Gone Medieval - Rapa Nui: The Truth About Easter Island

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

1,900 miles west of South America and 1,250 miles from any other population centre, Easter Island - or Rapa Nui - is world famous for its monolithic stone statues. But new evidence indicates that the isle's infamous prehistoric 'societal collapse' may actually be a myth.With the help of fresh techniques and research, Robert DiNapoli and his team from Binghamton University in the US have found that descendants of Polynesian seafarers who settled Easter Island in the 13th century continued to erect statues for at least 150 years past 1600 - the date long hailed as the start of societal collapse. In this episode Cat is joined by Robert DiNapoli to learn more about his remarkable findings. For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Gone Medieval newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. On Easter Sunday, 1722, 300 years ago this year, a ship of Dutch explorers came across a very small island in the Pacific Ocean thousands of miles from the nearest landmass. In honour of the day of their discovery, they called the island Easter Island. However, they were not the first to discover that island, it was already inhabited and already had a name Rapa Nui.

Although this was the first time any Europeans had encountered it, the island itself had a rich and long history and cultural development, not least in terms of the magnificent stone statues that the island is best known for. But within a short space of time of that first visit by the Dutch, disaster would strike the island as it became almost completely depopulated. The reasons why this happened have been widely discussed and debated, with one of the most common reasons suggested is that their population was responsible for its own demise

through an ecocide, an ecological suicide. Few places on earth are described as such a great mystery as this island, but in actual fact, what happened was not really a mystery at all. We know quite well what fate befell the Rapa Nui people. New archaeological research over the past decade or so has significantly helped us understand it's passed. Today I'm really excited to talk to an archaeologist who has been a key part of much of this very recent research into Rappanoia that's radically changing our understanding of the island.

I've got with me today, Dr. Robert DiNaple, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Binghamton University in the US. So thank you so much, Robert, or I should call you Bo, which is what you normally go by. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. So I know you've been working on this for your PhD and now on your postdoc research. So I'm really delighted to have a chance to actually sit down and chat because we've come across each other quite a few times before in the past actually for sort of a full disclosure for our listener here. I've also researched Rapa Nui diet and resources, especially in the past. And we've actually collaborated with the same people, but never actually chatted. Yeah, it's great to chat. I am a big fan of the research

you've done on Rapa Nui. It's really added to what we know about the things that people ate in the past, which is such a critical part of understanding the archaeology of any region is, you know, what is people's food base that they relied on? So yeah, it's great to be chatting with you. Thanks. So yeah, and absolutely. We're going to go, I want to ask a bit later on and talk about precisely this, about resource use, because I know that's one of the key things that you've worked on as well. And actually, I think part of the key to understanding any little sort of island community like this, which is so dependent on the resources and, And that's kind of been part of the issue as well with what people have said about Rapanuia, I think.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It's this very small, super isolated island. So they're really dependent upon the resources that the island has to offer and whether or not they used those resources sustainably is a really big part of debates and narratives that people have built about the island. Yeah, and I wondered if you wouldn't mind starting us off by just describing this idea of the ecosystem. and the sort of whole collapse theory that probably most of our listeners will be quite familiar with.

And I think maybe a lot of our listeners won't necessarily know that that isn't quite what we currently think happened. But could you sort of outline, what is that whole collapse ecocide theory? Sure. So the idea of the collapse on Rapa Nui is this idea that at some point in the islands past,

prior to Europeans arriving, the population was much larger than it was at European contact. So when Europeans first get there, they report a population of around 3,000 people living on the island. But the collapse idea proposes that in the past, the population was a lot larger. And the specific numbers vary from claim to claim. They go as high as 30,000. The average that people claim is usually around 10,000. And then in addition to a larger population size, people also claim that the island was environment. a lot more prosperous than it is today or at the time that Europeans arrive. So when Europeans

get there, the island doesn't have any trees, it doesn't have any permanent streams. It's a very ecologically marginal place. Now, those two conditions of the island, it having a relatively small human population and being very ecologically marginal, was contrasted with its archaeological record or the material things that people had built, which is most famously these Moai statues, so the famous monuments that people built, they're often called stone heads, but they're actually full bodies. People think they're heads because the most famous photos are from the statue quarry, where most of them appear as though they're just heads, but they're these full bodies.

