The Ancients - Easter Island

Episode Date: October 29, 2026

How do you make a giant stone statue walk? On one of the most isolated islands on Earth, the people of Rapa Nui carved AND moved the extraordinary Moai, colossal faces hewn from soft volcanic rock that still inspire wonder today.Today, Tristan Hughes is joined by Prof. Terry Hunt to uncover the story of Easter Island. How did its first settlers build a thriving society in such a remote and resource-limited environment? And what ingenious techniques allowed them to disperse these monumental statues across the island?MOREThe First New ZealandersListen on AppleListen on Spotify The First HawaiiansListen on Apple Listen on SpotifyPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Just how incredible is the story of the Polynesians and how groups of them settled all of these isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean, you know, hundreds, if not more than a millennia ago. I don't know about you. I'd love to hear what you think, but over the years doing this podcast, I've become more and more enamored, fascinated by the various stories. Last year, we did an episode all about the first people to reach Hawaii and their earlier settlements, their farming and so on and so. so forth. Earlier this year, we did the first people to reach New Zealand some seven, 800 years ago. And for me, that was really special because I was out in New Zealand early this year. And I met one of our listeners, Caleb, who gave to me this wonderful Jade necklace, a punnamo, a gift. And I'm wearing it around my neck as I do this interview.

All of these various stories are so interesting, but they're all so unique in their own way. And that is also the case with our episode today. An episode that you guys have been clamoring for us to do for some time now, an episode all about that most remote of islands in the Polynesian triangle. Easter Island, Rapper Nui. Let's go. 500 years ago, in the middle of the Pacific on an isolated island, the sound of rock-striking rock rings out across a vast volcanic crater. A community of people have gathered here, a few dozen, and they're here at their part of a large quarry for their latest monumental undertaking. Armed with heavy basalt picks and chisels, they are carving a colossus, a great statue

directly out of the bedrock, a towering brow, a long sharp nose, pursed lips, a face, a moai. Nearby, thick ropes woven from tree bark lie coiled and ready. Once this giant is freed from the rock face, it must travel miles across the island to reach its coastal platform, its final destination. And these ropes are the key. With them the islanders will do the seemingly impossible. They will make the Moai move.

They will make it walk. All this took place on one of the most isolated specks of land on earth, nearly 3,700 kilometres west of Chile, 7,500 kilometres south of Hawaii, and more than 2,000 kilometres from its nearest inhabited neighbour. Yet despite this astonishing isolation, the island is home to one of the ancient world's most extraordinary achievements. Settled by East Polynesian voyages, around 800 years ago, Easter Island, known to its people as Rapa Nui, marks the far southeastern point of the Polynesian Triangle. With no rivers and limited resources, survival here was an uphill

battle. But these settlers did not just survive, they quickly engineered a thriving island culture that commands global wonder to this day. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, And this is the story of Easter Island, of Rapper Newee. Joining me today is Dr. Terry Hunt, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, and one of the world's leading authorities on the archaeology of Easter Island. Terry, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for having me.

You're more than welcome, and it's about time we covered the story of Easter Island. I'm so envious of your job because it must be one of the most remote, yet also one of the most beautiful places to do archaeology in the whole world. It is. It's incredible. It's a beautiful island. It's remote. We're about 2,500 miles from the mainland of Chile and about the same distance in the other direction to Tahiti. Really small, remote island in the southeastern Pacific. And how long have you been working on Easter Island, Rappanoi? Can we say both names for the island? Yes. Easter Island is the name given by the Dutch on Easter Sunday, 1722. when the first Europeans encountered the island.

