Fall of Civilizations Podcast - 6. Easter Island - Where Giants Walked

Episode Date: June 29, 2019

On one of the world’s most isolated islands, hundreds of vast stone statues lie mouldering in the grass. In this episode, we take a look at one of archaeology’s most enduring puzzles: the mystery of Easter Island. Find out how this unique community grew up in complete isolation, severed from the rest of the world by a vast expanse of ocean. Discover the incredible story of how it survived for so many centuries, and examine the evidence about what happened to finally bring this society, and its statues, crashing down.Credits:Sound engineering by Thomas NtinasVoice Actors:Jake Barrett-MillsJacob RollinsonAnnie KellyShem JacobsMusic by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-fre…isrc=USUAN1100209Artist: incompetech.com/

In the early 18th century, a Dutch explorer named Admiral Jacob Rogovin 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. And when he saw a small island on the horizon, his heart must have skipped a beat, as Rogavine 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, Rogavine was curious, and he ordered his three ships to prepare for landing. It was Easter Day, 1720. 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 that 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 island's inhabitants came out on canoes to meet them, greeting them with friendly astonishment. This was much like other islands that Rogovin 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's statues. They were carved from black volcanic stone, some of them standing 10 metres high, wearing crowns of red sandstone.

But Rogovin and his men couldn't understand how these statues had got there. The 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. Rogavine 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 Civilization's 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? 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 1,000 volcanic islands. And 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 Teravaka. It's a young volcano, bursting out of the sea less than 400,000 years ago, its lava gushing out and raising a peak that looms half a kilometer above the ocean. When it first erupted, Terravaca's lava pooled so that it joined up two older volcanoes on either side of it, and the landmass that today we call Easter Island was born. I'll put a map up on Twitter and Patreon for you to see its geography for yourself. The people who have lived on Easter Island for centuries call it by the name Tapito 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. And 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, and it's one of the most remote and isolated places on earth. From the coast 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. Some time before the year 3,000 BC, they had left the mainland of the Asian continent, and 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 looked 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. And 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 sea birds

like the Black Turn, and this ancient Polynesian sailor's song shows the significance of these birds. The black turn. The black turn is my bird, bird in 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 Polynesians 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,

and 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 8th century, and even more modern analysis has pushed that date forward even further. Many scientists today believe that Rappanui 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 Hothu Matua. In Hiva, Hal Maka had a dream, in which his spirit travelled to a far country, looking for a new home for his king, Hoto. His spirit arrived at three

small islands, and another were the 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 travelled counterclockwise around the island, naming 28 places, including Anakena, a landing place on the north coast of the island and future residents of the king. When Halmaka awoke, he told his brother Huatava about the dream. After hearing about the dream, Hottu Matua ordered Halmaka to send some young men to explore the island. Othumatua told his two sons to build a canoe and search for the island of Halmakah'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-eer leaves, as well as sweet potatoes and sugarcane. They also brought saplings of the paper mulberry tree, the fibers of which they used to weave clothes. And 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 animal. everyday food for common people. This was an entire ecological system in waiting, packed up in the hulls of their canoes, optimized for transport and ready to be transplanted to a new land. Hottomotua 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 60,000 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 are the accounts of European visitors to the island, like the Dutchman Rogovin. 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 Rappanui'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 wondered 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 favoured argument, and that's something we should be very careful about as we go forward and assess the evidence. Some of these major accounts are post on Patreon so you can assess them for yourself,

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, and 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 Rappanui had already undergone drastic change. By this point, they had 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, Hottumatura. But his name is so similar to the folk hero of another nearby island, Mangareva, that some researchers have questioned whether this is a good one. name isn't a foreign import to Easter Island. And 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 harbour. And 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 Rogavine 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, of tropical palm trees. If you dig down into the earth of Easter Island today, you can still see the hollow moulds left by the roots of these trees. Studies of these root moulds as well as pollen analysis shows that when humans arrived on Rappanui, the island was home to over 21 species of trees. Some of these were large, including at least three, which grew up to 15 metres or more. One species of palm tree, the Easter Island or Rappanui palm, may even have been among the largest species of palm tree in the world. This now extinct tree, known as Paschalococcus,

seems to have once been the most numerous species on the island. And its closest relative today, Jubea Chelensis, or the Chilean wine palm, can reach heights of over 25 metres, its bulbous trunk the thickest in the world, reaching a diameter of more than a metre. I'll put an image of this tree up on Twitter and Patreon for you to see, as well as a digital reconstruction of what the original Easter Island might have looked like. 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 Rappanui. Studies have shown that as well as these plant crops, people supplemented their diet with a mix of marine animals, including dolphins that 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 How tree. And 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 landmass 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 island's ecology, the complex and centralised 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 Rappanui 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 forest, 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. And the stone statues too have proved irresistible as emblems of human folly, our desire to always build bigger and better than our neighbours. In his book, Jared Diamond even makes the comparison to his neighbours 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. And once we've dealt with them, we can get down to what actually happened to decimate the islanders of Rapanui, to strip the island of its plant life and to leave those famous stone statues, mouldering 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 statue. 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 Oroata Tapuna, 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 gig.

