui resulted in the
disappearance of most of its forest, but

this is true of virtually every forested
island on earth after the arrival of

people. No one has yet been able to
draw a clear causative link between the

loss of the forests on Rapa Nui and the
collapse of so-called complex society. In

fact, studies done on the skeletons of
islanders from around this time showed

that they suffered from less
malnutrition than the average European.

This all seems to be backed up by
Roggeveen's account of his first visit to

the island. It's clear from his account
that when he arrived, the Rapa Nui

islanders weren't starving. They didn't
make any attempt to beg for food from

the newcomers. In fact, they were much
more interested in the Europeans' hats.

One brave islander even climbed
through a porthole on Roggeveen's ship to

steal a tablecloth. But there's no
account of them stealing the Europeans'

food. In fact, it was the Dutch,
malnutritioned on a diet of salt meat

and hard tack after weeks at sea, who
begged the islanders for food, giving

them cloth and linen in exchange for 60
chickens and 30 bunches of bananas. None

of this sounds like the behavior of a
people living on the edge of starvation.

With multiple abundant sources of food,
alongside the efficient use of the land

around them, archaeological and written
evidence begins to make that popular

scenario of starvation and even
cannibalism look patently absurd.

Part and parcel of the starvation
narrative is the assumption that the

society of the island descended into a
period of brutal conflict once resources

ran scarce, but if resources were
abundant, can we also question this

assumption? The folklore of the islanders
does record a period of warfare, after

which the Moai-building culture faded
into obscurity. But as we've seen, this

folklore can be unreliable at the best
of times. Much more reliable is the

archaeological record. When a period
of conflict occurs in such an

environment, the evidence is usually hard
to miss. One great example of this is the

island of Fiji, another Pacific island
7,000 kilometers away. In Fiji,

archaeologists have found the remains of
strong hilltop forts and fortified towns,

all pointing to a period of warfare. In
Hawaii, it's well-documented that chiefs

fought each other in large battles
featuring hundreds of warriors armed

with clubs. The signs of war in the
archaeological record aren't difficult

to spot; increased number of weapons,
increased building of defensive

structures, and skeletal remains that
bear the marks of violence. First, let's

look at the evidence of weapons on Rapa
Nui. The islanders did make blades from

the black volcanic glass obsidian.
Obsidian forms in the vents of volcanic

eruptions when lava reaches the surface
and cools quickly, forming a glassy

material that is brittle but has
exceptionally sharp edges. In fact,

obsidian blades have been measured to be
up to a thousand times sharper than a

steel scalpel. The Rapa Nui gave their
blades names depending on their shape;

Fish Tail, Rat Spine, Banana Leaf are some
examples. Some writers have argued that

the large amount of these blades found
points to a mass production of weaponry

and a period of conflict.
But studies of these blades have found

that their edges were mostly covered in
vegetable matter;

that's sweet potato and taro. They
were found in the highest concentrations

in the area of the islanders' rock
gardens where they were most likely used

for everyday tasks like the preparation
of food. Studies of skeletons have also

seemed to undermine this picture of
conflict. In a historical zone of

conflict, we would expect to see
skeletons missing their heads, for

instance, or skulls with arrowheads
inside, broken bones, and bones bearing

scratches from blades glancing off them.
But studies of skeletal remains on

Easter Island have shown that the
islanders were, in fact, remarkable for

their mostly peaceful existence. Only
around 2% of the skeletons studied have

been found to have suffered trauma from
blunt and cutting weapons, and this isn't

a large proportion of the population. I
do think here it's also worth

remembering Behrens's observation that
the islanders were unarmed when they

first came to meet the Dutch explorers.
In the search for defensive

structures, archeologists have also found
themselves frustrated.