But Rapa Nui is the modern traditional name. There is another name that's Tepito Tehenoa, which means the navel of the world. Wow. Sort of like the center of the world or the end of the ambilical cord, depending on how it's translated. And yes, you ask how long I've been working there,

about 26 years now, along with other work I do in the Pacific Islands. Gosh, I love how they call it the navel of the world because that immediately makes me think of ancient Delphi in the ancient Greek world, which is also known as the Bellibusina or the naval of their own world. And of course, Terry, archaeologically speaking, one of the things that people will immediately think of

when anyone says either Easter Island or Rappanui are those incredible statues. And we should say statues rather than just heads, shouldn't we? That is right. They're basically torsos. They don't have legs per se, but they're meant to be bodies rather than heads. The idea of heads comes from the view of them in the quarry

where they're buried up to their shoulders or not. So people see that common image and think heads, but they're really statues. And to learn more about the story of the people who live there for centuries before you have the first kind of European arrivals and so on, you know, so-called kind of the prehistoric story of Easter Island of Rappanoi, I'm sure we'll probably will go between those two names for the island as our chat goes on. Terry, is archaeology our main source of information? What sources, what types of sources do we have surviving to learn about this? Archaeology is one of our main sources on the ground, but I think you're a source of.

it's important to appreciate where the discipline of, we could say, prehistory has gone and how it's developed. We use ethnographic or cultural evidence. We use the evidence of language. And there's been a recent revolution in using DNA, ancient and modern human DNA, plant and animal DNA. And that gives us links to the island's history. In recent years, we've learned a lot more. We've clarified some things that we've suspected for a long time. And so we use all of those disciplines together. Archaeology really deals with the hard evidence on the ground in terms of architecture, artifacts, landscape. But the picture comes together with all of those disciplines working together. Sometimes I call it historical science now, because all of those come together

in a way that informs us about the past. Can mythology slash, you know, like oral history and storytelling passed down through generations? I mean, can that also be helpful as well? Yes, it can be. Oral history is, it encodes history in symbolic ways, so sometimes it's rather fanciful. Other times, it's quite accurate historically, and our job is to kind of treat it as an independent source of information, because sometimes there'll be really supernatural things in the oral history that tell us something about the culture, but not about history, if that makes sense. And then other times, as we'll see when we talk about the statues and their transport, the oral histories

was telling us an answer all along. So there are parts of it that are literally true and parts of it that are metaphorical. So we have to sort of dissect it in that way. Love that. And that's a taster for what's to come when we get to those statues in time. But I also love in that previous answer, Terry, how you also highlighted things like learning more about the ecology, the science of the island itself, the topography, because I love to explore all of that, especially as we learn more about what this island used to look like. You mentioned it briefly at the start, but just to give us a bigger picture of where we are exactly in the world, Terry, where we are in the Pacific Ocean? When we mention Easter Island today, where should we be

thinking in the Pacific to get a real sense of just how a remote a place this is? You know, you'll often hear people say Easter islands off the coast of South America, but that's not really accurate. It's too far. We're 2,500 miles from the mainland of Chile. It's a five-hour flight on a wide-bodied jet, and we're all by ourselves out there in the southeast and Pacific. Heading to the west, it's the same distance to Tahiti. And the closest occupied island with just a very small number of people is Pitcairin, which is more than a thousand miles away. So a small island and really no neighbors, very remote. And we're in a part of the Pacific that is not only remote, but also a little cooler than the tropical Pacific. We're far enough south that

we get seasonality. We get kind of a cool winter with a lot of rain and a warmer summer that's drier. Not like Tahiti or Hawaii, where you get warm temperatures all year. So this pose challenges for the Polynesians who settled the island. Well, you mentioned the Polynesians there, so we'll get to them. But resources-wise, natural resources of this island, how rich is it? Is it an abundant island? Abundant and resources in the middle of nowhere? What should we be thinking? It's a challenging place for people to live. When humans first arrived on the island, they would have found a forest of palm trees and literally millions of seabirds and a small number of other woody plants, not many animals. And it turns out that the soils of the island are actually fairly

deprived of nutrients because the soils are excessively drained. And so nutrients are taken out of the soil relatively quickly. Once the forest and birds begin to disappear, there are challenges with the soil fertility, add seasonality to that, add the fact that you're bringing tropical crops to the island and you have the challenges of those things together, which makes it a place that is not one of great abundance. It's also an island with no permanent streams. It's also an island where not only do you have seasonal differences in rainfall, but you can have longer term patterns of drought. You can have a lot of rain, and then you can have several months with no rain. And of course, if you're farmers, that is a big challenge. That's a problem.

