Rapa Nui in brief
Rapa Nui, known in English as Easter Island, is a small volcanic island of about 164 square kilometres in the southeastern Pacific, some 3,500 kilometres west of Chile, of which it is a part. It is one of the most isolated inhabited places on Earth. Its people, the Rapanui, are Polynesians, and the island is known for about 900 giant stone statues, the moai. Rapa Nui National Park was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.
Settlement
Radiocarbon dating suggests that Polynesian sailors, in double canoes, reached Rapa Nui around 1200 AD, perhaps a little earlier. They brought chickens, rats, and plants such as sweet potato, yam and taro. The island at that time was covered with palm trees.
The moai
The moai are carved from volcanic tuff, mostly at the quarry at Rano Raraku, a volcanic crater, where about 400 statues in various stages of completion still lie. The average statue is about four metres tall and weighs about 12 tonnes. The largest finished moai is about 10 metres, and an unfinished one is over 20 metres. Most were moved, some for many kilometres, to stone platforms called ahu along the coast, where they were set up to face inland, over the villages. They probably represent important ancestors.
Many moai once wore a “hat” or topknot called a pukao, made of red volcanic stone, from another quarry, Puna Pau. Some had eyes made of white coral with obsidian or red stone pupils.
How were they moved?
Islander legend says the moai “walked”. Experiments in 2011 by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo showed that a 4.35-tonne replica could be moved upright over a short distance by a team of about 18 people, pulling on ropes to rock it from side to side, a walking motion. This fits with the island’s tradition, and with the shape of the statues.
What happened to the island?
A popular story, put forward by Jared Diamond, said that the islanders cut down all their trees to move the statues and so ruined their environment, causing a collapse of the society. More recent work challenges this. Archaeologists such as Lipo and Hunt argue that the rats that arrived with the settlers ate palm seeds and played a big role in the decline of the forest, and that the population remained until the arrival of Europeans.
The Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen reached the island on Easter Sunday in 1722, and gave it its name. Later, contact with outsiders was disastrous: diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis killed many, and in 1862 slave raiders from Peru took about 1,500 people, a third of the population. By 1877 only 111 islanders remained. Chile annexed the island in 1888, and the Rapanui population has since recovered to several thousand.
Writing and DNA
The island has undeciphered signs called rongorongo, carved on wooden tablets, which may be a form of writing. Studies of DNA published in 2020 found that the Rapanui have both Polynesian and Native American ancestry, with the mixing dating to about 1380 AD, suggesting that Polynesians and people from South America met long before Europeans came.
Visiting
The island is reached by plane from Santiago, Chile. Rapa Nui National Park, which is managed with the Rapanui community, protects the main sites, including Rano Raraku and the row of seven moai at Ahu Akivi. A small museum in the main town of Hanga Roa has finds from the island.
Sources
- Hunt, T. L. and Lipo, C. P. (2011). The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island. Free Press.
- Moreno-Mayar, J. V. and others (2020). Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas. Nature 584: 85 to 88.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Rapa Nui National Park.