The small Pacific island of Rapa Iti, for
instance, is five times smaller than

Easter Island and yet it has no fewer
than 14 hilltop fortresses. On Rapa Iti,

life on the island actually did descend
into a nightmare of violence and civil

war, and the signs of this are hard to
miss. Fortifications on Rapa Iti involved

watchtowers and walls, ditches, and wooden
palisade fences. We find weapons here and

human remains bearing the marks of
violence, but on Easter Island no such

fortifications exist. One feature known
as the Poike ditch was long assumed to

be a defensive structure, but recent
investigations have shown that it's

actually a natural feature caused by the
collision of two lava flows. Some walls

built at the entrances to caves have
also been used as evidence of the

islanders fortifying themselves, but
there's little other evidence of the

caves being used as military strongholds.
In fact, they seem to be more

commonly used as hiding places. So,
another one of our assumptions about

Easter Island has been taken away. Now
we're left having to explain how Rapa

Nui's culture could actually have been
less violent than many other comparable

societies, and certainly less violent
than any city of Europe at the time. We

may never know what decides whether a
small community will descend into a

violent hell like Rapa Iti or whether
they will work together to maintain the

peace like on Rapa Nui. Some have
suggested that the Rapa Nui islanders

all descended from that first
colonisation attempt would have had many

family relations between tribes, and so
it may have been unthinkable to escalate

conflict beyond the occasional feud or
skirmish. When a rival chief is also the

husband of your wife's sister's aunt,
for instance, you might try to avoid

excessive conflict and reach for
peaceful compromises. That is, if you want

to avoid a frosty atmosphere at your
dinner table.

On a small island, word travels fast
and it doesn't pay to be viewed as

overly aggressive. Some historians have
even argued that the construction of the

Moai themselves may have helped prevent
conflict by allowing the island's

different communities to compete for
dominance in a non-violent way.

Another way this may have occurred is
through an incredible ritual known as

the bird man competition.

The later history of the island is
dominated by the cult of a mysterious

figure known as the tangata manu or the
bird man. Cave paintings on Easter Island

show this ceremonial figure with the
body of a man but the head and wings of

a bird. Each year, the men of Rapa Nui
took part in a ceremony that allowed

them to become the human embodiment of
this figure for the next year. It was a

test of strength and daring that is
astonishing to even contemplate today.

The contestants who competed to become
the bird man had a simple enough task. Off

the southwest coast of Rapa Nui there is
a small cluster of islands, and one of

these is a rocky outcrop known as Moto
Nui which is home to several species of

nesting birds. Among these is the black
tern which we've already seen held a

mystical significance for Polynesian
sailors. These birds seem to be gifted

with a magical ability to lead sailors
home, and it's not hard to see how they

would have assumed a powerful religious
significance.

The bird man contest took place in the
spring, during the laying season of the

black terns. Young men who wanted to
become that year's bird man would have to

swim out to the rocky island of Moto Nui,
a distance of about a kilometer, through

choppy seas and powerful currents. Once
they reached the island, they had to

climb up through the flocks of cackling
sea birds and search through their nests,

looking for the first egg of the season.
Sometimes they would have to wait there

for days, but when they found their
precious prize, they had to swim all the

way back to Rapa Nui. Then, dripping with
cold saltwater, they had to climb the

sheer 300 meter cliff. The first man to
complete this incredible triathlon event

would be crowned the bird man.

It's unclear how much power this figure
actually had, but in terms of status

there was no higher honor. Allowing
men to battle it out in this test of

strength every year may have played a
role in reducing the violence of the

island. So, on Easter Island, the evidence
seems to suggest that there was no

starvation, there was no widespread
warfare. So, you might be left asking

did their society even collapse at all?
The answer to that is yes, but not

when you think it did. For early European
explorers, there was no greater mystery

than what they called the riddle of
Easter Island.

The French seafarer and artist Pierre
Loti wrote about it in the 19th century.

There exists in the midst of the great
ocean, in a region where nobody goes, a

mysterious and isolated island. The
island is planted with monstrous, great

statues, the work of I don't know what
race, today degenerate or vanished, its

great remains an enigma. We've actually
encountered this kind of thinking a

number of times over the course of this
series. When European explorers

discovered the ruins of past
civilizations, they often found it hard

to believe that so-called primitive
people had a hand in their construction.

Whether it's assuming that the ruins of
Angkor were built by the Romans or that

the Mayan ruins of Tikal were built by
the citizens of Atlantis, European

writers have often struggled to believe
that the indigenous people of other

lands were capable of great
constructions. This kind of thinking

follows a circular logic; only a
so-called advanced civilization could

have built these things, but the people I
see living here don't look like an

advanced civilization, therefore these
people can't

have built these monuments. The problems
with this kind of thinking are obvious.