And what's really amazing about Rapa Nui is that for this small island in the middle of the ocean, that's very ecologically marginal, people constructed around a thousand, of these moai and they transported them around the island to platforms that are called Ahoo, which are these ritual sites that the prehistoric communities were organized around. So the collapse idea is that how could this population of only about 3,000 people living in this very ecologically marginal place have done this? How could these people have constructed these really amazing feats of engineering? And so to explain this, and this starts with the very first European arrivals to the island,

is that the only way that this can be explained is that if in the past the population was much larger, under a more prosperous set of ecological conditions. Now that's sort of the original collapse idea. That's the basis for where it comes from. Then over the course of the mid to late 20th century, there was a lot of paleo-environmental work that was done on the island. that showed that actually in the past when Polynesians first arrived on the island, the island was actually covered in a dense palm forest. And that over several hundred years that people were there prior to European arrival,

the island becomes completely deforested. So these three or four couple pieces of information then are used to build these grand narratives that people cut down all the trees to support this moai building, mania. So they call it a moai mania. People are obsessed with building statues and because of that obsession, they destroyed the island and caused their own ecological, societal and cultural collapse. So this is a famous Jared Diamond ecocide narrative that these people, through their own greed, basically, destroyed their home. So, I mean, this is also used as a sort of lesson, you know, certainly in parts of Europe and when it first came out, sort of, you know, this is what we mustn't do to our

like this is how bad it can go. But there's some serious issues with that and some of the research we know now. But you mentioned very briefly the sort of first settlers and the first people. Could you also talk us through when was the island actually first settled? And who were those people? Where did they come from? So we know that the first settlers of the island were Polynesian peoples. We know this because the Rapa Nui language, its material culture, and also genetic studies of the population show that they're Polynesian. They're related to the same people that settled Hawaii and New Zealand and Tahiti. So Rapa Nui is initially settled as part of this population expansion from the southwestern Pacific

into the eastern Pacific, a region that we call East Polynesia. East Polynesia is everywhere that's in between Hawaii, New Zealand, and Rapa Nui. based on current archaeological evidence, it's most likely that this occurred around 1,200 AD. So there's this really rapid and expansive series of voyaging migrations out into the Pacific Ocean. And as part of that, Rapa Nui is settled by Polynesian peoples around 1,200 AD. And what about South America? Because there's been quite a lot of ideas and theories that actually people came from South America to settle, or, you know, at least in part, migrate across.

Is there, in your knowledge and in the sort of current research, any real evidence for that? Yeah, I think there's some pretty compelling evidence that as part of the Polynesian migration into the eastern Pacific, they reach the coast of South America and then return. One of the best lines of evidence that supports this is that a really important food crop in East Polynesia is the sweet potato, but the sweet potato. but the sweet potato is not a Polynesian crop. So when Polynesians are voyaging out into the Pacific, they're bringing with them a whole suite of domesticated plants and animals,

everything from food to medicine to plants that use for clothing. But where they were coming from didn't include the sweet potato. The sweet potato is a crop that's domesticated in South America, but it then becomes this very important food item throughout East Polynesia, especially in Rapa Nui. It's the key plant food item. they rely on. The other piece of evidence is that the Polynesian word for sweet potato, Kumara, is derived from a South American language. So that's a pretty clear connection

that there's contact with South America. In East Polynesia, they also use the bottle gourd a lot as a container. That's also a South American plant. There's some evidence that as part of this contact, Polynesians may have introduced chickens to South America, though. that's a line of evidence that's a lot more hotly debated than the sweet potato in the bottleboard. And then on top of that, there's been some recent genetic studies that suggest that there was genetic mixture or exchange of information between Polynesians and South Americans as part of this culture contact event. I'm not a geneticist, so I can't really evaluate that information super well. There's also been studies which I'm pretty sure you were an author on using ancient