I mean, absolutely, an island with no rivers or streams, it also makes me think of somewhere like Malta in the Mediterranean. Does that mean, as we'll get to these first people, very, very quickly now, does that mean that, you know, the sources of water available, of fresh water is predominantly from springs underground or from collected rainwater in kind of craters, that idea? Yeah, there are Two, and maybe if you count kind of a marsh, there are three lakes on the island that are associated with volcanic craters. They collect water and they form lakes. Presently, one of those lakes is completely dry.

The other one is a muddy swamp. Most of the water that people used in the past actually came from submarine groundwater discharge. Those are springs that are right at sea levels so that at low tide, you have fresh water coming out right above the salt water. And it's not an obvious source of fresh water, at least not to us. To islanders, they would have known where it was and they would get it at low tide. That's a fairly reliable source of water and one that is sustainable through droughts, at least through some droughts. So there's more water on the island than meets the eye, in other words.

And the lakes, yes, but many people on the island would have lived far away from the lake. So by the time they go to the lake to get a drink and go back home, they're thirsty again. So it wasn't really a viable day-to-day source of fresh water. It was really the springs in the groundwater discharge at the shoreline that was really an important source of water for people living around the island in the past. Well, let's explore these people now and the first people to reach Rappanoi. So, Terry, who are these adventurers, these people who arrive on this remote island? Who are we talking about?

We are talking about Polynesians. We're talking about Polynesians that in the Pacific we would denote as East Polynesians. Their most immediate history is migrations through the Austral Islands that are part today, part of French Polynesia. The Austral Islands includes islands like Mangareva, not part of French Polynesia, but Pitcairin and the islands of the southeastern Pacific. And before that, the language evidence tells us that people migrated through the Marquesis, and before that, ultimate Polynesian origins linking all the way back 3,000 years to Samoa

and the movement of East Asian populations into the Pacific that we denote as Austronesian. It's the language family that all Polynesian languages belong to. And so there's a long history and connection with the Pacific. islands and movement from west to east across the Pacific. Rapa Nui was settled around 1,200 common era, about the same time that Hawaii was settled by the same group of people, the same time, it was a very quick settlement, same time as the Marquesas and then a little bit later, New Zealand. So all of those people are related. Their languages are very similar. Their origins are in the movement of East Polynesians across this vast area of the Pacific.

I mean, Terry, that's such an incredible fact that I'm sure you never get tired of talking about, isn't it? You think that the so-called Polynesian triangle to think that, you know, from various islands in the Pacific, in the East Polynesia, you get certain groups going and venturing out to Hawaii, other groups, as you say, ending up on Rapanui, Easter Island. And then roughly maybe a bit later, as you say, other groups ending. up on Alta Roa, on New Zealand. And it's amazing to see, you know, the cultural similarities between them and how these different groups went and settled these different parts, you know, of the Pacific at roughly similar times. Yes, and roughly similar times means that they did very quickly. The radiocarbon evidence shows us that it all happened within one or two

centuries, which is, if you think about it, is, it's not just the voyaging time, it's the colonizing time. It's the population growth. It's the discovery of literally more than a thousand islands in a short space of time. And the radiocarbon record also shows us something quite remarkable. They went to the very far reaches of the Pacific in the same episode. For example, the Auckland islands, which are south of New Zealand, their sub-Antarctic islands, there are Polynesians there, seal hunting with dogs and camping at the same time that people, are reaching Hawaii and Marquesis, they are spreading out rapidly, discovering every speck of land and then colonizing. Rapa Nui was part of that. Very much different climates as well.