It deceives us into thinking that an
advanced civilization can only look like

a European civilization; highly
centralized and organized, and the very

notion of a society being advanced
suggests that human progress follows a

fixed and inevitable path, and that our
way of organizing our societies and

economies is the only one. It's this kind
of thinking that made early explorers of

Easter Island look at the advanced rock
mulching techniques of the Rapa Nui

people and see only a wasteland
scattered with rocks. This belief system

found its logical conclusion in the
Norwegian adventurer and archaeologist

Thor Heyerdahl. Heyerdahl believed that
the Polynesian Islands had been

populated not by Polynesians hopping the
islands from the west, but from people

from South America traveling by raft
from the east. He also believed, curiously,

that these people must have been white-
-skinned and European in origin. He simply

couldn't comprehend the idea that other
peoples around the world could have

developed such artistic and
architectural skills. So, what appeared to

be a puzzle to early European visitors
wasn't actually a puzzle at all. The

stone statues of Easter Island hadn't
been built by some vanished ancient

culture, but by the people who lived
there already and seemed to those

Europeans to be so simple. This idea of a
societal collapse happening on Easter

Island before contact with the Europeans
has survived into our day, even though it

has very little basis in fact. But this
doesn't mean that a collapse didn't

occur on Rapa Nui. In fact, the island
would soon undergo one of the most

dramatic examples of societal and
cultural destruction that can be found

in history.
But it wasn't because they cut down the

trees. There is one event in Easter
Island's history that I think encapsulates

the complete destruction that would soon
rain down on it and its poor,

unsuspecting inhabitants.
That's the toppling in only a few years

of every one of the island's statues. For
centuries, the islanders had loved and

revered the Moai that their ancestors
had spent generations carving and

transporting. In 1722, the Dutch
sailor Behrens recounts what he saw of

the islanders' devotion to these statues.
They kindle fire in front of certain

remarkably tall stone figures they set
up, and thereafter squatting on their

heels with heads bowed down, they bring
the palms of their hands together and

alternately raise and lower them. But
with every subsequent European visitor

to the island, this situation seemed to
change. On the 15th of November, 1770,

48 years after the first European
visit, a second arrived.

Two Spanish ships landed there and spent
five days on the island, performing a

very thorough survey of its coast. They
renamed the island Isla de San Carlos

and claimed it on behalf of King Charles
III of Spain. They also

ceremoniously erected three wooden
crosses and a Spanish flag on a hill.

When they explored the island, it
seems that all of the 200 erected

statues were still standing but four
years later, the famous British explorer

Captain Cook sailed past the island and
found a much different situation. Cook's

diary of Thursday the 17th of March, 1774,
gives his account of the impoverished

state of the island. This is undoubtedly
the same island as was seen by Roggeveen

in April 1722,
although the description given of

it by the author of that voyage does by
no means correspond with it now. No

nation will ever contend for the honor
of the discovery of Easter Island, as

there is hardly an island in the sea
which affords less refreshments and

conveniences for shipping than it does.
Nature has hardly provided it with

anything fit for man to eat or drink, and
the natives are but few and plant no

more than sufficient for themselves.
If Cook's account is to be believed, the

population size of Easter Island also
seems to have taken a serious hit. The

inhabitants of this isle, from what we
have been able to see of them, do not

exceed six or seven hundred souls.
There's another significant detail, too;

Cook noted that the islanders now
carried weapons when approaching foreign

visitors.
Their arms are wooden patta pattows and

clubs very much like those of New
Zealand, and spears about six or eight

feet long which are pointed at one end
with pieces of black flint. But the final

tragic detail is that in the four years
since the Spanish expedition, virtually

all of the standing Moai on the island
had been toppled over. On the east side

near the sea, they met with three
platforms of stonework, or rather, the

ruins of them. On each had stood four of
those large statues but they were all

fallen down. All except one were broken
by the fall or in some measure defaced.