with not even enough room to fit a razor blade between the stones. The largest of them, Ahu Tongariqi, 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. tough. Tough is formed when ash from a volcanic eruption falls thickly on the ground and is then slowly compacted into solid rock. Tough 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-Roraku 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-Roraku crater is 700 meters across, formed of ash and volcanic tough, thrown up in an ancient explosion, and rings by cliffs 160 meters high. The wide volcanic bowl is one of the three places on Easter Island where fresh water pools to form a lake. Here are 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 tough. 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 tokey a whole day or two days to complete. And 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 discovered 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 things, statues, let's imagine ourselves into the role of a team of moai carvers during the golden age of Rappanui's 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 strife.

striking together of two stones, emulating the sounds of the toky tools napping away at the statue. Here it is, recorded especially for this podcast, by children from the toky 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. And 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 how 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. And 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 Ahoo 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. And 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, as its grassy slopes seemingly devoid of large trees, and asked how are 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 tonnes, heavier than a Boeing 737 aircraft when fully loaded with passengers and fuel. And the ancient islanders would sometimes transport these statues for distances of 20 kilometres 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?

And 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 Joe Anne Van Tilberg successfully tested this theory, using a large number of hardwood rollers to transport a statue for a short distance. But recent research has cast doubt on this theory and proposed an incredible alternate possibility. And the key to discovering how the statues were actually moved lies in the ones that never made it to their intended locations. Litted across Easter Island are the sad shapes of statues that broke during their transportation.

Only about a fifth of the Moai ever carved would reach their destination on the Ahoo 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 mouldering and moss-covered in the long grass. For the ancient islanders, this must have been a heart-rending story. 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 Lippo, 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. And 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 halves and rounder bellies. This had puzzled archaeologists for a long time, but Hunt and Leipo'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. And once it had been rocked into place on its platform, it was then carved into its more slender and elegant final. shape. And so Leipo 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 100 meters in an hour,

meaning it could have walked around a kilometer in a day. And of course, I'll put a video of this on Patreon for you to see. If this is indeed how the statues were moved, it must have been an incredible sight to see. The tallest moai weighed over 80 tons, and each one of the statues' full of the statues' full 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 Lippo 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 Lippo 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. And 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 plant. palm would have been exceptionally badly suited for this job. The hard outer shell of the palm trunk conceals a soft centre 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 sugar cane. 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. Pollan 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 Rappanui, 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 of food stuff 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. And 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 forest

from regenerating. In Anakena Beach and certain caves, archaeologists 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 sea birds, finishing off those the islanders hadn't trapped and eaten. And since the seabirds fertilised 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 cause a societal collapse on Rapanui. And 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.

And 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 Langeu in China, the ash fields of the Canary Islands, and the fields of the Anasazi culture

in New Mexico. And the Rapa Nui set about the task of rock mulching, with the ashwis'is'a, 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. and there's strong evidence that the Rappanui 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 islander's relationship with these caves goes back to the first known moment of their history, as this piece of Rapa Nui folklore about King Hottomatu 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, Hangaroa.

They rode a wave to the left and landed at Apina Itti. They caught more waves than went ashore and rested in a cave at Pupakakakina. Some of these caves can stretch for three or four kilometers into the island's rock. And as the forests of Rappanui 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.

Archaeologists 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 manifide 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. I'll post the full text of it on Patreon for you to read and make up your own minds. Although Rogovin believed Rappanui 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, but on the contrary, it exceeded. including 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 Rogovin's officers, a man named Karl Friedrich Berens, 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 looting and covered with palm leaves. In fact, Barron's 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.