DNA analyses of Ropinoui human skeletal remains. That suggested that there isn't a South American component in the ancient DNA. So I think that's something that's definitely still up for debate. I don't know what you think about that recent evidence. Yeah. So that was a project that I was part of looking at some ancient DNA. And in those early ancient samples, we found no South American DNA at all. But I think some of the other studies are using modern DNA. So they're using living populations and then trying to sort of back calculate. And so we were trying to work out what the link there was. And of course, if you use modern DNA, that has the problem of, you don't know when that contact happened. So in principle, it could have happened at any point in time. So, but certainly

those early skeletons that we looked at didn't have it. So yeah, I think you're right. It's a bit of an unclear one at the moment. We don't quite have the answers. But one thing I wanted to pick up on that you just said earlier was that this, which I think might come as a bit as a surprise, is that this contact is actually coming from Polynesia and then going to South America and back again. It's not South Americans going across, which I think, you know, certainly earlier European researchers believed that it came, you know, had to come from that way. But it's west to east, isn't it? And I'm back again. Right. So there's this famous archaeologist. His name was Tor Hairedahl. He was really famous for this idea that a lot of the amazing

cultural achievements of Polynesians. In particular, Moai construction on Rapa Nui was actually part of a diffusion event from South America. Part of the reason for that is that some of the monumental architecture on Rapa Nui is superficially similar to monumental architecture that you find in South America. So, for example, the Inca stonework where the cut blocks are really nicely fit together. You also find that on Rapa Nui. For that reason, also for some superficial similarities between moai and statues that you find in South America. He argued that Rapa Nui was settled from South America. Now, there's not really a lot of support for that, in my opinion. I think that those artifactual similarities between South America and Rapa Nui are superficial, like I said.

So they both have nicely cut stone blocks that are fit together really well. But when you actually look at the architectural techniques used to build them, they're very different. So I think the simpler answer is that people converged on the idea of it looks nice to cut blocks and put them really nicely close together. But then going back, so to me it's not surprising at all that this contact event was from Polynesia to South America and not the other way around because Polynesians were some of the most accomplished skilled voyagers anywhere in the prehistoric world. And I'm not sure there's much evidence that there was a lot of open sea voyaging going on in South America. around the same time. They did have ocean-going vessels, but my understanding is that they're mostly rafts that would be used near the shoreline versus Polynesians who had these, you know, giant voyaging canoes that could sail against the wind, and they're pretty accomplished.

So it's not surprising that that is the direction that this took. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with that. Now, I wanted to get back a little bit now to your research and the contributions that you've made, and especially that relates to the statues and statue platforms because one of the things that you've looked at is their locations and you mentioned in the introduction that there's about thousand of the statues or so all the way around the island and because one of the things that people have debated and discussed over the years is why they are where they are and you know why would you put them in that particular location and related to that some of this as we talked about the resource use I know you've been looking into water

sources so can you tell us about that research that project with the statue locations what What were you looking for and what were you sort of trying to achieve with that? Sure. So my dissertation work was about trying to evaluate this common claim about Moai and the platforms that they were put on, which are called Ahu. There's around 150 Ahu on the island that have Moai statues on them. And there's been a lot of debate and discussion by archaeologists over the years about why people chose to construct those platforms in the particular places that they did.