The practice of statue-toppling is
called huri mo'ai in the Rapa Nui

language, and it continued into the 1830s.
By 1838, every single coastal Moai had

been taken down. Now, the only standing
statues were those abandoned on the

slopes below the quarry at Rano Raraku.
What happened to make the islanders

start to carry weapons? What caused their
population to reduce so heavily, and what

made them turn so dramatically against
their gods? Well, the answer to that may

lie in the very event that opened this
episode, and which we've returned to a

number of times;
that's the arrival of three Dutch sails

on the horizon on Easter Day, 1722. At the
site of the enormous ships dropping

anchor some way off the coast, the Easter
islanders gathered on the shore in

astonishment. They must have felt how we
would feel if a vast alien spaceship

were to one day materialize over one of
our cities. It must have been a mix of

fear and wonder, a sense that the world
would never quite be the same again. They

selected one of their number who must
have been the bravest

of them all. It's not unlikely, I think,
that he would have been the winner of

the most recent bird man competition, the
island's champion and protector. This man

got in his canoe and rode out to meet
the strange vessels whose white sails

must have looked brilliant and dazzling
in the sunlight. Perhaps he wouldn't have

immediately realized how large they were
until he got up close and their prows

began to loom over his small canoe. When
he approached, he saw that there were men

on board and he waved to them. The Dutch
officer, Karl Friedrich Behrens, wrote

about this incredible encounter. During
the morning, Captain Bouman brought an

Easter Islander on board, together with
his craft. This hapless creature seemed

to be very glad to behold us and showed
the greatest wonder at the build of our

ship. He took special notice of the
tautness of our spars, the stoutness of

our rigging and running gear; the sails,
the guns, which he felt all over with

minute attention and with everything else
that he saw. When the image of his own

features was displayed before him in a
mirror,

he started suddenly back and then looked
towards the back of the glass, apparently

in the expectation of discovering there
the cause of the apparition. After we had

sufficiently beguiled ourselves with him
and he with us, we started him off again

in his canoe towards the shore. With this
light-hearted encounter conceals a dark

truth about Roggeveen's visit. In fact,
when Roggeveen and his men went ashore,

their visit would turn to tragedy. It's
clear from both accounts that the

Europeans were nervous when they stepped
ashore. They had heard stories of violent

encounters with indigenous people and
it's worth noting that the novel Robinson

Crusoe had been published only three
years before, full of garish stories of

cannibalism and murder.
Despite their guns and cannons, it's

clear that the islanders frightened them,
and the natural curiosity and boldness

of the Rapa Nui
people seemed to make matters worse.

When the Dutchmen got ashore, the
islanders pressed around them, grabbing

at their hats and clothes, and even
touching the guns they carried. It's not

clear which Dutchman shot first,
but the situation quickly spiraled out

of control.
The Europeans fired into the unarmed

crowd of islanders. Their guns were
flintlock pistols and rifles that would

have sent up puffs of smoke, and the
cries of people shot would have rang out,

with the smell of gunpowder filling the
air. Behrens recounts what happened next

as he recognized a familiar face among
the murdered islanders. Many of them were

shot at this juncture, and among the
slain lay the man who had been with us

before of which we were much grieved. In order
to obtain possession of the bodies, they

congregated in great numbers, bringing
with them presents of various kinds of

fruits and vegetables in order that we
might the more readily surrender to them

their slain. The consternation of these
people was by no means abated, even with

their children's children in that place
will, in times to come, be able to recount

the story of it. We can assume that what
Behrens said is true. The story of this

violent encounter must have reverberated
through the history of the Rapa Nui

people. It would have destabilized their
ancient beliefs and rocked their very

sense of the world around them. Remember
that Behrens mentions that the islanders

didn't have any weapons at this point,
that they only prayed to their gods for

protection. Now imagine what would happen
to this belief system when visitors

arrived from the sea, killed multiple
islanders with what must have appeared

to be magic weapons. Then when these
visitors walked around the island, even

approaching the statues, and then sailed
away unharmed. When you think about this

encounter through that lens,
it becomes a lot clearer why the Rapa Nui

might have lost faith in their ancestors.
But the sad truth is that the European

bullets were not the deadliest legacy
they left behind. The true killer of the

Rapa Nui would have been something much
smaller; invisible microbes, viruses, and

bacteria to which the islanders' immune
systems had never been exposed. Europe

has always been a crossroads between
many different peoples, sometimes

separated by hundreds or even thousands
of miles.

Europe's constant wars and exchange of
trade spread localized diseases across

the continent, and each year the Silk
Road brought fresh shipments of disease

from China and India along with silks
and spices. This all resulted in

Europeans becoming immune to a large
variety of diseases, but although the

diseases didn't affect them, they could
still carry them. For populations

that had not suffered the same exposure,
these germs could be devastating. In

pathology, this phenomenon is known as
the virgin soil effect. It's not recorded

what diseases may have been transmitted.
In other parts of the uncontacted world,

cholera, measles, diphtheria, and even the
bubonic plague swept through populations.