And Rugavine himself also witnessed cultivated grovees. 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 Rappanui 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, and no one has yet been able to draw a clear causative link between the loss of the forest on Rapanui 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 Rogovin'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. And one brave islander even climbed through a porthole on Rogovene'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 hot. 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. And 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 kilometres 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 Rapanui. 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 or 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, and they were found in the highest concentrations in the area of the islander's 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 Berens' observation that the islanders were unarmed when they first came to meet the Dutch explorers. And in the search for defensive structures, archaeologists 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 involve 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 Poika 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, and 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 Rappanui'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 colonization 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. And another way this may have occurred is through an incredible ritual known as the Birdman competition. The later history of the island is dominated by the cult of a mysterious figure known as the Tangatamanu or the Birdman. 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 birdman 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 Motunui, which is home to several species of nesting birds. Among these is the Black Turn, 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 Birdman contest took place in the spring, during the laying season of the Black Turns. Young men who wanted to become that year's Birdman would have to swim out to the rocky island of Motanui, a distance of about a kilometre 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 with the egg in one hand. Then, dripping with cold salt water, they had to climb the

sheer 300-meter cliff of the volcano Ranukoa. 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 honour. And 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, and so you might be left asking, did their society even collapse at all? And 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 Lottie wrote about it in the 19th century. There exists in the midst of the great ocean in a region where no one. 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 Rappanui people and see only a wasteland scattered with rocks. This belief system found its logical conclusion in the Norwegian adventurer

and archaeologist Thor Heyerdal. Hayedal 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. And in 1722, the Dutch sailor barons 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 fire.

days on the island, performing a very thorough survey of its coast. They renamed the island Ila 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. And when they explored the island, it seems that all of the 200 erected statues were still standing. But four years later, the famous British Blora 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 Rogovene 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 honour of the discovery of Easter Island, as there is hardly an island in this 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 700 souls.

And there's another significant detail, too. Cook noted that the islanders now carried weapons when approaching foreign visitors. Their arms are wooden patapataos 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 fool or in some measure defaced. The practice of statue toppling is called Huri Moao 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 Ranooraku. So 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 somewhere 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 Birdman 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 realised 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, Carl Friedrich Berens, wrote about this incredible encounter. During the morning, Captain Boomin 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 torteness 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. But this light-hearted encounter conceals a dark truth about Rogavine's visit. In fact, when Rogovin 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 Dutchmen 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. Barron's recounts what happened next as he recognised 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, a which we were much grieved. In order to obtain possession of the bodies, they congregated in great numbers, bringing with them presence of various kinds of fruits and vegetables, in order that we might, the more readily

surrender to them they're 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 Barron said is true. The story of this violent encounter must have reverberated through the history of the Rappanui people. It would have destabilized their ancient beliefs and rocked their very sense of the world around them. Remember that Barans 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. And 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 Rappanui 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 Rappanui 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. and 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, 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%. And 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, 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's 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 Rongo Rongo 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 Rongo Rongo 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. see the familiar shapes of sea turtles and birds, for instance. And I'll post images of these up on Twitter and Patreon for you to see. The legends of the islanders say that the original founder, the man they called Hottomatua, 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.

And so it's thought that Rongo Rongo 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. And some have argued that Rongo Rongo 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 Rongo Rongo would have emerged, flourished and then fallen into oblivion, all within a space of less than a hundred 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 70 years before first European contact. To my mind, this alone shows that Rongo Rongo, was developed on the island during a time when giant palms still towered over its shores. In 1864, a French churchman, Eugène Ro, 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 and by this time none of the islanders could agree on how to read the tablets whatever knowledge was held in the Rongo script the destruction of the island society had caused it to be lost

and 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. And 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 the island, found the island of the island themselves short-handed. In need of labourers, they made landfall on Easter Island and kidnapped 22 Rappanui 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 blackbirders, 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 1,500 of the Rappanui 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 Rappanui 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 now 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 Rongo-Rongo script. The continuity of songs and folk tales that had for centuries carried the folk memory of the people of Rappanui was lost. By 1866, there were just 111 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 Topaz, 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 tough but from hard basalt, meaning that its surface details and contours have been remarkably preserved. It must have been truly a labour 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 Rappanoi watched. When a British sailor asked one of the islanders what the name of the statue was, they replied that he was Hoa Hakanaaya. 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 12 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 Hangeroa 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 labourers on their own island.

The island now became home to many thousands of sheep, who grazed its slopes for more than 60 years. And 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 island's ecology. In other parts of the island may be seen in places in considerable numbers, a hardwood tree called by the natives Toramiro. 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 recognise, so different to the rich cultivated gardens of the Rapa Nui. And so 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.

Rapanui wasn't the sight of an ecological suicide as we've been led to believe, but the site of a genocide. This 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 time. 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 lowering 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 Rowlandson, Jake Barrett Mills, Annie Kelly and Shem Jacobs. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me at Paul M.M. Cooper.

And 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 at Fall of CivPod, 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 Rappanui, 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-Rapanui.org. That's t-O-K-I-R-A-P-A-N-U-I-O- To find out more and donate whatever you can to keep this unique and beautiful initiative alive. For now, goodbye and thanks for listening.