Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island (a name given to it by Europeans), is located in the southeastern Pacific and is famous for its approximately 1,000 Moai carvings, statues with human faces.
The island measures about 22 kilometers by 11 kilometers at its furthest points and it is often said that it can be crossed on foot in a single day. The volcanic island is the most isolated inhabited landmass on Earth. The nearest inhabited country is the Pitcairn Islands, which lie about 1,900 kilometers to the west. Chile, the nearest South American country, lies about 3,700 kilometers to the east.
The famous carvings are huge, up to 12 meters high and weighing 75 tons. They were decorated at the top with “Pukao”, a soft red stone in the shape of a hat. Torsos are also buried under the heads of the statues.
Scientists are still finding new Moai, including one that slightly smaller than the others the researchers excavated in a dried-up lake bed in 2023. Meanwhile, a suspected arson attack on the island left a number of Moai “completely charred” in 2022.
When was Rapa Nui settled?
Radiocarbon dating of starchy foods on obsidian blades revealed that People settled in Rapa Nui no later than 1000 AD.a time when Polynesians travelled to the Eastern Pacific and perhaps South America. A 2020 genetic study found that Polynesians and Native Americans in what is now Colombia mated around 1200 AD, although it is unclear where this occurred. It’s possible that the Polynesians traveled to Colombia, mixed with locals, and their descendants then returned to Polynesia. Or perhaps people from Colombia traveled to Polynesia, the researchers said.
As for the original settlement of Rapa Nui, legend tells that a chief named Hotu Matu’a, who had learned of Rapa Nui from an advance party of explorers, led a small group of colonists, perhaps no more than 100 people, to the island.
Their place of origin is a mystery and may have been the Marquesas Islands, which lie 3,700 km northwest of Rapa Nui. Another suggestion is Rarotonga, which lies 5,200 km southwest of the island. In any case, the journey would have been arduous, possibly involving tacking against the wind.
A deforested environment
When the first people arrived on Rapa Nui around 1,000 years ago, they found the island covered with palm trees, among other things. In the centuries that followed, Rapa Nui was deforested until the landscape was completely desolate in the 19th century.
How this happened is disputed. When people arrived on Rapa Nui, they brought with them (whether intentionally or not) the Polynesian rat, an animal that reproduces quickly and that the Polynesians sometimes consumed. This species had no natural enemies on the island and may have played an important role in Deforestation.
The popular claim that the island’s palm trees were cut down to build devices to move the Moai statues is probably false. According to ancient stories, the statues “walked” from the quarries to their place on stone platforms (known as ahu) and, in fact, research has shown that two small teams with ropes can move the statues vertically. A recent demonstration of this was shown in a YouTube video (below) by Terry HuntProfessor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii, and Carl LipoProfessor of Anthropology at Binghamton, State University of New York.
Hunt and Lipo also point out that the deforestation of the island did not necessarily lead to a food crisis. In their book they write: “The Statues That Walked: Uncovering the Mystery of Easter Island” (Free Press, 2011) that the abundant rocks on the island enabled the construction of stone-protected gardens known as ‘manavai’. These rock gardens were supported by lithic mulching, a process in which minerals from rocks fertilize the soil.
In a 2024 study published in the journal Scientific advancesLipo, Hunt and colleagues found that the population of Rapa Nui never had a rapid rise or catastrophic fallbecause it never contained more than about 3,900 people before the arrival of Europeans. Their team came to this conclusion by using shortwave infrared satellite imagery and machine learning to find archaeological rock gardens on the island, because these gardens were used by the indigenous people to enrich the soil with nutrients. These rock gardens could not have supported more than 3,900 people, the team argued, but other scientists called these methods too simplistic to determine population numbers.
Rongorongo script
The people of the island apparently had enough food not only to build and move statues, but also to develop a script now known as Rongorongo, which researchers are still trying to decipher. Radiocarbon dating of four wooden tablets on which the script was carved suggests that the wood was harvested 200 years before Europeans arrived on Rapa Nui in the 1720s. It is possible that the indigenous people of Rapa Nui carved the script into old wood, but if they carved it into freshly cut wood, then their writing system would be one of the few independently invented writing systems in the world.
The Secret of the Moai
In their book, Hunt and Lipo provide further evidence to support the idea that the statues were moved vertically, pointing to the existence of paths or “roads” leading from quarries to moai sites in the southeast, northwest and southwest of the island.
“The evidence on site showed that the roads were not part of an overall planned network. Rather, they are remnants of paths taken by the moai transporters as they carried the statues across the landscape,” they write.
While this helps explain how the statues were moved around the island, it does not explain why. Scientists do not know what the reasons were for the statues’ creation, but they have noted several features that provide clues.
The statues on their platforms can be found almost all along the island’s coast. Remarkably, despite their seaside location, each individual Moai appears to face inland rather than out to sea, suggesting that they were intended to honor people or deities located on Rapa Nui itself.
Construction of the moai statues appears to have stopped around the time of European contact in 1722, when Dutch explorers landed on Easter Sunday. Over the next century, the moai fell over, either deliberately knocked over or from sheer neglect. Why construction stopped is another mystery. It is known that disease struck the islanders after contact and that the islanders had a craving for European goods. Early explorers reported that hats were particularly popular with the people of the island.
Regardless of what the moai were intended for and why their construction stopped, the statues are more popular today than ever. Many statues have been rebuilt on their ahu bases and Rapa Nui now has a population of more than 5,000 people, and its hotels and facilities support a thriving modern tourism industry.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on October 16, 2012, and updated on June 21, 2024, to include current information on the first settlement of Rapa Nui, the Rongorongo script, and whether the indigenous people there experienced catastrophic population decline.
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