By even the lowest estimates, indigenous
populations were reduced by 80% right

across the Americas. Four out of every
five people died, and it's likely that in

the even more isolated environment of
Easter Island, the effects could have

been even more devastating.
On other better-observed Polynesian

islands, the reduction in population
after first contact was as much as 90%.

So, in the decades after the Dutch
visit, we can imagine disease ravaging

the helpless population of Rapa Nui. It's
possible that the population of the

island may have crashed from a height of
around 3,000 to only a few hundred. The

population may have only just recovered
by the time 48 years later that the

Spanish arrived and delivered a whole
new dose of invisible death to the

islanders. The Rapa Nui people wouldn't
have been able to understand why this

was happening to them. In fact, if you'd
asked the Europeans of the time what

caused these diseases, they wouldn't know
either. They may have told you that they

were caused by miasmas or bad night
air,

this being the prevailing theory at the
time. As whole families of islanders died,

the Rapa Nui must have believed that the
ancestors they had so laboriously

carved to protect the island had failed
them. By the time the Spanish brought the

second wave of disease and it began
ravaging the population all over again,

those looming monoliths on the coast may
have begun to represent not protective

spirits but the very specters of death
themselves, and the islanders, one by one,

began to bring them down.

Soon, these fallen giants would litter
the landscape. Now, only those abandoned

Moai half-buried in the runoff from the
quarry would remain upright, and the age

of Easter Island statues would come to
an end. The loss of Easter Island's

culture was an incalculable tragedy for
our understanding of humanity. One of the

reasons this is true is that Easter
Island may have been one of the few

places on earth where writing was
independently invented. A kind of script

called Rongorongo has been found on just
a few dozen wooden objects and tablets

that have survived from Rapa Nui. Many of
them are heavily weathered, burned, or

otherwise damaged, and they were all
plundered by private collectors in the

19th century, now scattered in museums
and private collections around the world.

Every modern attempt to decipher
Rongorongo has failed and the script

stands as one of the true mysteries of
Easter Island. Many of the glyphs that

make up the script are representations
of things the islanders saw around them.

We can see the familiar shapes of sea
turtles and birds,

for instance. The legends of the
islanders say that the original founder,

the man they called Hotu Matua, had
brought the wooden tablets with him when

he landed on Easter Island. But this
seems unlikely; there is no known

tradition of writing anywhere else in
Polynesia. So, it's thought that

Rongorongo must have been an invention
of the islanders themselves. It doesn't

seem like literacy was ever widespread.
In fact, early visitors to the island

were told that reading and writing was a
privilege of the ruling families and

priests. Some have argued that
Rongorongo must be a more modern

invention, that the islanders may have seen
Europeans reading and writing,

thus inspiring them to create their own
script. If this were the case, then the

written language of Rongorongo would
have emerged, flourished, and then fallen

into oblivion all within a space of less
than 100 years.

But I think one detail of the script
makes me doubt this; that's the character

that shows clearly and unambiguously the
distinctive wine bottle shape of a

Jubaea palm tree, a species that went
extinct on the island before the year

1650, more than seventy years before
first European contact. To my mind, this

alone shows that Rongorongo was
developed on the island during a time

when giant palms still towered over its
shores. In 1864, a French churchmen Eugene

Eyraud arrived on the island and
described seeing a vast number of these

writing tablets, although it seemed to
him that the islanders no longer valued

them as repositories of knowledge. In
every hut, one finds wooden tablets or

sticks covered in several sorts of
hieroglyphic characters. They are

depictions of animals unknown on the
island which the natives draw with sharp

stones. Each figure has its own name, but
the scant attention they pay to these

tablets leads me to think that these
characters, remnants of some primitive

writing, are now for them a habitual
practice which they keep without seeking

its meaning. European visitors in the
following decades reported seeing the

islanders using these writing tablets as
reels for their fishing lines and as

tools for fire-starting.
By this time, none of the islanders

could agree on how to read the tablets.
Whatever knowledge was held in the

Rongorongo script, the destruction of the
island's society had caused it to be lost.