And so when these first people arrive on Rapanui on Easter Island, Terry, you touched on this earlier, but the environment that they would have arrived into, should we be imagining heavily forested, lots of trees at that time? Yes, they would have found an island with literally millions of giant palm trees, a palm tree that looks much like the native palm tree in mainland Chile. There would have been millions of seabirds, as I mentioned, and they would have arrived on the island and brought their crops with them, such as taro, sweet potato, sugar cane, yams, and they would have immediately planted those crops. They would have brought with them the usual animals. In this case, they brought chickens, and whether they meant to or not,

they brought with them the Polynesian rat. Those animals would sort of quickly become established on the island intentionally and unintentionally, perhaps with the rats. Chikins were an important food source as well. So they discovered this island. They would probably very quickly explore the island for the resources. You know, where is the good stone to make tools? where is the water, where can we plant crops, and they would have began to establish their settlements as they had on other islands. Do we have any archaeology surviving

from, you know, those earliest settlers on Easter Island? Is there like a Wyrall Bar equivalent almost from that island? Yes, Wyrall Bar, like in New Zealand, yes. We think that it's on account of beach. It's a bay with a white sand beach on the north shore of the island. And we excavated there in 2005 and 2006, And at the base of that excavation, we find an undisturbed natural layer with the evidence of the palm tree roots undisturbed, which means that that's the original sort of primeval deposit on the island or layer on the island. And right on top of that, you see obsidian tools, fish bones, rat bones.

and you can see the very beginning of human presence at that stratigraphic point in our excavations. And that's the point that we excavated and recovered radiocarbon samples that gave us the approximate 1,200 CE date for human arrival on the island. We compared that date with every other date that other archaeologists had ever received from the island, and there was nothing older than that that was. reliable. There were a few older dates, but they required corrections for the way we correct radio carbon dates for accuracy. And it turned out that nothing was older than that. So we found the very earliest evidence. We found really solid evidence for when people arrived. And it matched

up with the chronology for the other islands, as we've been talking about. What do we know then about these earliest settlements? Is their culture very Polynesian in its outlook. By what I mean in that is that you haven't seen the kind of the evolution, the development of that very unique Rappanoi Easter Island culture that you get later on. As East Polynesians, we know that they brought the idea of anthropomorphic, that is human figures with them. Human figures that represent ancestors and that are part of the religious and cosmological traditions from East Polynesia. And I say East Polynesia, because we don't see it in Western Polynesia, places like Samoa. We don't see the same architecture and symbolism in use of stone

and wooden statues. So they would have brought that idea with them as people settling the Marquesas and Hawaii, the other islands of the east. So they would have brought those ideas with them. They would have had a similar language which reflects their cultural similarities across the region. That would have been the seeds for what was to really become greatly elaborated on Rapa Nui more so than other islands, but it has its roots in East Polynesian culture. Thank you for clarifying that. And do we have any evidence from the surviving archaeology, for instance, when you were doing excavations at that particular site, Terry, do we know much about how large these early settlements were, like how many houses they were? Any insights into that?

No, not really, because we excavate a small area and we're recovering evidence of kind of animals and diet and chronology artifacts. We would require large excavations to understand how many houses there might have been, things like that. We do have genetic evidence that tells us that there may have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 people plus or minus a bit. And so we have other lines of evidence to tell us how many people might have been in that colonizing group. And when we think about numbers, we also think about the double-hold canoes that people would have been using. And maybe there were two or more canoes that would be used to colonize an island. Settling an island with two or more canoes would make it safer because if you had