And a common claim is that the whole Aahu Moai tradition of building this monumental architecture was in part a way that the communities were competing with each other. So they were basically showing off like we can build a larger platform, we can build more Moai, move them around the island, in that this was in some way related to competing over resources or signaling control over different resources on the island. But people had debated what in particular people were competing over. So some had argued that it was over the best agricultural land. Some argued that it was competition over the best marine resource areas. And then others had said that, no, they're constructing these statues and platforms near the water sources on the

island. And each of these things seem reasonable to me on the surface because each of those resources are really important for people on the island. They need places where they can grow food. Marine resources were also a pretty important part of the diet. People need those to survive as well. And freshwater is really limited on the island. So the island frequently gets these severe drought events. There's only three small crater lakes. There's no permanent streams. But there are really common areas where groundwater seeps out along the coastline. And we know that people were using those coastal water sources as well. So in this project that I worked on,

just tried to answer the question of, well, what are these statute platforms most strongly associated with? So to do that, I used a kind of geographic statistical modeling that allows us to assess what predicts the locations of these platforms. And in doing that analysis, the results are pretty clear that these platforms are really strongly associated with where freshwater occurs. So if the monumental architecture is in some way related to competition over resources, the evidence seems to pretty clearly point towards the fact that people are most likely competing over

water. So they are related then to these freshwater sources and control of them, which I think makes perfect sense because you sort of, you have to, presumably, in order to compete, you have to be able to control who gets access to what and when and how. But what about things like religious beliefs? Because obviously the statues and these platforms have very important ritual and religious functions as well. Could there be some beliefs there in terms of protection or anything sort of more sort of supernatural? Yeah, for sure. So a common response that I've gotten to the claims of this research that I'm talking about is that, oh, well, like, you're saying

that they aren't these religious sites like people have claimed for a really long time. And that's not what we're saying at all. We're saying that they have multiple functions within these social groups. So these are these massive stone platforms with, you know, multiple giant stone statues on them. They are these big community events that unfold over hundreds of years. most likely of people building these things. So the locations where they're built are the site of continuous investment by these communities over time.

And we know that they're religious sites. There's no debate at all that these are really important ritual locations. But the ritual location occurs right next to these freshwater sources. So it shows that there's multiple different things going on in the construction of these platforms. The really important religious sites, they're probably related to communicating between different communities about that community's ability to cooperate and come together to build these giant monuments. And the fact that they're so closely related to water sources suggests that the control and use of this limited resource is an important part of the social activity of these communities.

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from this all collapse there, which are going to get back to a little bit in a moment, is that actually this is a society that's got really quite good control, good social and social and sociopolitical systems set up in order to be able to thrive. because really they did thrive for a very long time. So I guess this is all just a crucial part of that, really. Yeah, I think it reflects the underlying social structure of the island, which is not like one giant kingdom or chiefdom with this top-down hierarchical control.

It's multiple small communities that are dispersed around the island. And they are competing with each other, but not in a very violent sense. So there's not a lot of evidence for warfell. It's a lot of small-scale cooperation with some limited interaction and competition between these communities. I think that brings us quite nicely to this idea of the statue carving and this idea of a competition and the idea that it was the sort of madness over constantly having to

come these statues and all of that that led to, in part, to the demise. And some of the more recent research that you've done has had to do with the timing of stopping of the statue carving. So it used to be thought that I believe around 1,600, 1650 or so, so before European arrivals, that that was when the statue carving stopped. And this was because of using too many resources and, you know, all the competition. But you've been looking at that timing, haven't you, and sort of seeing when it actually stopped. So can you talk to me through that research that you've done? Sure. So another part of my dissertation research, so sort of two-pronged. One, was about like, where are they building these things? And then the other part is, well, when are they

building them? And a big part of the collapse narrative is that when this ecological catastrophe happens, people stop building Ahu, they stop building Moai. And this is sort of the main event of the collapse. Like, the culture has collapsed. They're no longer doing this thing that was, you know, the most important thing previously in their society. And part of that, I think, comes from the fact that when Europeans arrived, they never saw any Rapa Nui people transporting these Moai. But they do see them still using them as religious sites. But the fact that they never saw anyone move one was sort of the first time that this idea

that Moai construction and Aahu construction had ended some time prior to Europeans getting there. The other part of why I think this. idea that Moai and Ahu construction collapsed around 1,500 AD or 1680, whatever date people decided to use, is in large part based on how the radiocarbon dates were treated. So these are stone monuments. You can't directly date them. They're only dated by the association of radio carbon dates with the actual structures. Now, the way that researchers had treated, the radio carbon dates from these sites, I think over-emphasized the earlier dates than the later