If attempts at deciphering it
continue to be unsuccessful, we may

never know what the Rapa Nui people
wrote down. This destruction occurred

more than anything
due to the final tragic stage of the

collapse of Rapa Nui society. Once
again, it's not because they cut down the

trees.

By 1789, maps were being printed that
showed exactly where Easter Island was.

These maps meant that anyone with a ship
could now make their way there and for

the remaining islanders, this would spell
their doom. In the 19th century, the

island became a common stop for ships
that wanted to pick up food and supplies,

and more than 50 recorded voyages are
known to have stopped there. But the

number of unrecorded visits may have
been much higher and as time went by,

people's reasons for visiting the island
began to become more sinister. In 1805, a

ship full of American seal hunters
found themselves short-handed. In need of

laborers, they made landfall on Easter
Island and kidnapped 22 Rapa Nui people,

forcing them to work on their ship and
keeping them in shackles below deck. When

the men were finally taken up on deck,
every last one of them jumped overboard

into the sea and swam below the surface
so the sealers couldn't recapture them.

This would be only the beginning of
increasingly organized slave-taking

raids against the island. Soon, the
Rapa Nui

were understandably hostile to any
foreigner who tried to land there. A

Russian expedition was pelted with
stones when they landed in 1816, and

traffic to the South Pacific was only
to increase as whaling activity drove

the North Atlantic whale populations to
the edge of extinction.

Now, more whalers ventured ever further
into the South Pacific and it was common

for these ship crews to kidnap Rapa Nui
men and women as slaves. These slave

raids reached their peak in the 1860s
when large and well-equipped expeditions

began arriving from Peru with weapons.
These teams, known as black birders, would

scour the whole island, searching through
its caves and hollows, rounding up almost

every single adult they could find. In
total, these raids kidnapped over 1500 of

the Rapa Nui people. Only a scattered
bunch of survivors who had managed to hide

were spared. With their work done, the
sailors voyaged home to Peru and the

kidnapped Rapa Nui people were put to
work on plantations or as domestic

servants. When news of these kidnappings
got out, there was a public outcry and a

campaign began to repatriate the
kidnapped islanders, headed by a French

bishop. The Peruvian government was
reluctant at first, but it was ultimately

forced by international pressure to
comply. The islanders were rounded up and

transported back to the home they had
been stolen from. But this only led to

further tragedy. Of the 1500 who had been
taken, the vast majority had died in Peru,

leaving less than a hundred remaining. A
further 85 died due to the harsh

conditions on the voyage back to Easter
Island, leaving only about a dozen

survivors who ever made it home.
Of these, some were infected with

smallpox and before long, this spread
through the remaining population of the

island. This devastating event would be
the final death knell for the island's

distinctive and beautiful culture. Among
those taken as slaves were every single

one of the priestly class, the only
people on the planet who could read the

Rongorongo script. The continuity of
songs and folktales that had for

centuries carried the folk memory of the
people of Rapa Nui was lost. By 1866

there were just a hundred and eleven
adult islanders living on Rapa Nui, 68

men and 43 women. Of these, only 36 ever
had any offspring, meaning that the

current indigenous population of the
island is descended from only these 36

people. Two years later, in 1868, the HMS
Topaze, a 51-gun British frigate of the

Royal Navy, landed on Easter Island to
find a devastated population. The

islanders could no longer summon the
energy even to throw stones at the

arriving Europeans. The British searched
the island until they found what they

were looking for. It was the most
beautiful example of a Moai ever carved.

This was one of the rare statues carved
not from the soft volcanic tuff, but from

hard basalt, meaning that its surface
details and contours have been

remarkably preserved. It must have been
truly a labor of love for a team of

ancient artists to carve this hard stone.
The British put ropes around it and

dragged it aboard their ship while the
helpless Rapa Nui watched. When a British

sailor asked one of the islanders what
the name of the statue was, they replied

that he was Hoa Hakananai'a.
This translates to 'our stolen friend'. The

statue was eventually presented to Queen
Victoria and it was placed in the

British Museum where it remains to this
day despite repeated requests by the

modern Rapa Nui for it to be returned. As
a final death blow, Rapa Nui was annexed

by Chile in 1888 and twelve years later,
the whole island was bought to be used

as a sheep ranch. Capitalism arrived on
Easter Island.

