Easter Island's Monoliths Made the Crops Grow

By quarrying rock for the statues, the people of Rapa Nui fertilized the soil.
BY REINA GATTUSO
JANUARY 8, 2020



A row of stone monoliths, or moai, on Ahu Tongariki in Rapa Nui. BJØRN CHRISTIAN TØRRISSEN/CC BY-SA 3.0

WHEN EUROPEANS FIRST REACHED RAPA Nui, or Easter Island, on Easter Day, 1722, they were awed to find around 1,000 imposing stone moai, or monoliths, carved in the shape of human beings. The statues overlooked a barren landscape. While archaeological evidence shows that Rapa Nui was once lushly forested, by the time Europeans reached the island, it had been clear-cut, devastated by human overuse, ecological change, or a bloody civil war. The population, which had once likely numbered in the tens of thousands, had been reduced to 3,000 at most.

For the Dutch sailors, many of whom had travelled Polynesia extensively, the sculptures were astounding. Human sculptures are rare in Polynesian art, which more commonly depicts mythic and animal forms. In addition, Easter Island was incredibly remote—more than 1,200 miles away from other populated islands, and 2,100 miles away from Chile, to which it now belongs—and appeared barren. According to Joanne Van Tilburg, a UCLA archaeologist who has researched Easter Island for decades, the sailors regarded the sculptures as a mystery. “How and why did people produce these wonderful sculptures when it was crystal clear that the environment of the island had been completely altered?” she says.

The Dutch, of course, weren’t the first sailors to land at Rapa Nui. That honor goes to the Polynesian seafarers who settled the island by around 1200. While the island likely had significant vegetation, including forests, when they arrived, a 63-square-mile chunk of rock in the middle of vast ocean is an unlikely incubator of a complex society. But the Rapa Nui people initially thrived, producing Polynesia’s only writing system and the famous monoliths.

When Europeans visited Rapa Nui in the 1700s, however, the island’s population was already in decline, and its history getting hazy. The ship’s officers recorded their observations, but the most extensive documentation of the Islanders’ views of their own culture didn’t emerge until 1914, when an English anthropologist, Katherine Routledge, teamed up with a Rapa Nui man, Juana Rapano, to collect oral histories. By that time, after almost 200 years of Peruvian slave raids, missionary activity, and European disease, many memories of precolonial society—including knowledge of the island’s writing system, which died with the elites who mastered it— had been lost.

More:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-do-easter-island-statues-mean