Head Cases

Unraveling the Mystery
of Easter Island

by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo

Free Press, 256 pp., $26

When I was a boy in the late 1950s, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, a great bestseller, was fascinating to me—certainly far more intriguing than Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking or even Grace Metalious’s steamy Peyton Place. In Heyerdahl’s “nonfiction’’ book, the late Norwegian anthropologist/adventurer/entertainer asserted that a highly civilized race of people from South America and points north and east had sailed across the Pacific to Polynesia on balsa-wood rafts. (Incan ingenuity!)

To the most southeastern island in that group, Easter Island, his argument ran, the South Americans (who included an admixture of Caucasians) brought the skill of carving huge statues representing deified ancestors; for raw material, they used the island’s highly malleable soft volcanic rock. These creations were then very laboriously moved to, and installed on, stone platforms. The immigrants also imported sweet potatoes and some other benefits of high, or at least medium, culture.

Heyerdahl was one hell of a showman, but in recent years, much of what he asserted has proven to be nonsense. Probably most important, there is no plausible indication that South Americans sailed to Polynesia. And Easter Island (officially called Rapa Nui) was first settled not in 300 or 400 a.d., which is what he said, but much later and entirely by Polynesians (the Easter Island subset called themselves the Rapanui). Contrary to his book Aku-Aku (1958), the “long-ears’’ (of Caucasoid appearance) and “short ears’’ didn’t duke it out for supremacy on the island in a suicidal civil war. The movie-star handsome Heyerdahl’s conclusions were highly cinematic—a step or two from space-alien tales—but even at the height of his popularity, plenty of anthropologists challenged them.

Recently, far more people have taken seriously the theme of Jared Diamond in his bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed  (2005), in which he used Easter Island as an example of “ecocide.’’ Diamond essentially argued that the islanders destroyed the island’s physical and cultural wealth through overpopulation, irresponsible use of the land, and the maniacal diversion of resources (including much of what was left of Rapa Nui’s wood) to put up the huge statues. He fit the place into many eco-activists’ idea that humans, when given the chance, will devastate their environments for short-term benefits, and presented Easter Island (and some other places) as a warning to all of us wasteful, greedy consumers. Easter Island is “the Earth writ small,’’ he wrote.

But Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, who are, respectively, professors of anthropology and archaeology at the University of Hawaii and California State University, demolish Diamond’s argument that the decline and fall of Easter Island’s native culture was due to environmental fecklessness. Rather, they demonstrate, in sometimes chatty, sometimes scholarly, sometimes almost lyrical prose, that the Rapanui were remarkably good stewards of their little island. They only indirectly can be blamed for the deforestation of the island soon after they arrived, from the west, in about 1200 a.d. (not in 400 a.d., as misreported by Diamond). The main culprits were rats, probably showing up by way of the Polynesians’ big canoes; the rodents feasted on palm-tree seeds.

Indeed, the islanders seem to have maintained a stable population of about 3,000 people for hundreds of years through skillful use of stone enclosures, and “lithic mulching’’ (spreading rock fragments on land to be cultivated, thus moderating the temperature of the soil and providing a source of minerals) to grow crops sufficient to keep the population generally healthy. The island, despite dirt that was already quite leached-out when the Polynesians arrived, became a giant and quite productive rock garden. 

Hunt and Lipo argue that there was no “prehistoric [i.e., pre-European] environmental catastrophe that turned a once-productive island into a barren landscape.’’ Thousands of sheep, introduced by foreign businessmen, helped complete that devastation in the late 19th century. Indeed, the islanders “transformed Rapa Nui from an island covered in palm forest with few resources for humans into an island that could reliably, though marginally, sustain them over the long run.’’ And as for the much-denounced statue-building, Hunt and Lipo prove (to me, anyway) that this activity not only did not require nearly as many people as has been argued but also, by encouraging island-wide cooperation and planning (and by distracting the natives from sex!), encouraged island-wide peace and helped prevent overpopulation.

They write that “some kind of centralized and shared activity is a key feature of dispersed communities’’ like those of pre-European Easter Island, which had no real central town: “This activity [like the statue cult] brings communities together to share resources, redistribute materials, or exchange information.’’ And there was great prestige associated with sculpting, moving, and installing the statues; to be involved in the projects put you in the island’s elite. (The writers conclude, by the way, that the multi-ton figures were transported from the quarry upright, head-up with ropes and jerking movements that recall moving a refrigerator. Very little wood was used.) 

There is remarkably scant evidence of pre-European intra-Rapanui conflict on the island, and the very spread-out crop cultivation on it (and no big estates to fight over), and the unifying and calming qualities of the statue activity, were probably the main reasons. What really virtually destroyed the island’s culture was foreigners. It began with the first Europeans to arrive, the Dutch, in 1722. These visitors, and, later in the 18th century Spanish and English sailors, exposed the islanders to lethal diseases from which they had no immunity. That they enthusiastically encouraged women and girls to offer easy sex to the visitors worsened what would have been, in any event, catastrophic epidemics. Imported diseases soon killed most Easter Islanders. And the “consumer goods’’ displayed by the Europeans also helped to swiftly undermine native culture, whose statues and ancestor worship could not compete with the charms of European clothing, knives, mirrors, and so on; the Rapanui particularly craved hats, which they snatched off Dutch, Spanish, and English sailors’ heads.

“With the arrival of the Europeans the rationale for participating in moai [statue] construction and movement had been undermined .  .  . the acquisition of European goods became the new form of obtaining prestige.’’ Indeed, the natives began to develop “cargo cults’’—rituals used in the hope that foreigners would return with their exciting goods. And later, many islanders were “blackbirded’’ into slavery in South America and elsewhere—bondage that killed many of them.

Easter Island, of course, has recently been reenergized as an affluent-tourist destination, albeit with some major environmental problems associated with that. Thor Heyerdahl’s vivid storytelling, and those stunning photos of the giant enigmatic heads, have ensured that the speck in the western Pacific will continue to fascinate millions around the world. Romantics like to reflect on the idea that the Rapanui, without the arrival of Europeans, might to this day still be subsisting contentedly in a stable (if “primitive’’) society. But would they have really wanted to if they had known any alternatives? I doubt it. For all its flaws, modern Western-created consumer culture is immensely attractive. The trick is to figure out its global environmental limits, just as the very low-tech but ingenious Easter Islanders learned in their centuries alone to make do with the austerity of their remote home—albeit within an ultimately lethal ignorance about the rest of
the world.

Robert Whitcomb is editor of the editorial pages at the Providence Journal.