The tiny population of remaining Rapa
Nui were moved into the town of Hanga

Roa on the west coast. They were ordered
to build a nine-foot stone wall around

the town, and were then told they were
not allowed to go beyond this wall.

Virtually, the whole island was now
off-limits to them. The only way for the

Rapa Nui to survive was to work on the
sheep ranch so that they could earn

wages to buy food. But the only food
they could buy was from a shop owned by

their employer. They were effectively
imprisoned laborers on their own island.

The island now became home to many
thousands of sheep who grazed its slopes

for more than 60 years. This, more
than anything the Rapa Nui had done,

destroyed the last remaining trees and
stripped the island of its topsoil. One

American visitor to the island, a company
man named William Thompson, recounted

seeing the ecological damage that the
intensive sheep farming had done to the

islands ecology. In other parts of the
island may be seen in places and

considerable numbers a hardwood tree
called by the natives toromiro. These

must have flourished well at one time,
but are now all or nearly all dead and

decaying by reason of being stripped of
their bark by the flocks of sheep which

roam at will all over the island.
Now, the buried statues of Easter Island

would stare out over the bleak and
treeless landscape we've come to

recognize, so different to the rich
cultivated gardens of the Rapa Nui.

A clear picture of this collapse does
begin to emerge and we can see that the

mystery of Easter Island isn't much of a
mystery at all. Rapa Nui wasn't the site

of an ecological suicide as we've been
led to believe, but the site of a

genocide. Its unique and beautiful
civilization did collapse but it did so

after contact with the outside world and
not before. The Easter Islanders didn't

foolishly damage their environment and
bring about their downfall. In fact, they

made their island garden flourish. They
built one of the most remarkable visual

cultures in the world through ingenuity
and hard work, and maintained peace on

their island community. So when we
reach for Easter Island as a fable or

warning about our future, we should be
very careful about what kind of fable we

turn it into. As we move forward in
facing the challenges of our own time,

perhaps we should be asking not what
warning we might take from the fate of

Easter Island but what its people may
have to teach us.

I want to end the episode by listening
to a piece of music we've heard a few

times already. It's an old piece of Rapa
Nui folk music performed by students at

the Toki School of Music and Arts in
Rapa Nui, which aims to preserve the

traditional culture of the Easter
Islanders for the next generation. It's

the song that was once sung over the
carving of the great Moai statues and

its rhythm comes from the striking
together of two stones. As you listen, try

to imagine what it must have been like
for these islanders to watch their

traditional way of life dissolve beneath
the pressures of a cruel and unrelenting

outside world. Imagine what it must have
felt like to have your faith in the

protective power of your ancestors
shaken as disaster after disaster seems

to wash in like a summer storm from the
sea. Imagine how they must have felt

standing on those grassy slopes and
watching the sails of tall ships coming

in over the horizon, as the Pacific wind
blew over the rolling grassy slopes

still scattered with the louring stone
statues of a forgotten age.

Thank you for listening to The Fall of
Civilizations Podcast. I'd like to thank

my voice actors for this episode Jacob
Rollinson, Jake Barrett-Mills, Annie Kelly,

and Shem Jacobs. I'd love to hear your
thoughts and responses on Twitter, so

please come and tell me what you thought.
You can follow me @PaulMMCooper.

If you'd like updates about the podcast,
announcements about new episodes, as well

as images, maps, and reading suggestions,
you can follow the podcast @fall_of_

civ_pod with underscores separating
the words. This is normally the part of

the podcast when I ask you to support me
and my work on Patreon, and I would like

to give a heartfelt thank you to
everybody who has subscribed to the

podcast so far. But I wanted to give that
time on this episode to a project that I

find truly inspiring;
that's the Toki School of Music and Arts

on Easter Island who kindly agreed to
record some music especially for this

episode. Toki was set up after a
successful crowdfunding campaign to

create a fully sustainable music school
on Rapa Nui where the island's children

can learn the traditional songs of their
ancestors and keep the culture of the

island alive for future generations.
While the bid to build the school was

successful, it still needs funds to keep
running to cover its costs and to pay

its teachers, so if you think you can
spare anything please head to Toki Rapa

Nui.org. That's TOKI RAPA NUI.org to
find out more and donate whatever you

can to keep this unique and beautiful
initiative alive.

For now, goodbye and thanks for listening.