problems on one, you had sort of a backup. But people would arrive discovering the island and then colonizing the island. And they would probably spread out fairly quickly as they looked for good resources on the island and planted crops and so on. And I guess potentially also the other question of whether this travel, was it two-way? Could some people have left Rapanui, Easter Island, and gone back to somewhere like Tahiti in East Polynesia and then almost kind of another wave of migration following that? Or do we just think it's that one kind of burst of colonization at the beginning? Or are these questions we still not quite sure about? It's a great question and we're not quite sure, but let me explain. The oral tradition

recounts the discovery of the island by navigators who then return to their homeland and then mount an expedition to colonize the island. Now, that fits the sort of pattern of discovery and colonization, but there's another line of evidence that's quite intriguing, and that is the DNA of the Polynesian rat. The DNA of the rat is really homogeneous, and in other islands, it's not as homogeneous as it is in Rapa Nui. Now, what does that? mean? In a place like Hawaii or New Zealand, it looks like there are multiple voyages because we get multiple lineages of rats that are coming from different source populations. They arrive on different canoes, and that's our calling card of multiple voyages. In Rapa Nui,

with one rat lineage, basically, very homogeneous rat DNA. It looks kind of like one canoe arrived and that was it. So whether the oral tradition is literally true or not, or whether the rat DNA is telling us that they're coming from the same homogeneous source, which is also possible, it looks like there may not have been very much back and forth. And certainly once the island was settled, there probably wasn't any going back to other parts of Polynesia because the palm trees are not suitable for making canoes. So once they arrived and the canoes they arrived on were no longer seaworthy, they were kind of stuck there and there wouldn't have been voyages that set off from Rapa Nui to other parts of Polynesia. Doesn't mean that other

pollinations might have occasionally arrived there, but it is a very remote island. It's hard to find. And we also, generally in the region, we don't have oral traditions in other parts of Polynesia about Rapa Nui. In other islands, they don't talk about a place like Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui talks a little bit about their homeland, but it's very kind of remote and remembered as opposed to recounting people arriving again and again. So they were probably pretty isolated. Very interesting. Almost like a one-way journey. Glad you mentioned the rat there. We'll certainly return to the rat and what information you and many other archaeologists have gleaned from learning, exploring their remains as well on their DNA.

and so much and so forth. Going back to the agriculture, Terry, you mentioned how these Polynesian arrivals, these new settlers, they're coming from a tropical climate, and now in Easter Island, it's a more temperate one, and they're bringing their tropical crops with them. So it begs the question, how effective is their agriculture when they realized they got to settle down on this island with these crops they've brought with them? They face some challenges, and I'll tell you, they probably brought some plants that did not survive. They probably brought. breadfruit with them, a tropical plant. They probably brought coconut. These plants would probably die with their first winter on the island. The temperatures would be a little too cool, or maybe the dry

conditions of a summer would lead these plants to die. The typical plants of the main subsistence in the tropics, such as taro, face challenges with temperature and availability of water. And the crops that became really important were the sweet potato and sugar cane. They have a little more tolerance in terms of temperature. And so the Rapa Nui people would have really focused on a smaller number of crops than their Polynesian counterparts in the tropics. And they did face challenges in the agriculture. The seasonality, the dry summer, the high winds, the nutrient-poor soils. And this led to some adaptations that involved the use of stone as stone mulch, where you protect the soil with stones, and it's a really ingenious method. And you also put crops in

enclosures that in Rapa, new are called Monovi, and the Monovi protect the crops from the wind, and they would have been sort of putting compost, and they'd put rubbish in these and create compost, and we know that from taking samples of the soil inside of these enclosures, and we can see that they're adding kind of rubbish as fertilizer in these compounds. Now, something interesting about rock mulch is that with nutrient-poor soils, the rocks, which are younger geological materials, are actually leaching nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen from the stone, and they act kind of not only as a protection of the soil, but they're actually adding nutrients. It's almost like a rock fertilizer that helps with the cultivation of these crops. So

the climate, the soil, and then they made some, with these challenges, they made some really ingenious innovations that made agriculture more successful, perhaps not optimal, but more successful than it would have been otherwise. That's so ingenious. I've never heard of that before. And I'm guessing because these rock mulch gardens and these manoeuvai enclosures, because they include stones, are they quite easy to spot on the ground today? Do they leave quite a clear archaeological signature, so to speak? Absolutely, and we've actually analyzed them from satellite images. From satellite images, we can see that there are more than 3,000 Monovi on the entire island.