ones. And this is a function of just the tools that they use to analyze them. I don't think there's anything nefarious going on with that. So in my research, I use a kind of technique that allows us to use the radio-carbon dates and the architectural information about how these monuments were built to try and estimate what is the number of construction events that occurred at any given time. So these monuments are really complex architectural features. They weren't all built at one time. You can tell just by looking at the styles and how different pieces are added on top of the platforms, that they're constructed in multiple different events. And there's been a ton of archaeological excavations and research done on these platforms.

so we have lots of radiocarbon dates from them that come from different places. Some come from underneath the platform, some come from inside the platform. And so the research that I did basically takes the radiocarbon dates and the architectural information and fuses them together and says, what is the number of different construction events that occurred for this particular platform and when did each of those events occur? and then we take all that information and then do sort of a meta-analysis of that and try and see what the outcome is. I was just curious, like, what's the best estimate of when these things were constructed?

And for the initial onset of when people start constructing them is very similar to what previous researchers had said. So it starts very early after people initially settle the island. So within 50 to 100 years, they're starting to... to build the Ahoo platforms. Previously, people had said that they most likely stop building them between 1,500 and 1,600 sometime around there. But what our research showed is that when you properly take into account these different

later building events, it's very clear that people don't actually stop building these platforms prior to European arrival. There's an initial intensive building phase around 14,500 AD, but then there's this steady period of construction events that continues on past the timing of European arrival. So people are continuing to add to these platforms after 1722. And this is pretty interesting to me that it's very different than what had been said previously. And it shows that there wasn't a collapse of Moai and Ahoo construction, but it continued after European arrival.

And going back to what I said previously about the fact. that Europeans never saw people doing this, it's not totally surprising given that, so the Dutch first arrived in 1722, and they're there for a few days. And then 50 years later, the Spanish come, and the Spanish are there for about a week. And then four years later, Cook and the English come, and they're there for like a few days. So it's not really surprising that over the course of 70 years or so, they never saw anybody doing this because Rapa Nui was completely isolated prior to Europeans arriving. So it's not as though this giant European ship shows up. They're probably going to stop what they're doing to go check

out what's going on with these new arrivals. So I don't think it's terribly surprising that. The Europeans didn't observe them doing this. Yeah. And of course, those records that they've left are quite, you know, as you already mentioned it, a few times before, they're pretty basic and even things like estimations of how many people lived on the island and reports on the flora and the fauna. They're so limited, but they've been given a huge amount of emphasis, I think, by some of the later researchers sort of making all these theories about the island. But as you say, why would they? It's not surprising at all. So it's a really good point, I think. Thanks. And I think that those texts, so the European ship logs, we need to be interpreting those

tax or dealing with those texts in the same way that we deal with any other line of evidence in archaeology or anthropology. Like, we need to be seeing those texts in the context in which they were written. So in the 18th century in Europe is, like, just think about it from the other perspective. So Europeans are getting there. They're seeing a culture and a people that they don't really know how to interpret either. So we need to not always be taking European ship logs of that time at that face value. But they're still full of really useful, interesting information. As a scholar of Polynesia, one of my favorite things is reading those European ship logs because it's such an interesting anthropological experience from multiple sides,

trying to decipher, you know, what are they really seeing and trying to figure out what they mean when they say various things. And yeah, so it's a super fascinating place for all kinds of reasons. So just sort of finish off then. I mean, I think it's pretty clear. And a lot of it, you know, this research is quite staggering actually because this idea that statue carving ceased long before Europeans, that's been so prevalent and so important to the whole collapse theory.

And you pretty much just smashed that completely. And with that and with all our evidence that there wasn't a depopulation, there wasn't really a massive ecological crisis, none of this is really true. Can you just talk us through what actually happened? Because the reality is that not long after, you know, within a short space of time, the island was completely depopulated.

only down to, I think, 111 or something like that, people. What actually happened on Rapa Nui? Yeah. So to kind of start with the post-European contact period, Europeans have a very devastating impact on the island. By the 1860s, the resident population of the island is around 111 people. There are other Rapa Nui people still alive at that time, but they'd been taken off island to French Polynesia.

But yeah, so by the 1860s, there's only 111 people, and the reason for that is a really tragic story of epidemics and people being kidnapped from the island to work as slaves in South America. So there's definitely a post-contact population collapse. In terms of what I think we know about the prehistoric period, my feeling, honestly, is that we don't know as much as people have previously said, there's still a ton of work to be done on the island in various areas.

So there's still a lot of really interesting research that people are currently doing. If I have to give kind of a very brief synopsis of what I think happened, so Polynesians initially settle the island around 1,200 AD. They arrive with a tropical Polynesian way of life. and when they get there, a lot of their previous subsistence practices just don't work on Rapa Nui anymore. It's not warm enough. It doesn't receive enough rain. It doesn't have enough surface freshwater. So they have to adapt to this very challenging place. So you get these small dispersed communities that rely on farming and fishing and extracting fresh water from groundwater sources.

They also continue this tradition of building. stone platforms and putting stone statues that represent deified ancestors on top of them. So this is a pan-East Polynesian practice. Everywhere in East Polynesia, people are building similar kinds of architecture. And on Rapa Nui, it just becomes really elaborated. So you get lots of small communities, and each of them are building one of these platforms with stone statues on them. So you get this proliferation of monumental architecture,

construction that may be in part due to the way in which people are competing with each other. And so my view of the island is that people were presented with this very challenging place to live and the evidence that we have suggests that they lived pretty sustainably for about 500 years prior to Europeans getting there. So rather than it being this case of this ecological collapse where people destroyed their environment, it's most likely something like the opposite, where people were faced with a really difficult place to live, and they lived in a sustainable and resilient way for a very long period of time. So I think it does provide a useful case study to think about our own time,

but not really in the way that it has been presented for a whole long time. It's almost the exact opposite, isn't it, in some ways? It's a tale of adaptability and sustainability rather than the opposite, which is such a shape, isn't it? That's not the narrative that's come across. Yeah, and that's really similar for collapse narratives everywhere in the world, actually, that all these places that have been argued to be these total societal collapses, when you really look closely at the evidence, that's not really what's going on.

It's that collapse is being used to characterize. change, that people and their practices are changing when things need to change. The way that they previously were living is no longer sustainable or just no longer is working. So I think that's pretty common in collapsed narratives. For Rapa Nui, it's a little bit different in that I don't see any evidence that there is a major change that occurs in prehistory. There's no evidence as far as I'm concerned that there's any sort of cultural

crisis that occurs prior to European arrival. Once Europeans arrive, there's definitely a whole suite of changes that happen. So this anniversary this year of the 300 years since the first arrival is, it's probably not a very positive one in a way. It's a sort of marks the beginning of the end in some ways, I suppose. Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know. I personally would make the judgment call on that. I mean, I'd want to talk to my Rappanili friends and see what they think about the 300 year anniversary. Bo, that was absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much.

I can't wait to see what you come up with next. And hopefully, I think you're going back to the island to do more when you can, and it all opens up again after the pandemic. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. So we have plans to go back soon. The island has been closed since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. And it's still closed, potentially opening in July.

So we're going to wait until things are safe to go back there for us, but especially for the people on the island. But yeah, we definitely have future research planned. Fantastic. Well, I can't wait. Thank you so much again, Vaux, for taking part and coming on Gone Medieval today. Yeah, thanks for having me. I had a great time chatting. Fantastic. So thank you all so much for listening.

This has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hits. I'm Dr. Kat Jaman. I'll be back again next Tuesday, and my co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Saturday with another episode. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't all. already and also you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter. Just look in the episode notes and it'll tell you exactly how to do it. I hope that you will join us again soon.