Wow. And we can detect areas of rock mulch by the density of rock and its concentration in certain regions. And we can measure the... that with special detection methods used in satellite imagery. And then we can ground truth it on the ground to make sure that what we're seeing and analyzing in the satellite images is actually what we think it is on the ground. So we go and check things. And we've estimated the amount of rock mulch on the island covers an area that's not as large as we originally thought, but there are a lot of areas of the island that have been modified with rock mulch for cultivation.

So that's like with agriculture to improve that agricultural yield. But what about water? If you mentioned there are no rivers, no streams. Is there quickly kind of technological developments, a realization of how to try and ensure there's a steady flow of fresh water coming into these settlements? So a lot of the settlements are along the shoreline. And the shoreline is where there is access to groundwater discharge. And it's sometimes called submarine.

groundwater discharge because it comes out of the island's water table and is accessible at low tide. At high tide, it's going into the salt water and so it's not easy to get. But at low tide, it's accessible. So much of the island has groundwater discharge along the shoreline, and they use some techniques to impound that freshwater. They made, they excavated what looks like a well, basically, lined it with stones and that it would fill with fresh water being trapped or impounded before it reached the saltwater. So you would actually have freshwater sources along the shoreline. Many of these have been destroyed because as soon as there's high surf or something like that, there's some of the first things to be damaged and destroyed. But that was a regular

source of fresh water. The other sort of expedient method for freshwater was carving a stone, carving a basin into bedrock or into a boulder, creating kind of a bowl that would trap rainwater. And when it rains, these fill up with water. And then you have a short-term expedient kind of little, you know, in the middle of nowhere, there'd be a drinking fountain because you have fresh water from the rain. So we do see these all over the island. And it was another source of water.

And it reminds us that fresh water was important and that it had limitations on the island as well. One last question on kind of the food part is you also mentioned earlier Terry fish bones. So I'm guessing these early settlers, and presumably for many generations afterwards, alongside developing innovations in agriculture and freshwater, were they also kind of keen fishes as well as another kind of food resource, basically? Yes. We know from studying the chemistry of human bone that marine resources was about half of their diet. And then, that's significant. That's a good source of protein. The fishing we see in the fish bones, even from the historical record, the ethnographic record, is that a lot of the fishing was

near shore. That is, in other words, they're fishing right on the shoreline. They're getting fish and eels and shellfish, things that are available at the shoreline. Deep sea fishing would be a little less common because they really had limited canoes, limited watercraft because of the limitations of wood. Now, there's a little bit of a false dichotomy between near shore and deep sea because the island has a very, you get deep water very quickly offshore. It's a very rapid, the submarine contour there gets deep very fast, which means that you can be just a few hundred meters offshore and you're in very deep waters. That's where you could get tuna and other deep water fish. So we do see that occasionally.

And they have some access to that without going very far out to sea. So, yes, marine resources were important and dominated by near shore, but included some deep sea fish as well. And the tools they're using, Terry, you mentioned earlier, Obsidian, but should we also be imagining that they take full advantage of the kind of the volcanic rocks, you know, those hot like basalt and so on, that that presumably is on the island? Yes, so obsidian is a great tool for making something. that has a sharp edge because it's very glassy. And they made a tool called Batta'a, which is a kind of a multi-purpose tool that has a stem on it, so you would halft it to a handle so that you wouldn't cut your hand and using it. Then it could be used for cutting and scraping, and it's usually associated with agricultural

activities like cutting plants, like bananas and sweet potatoes. The basalt was used for making stone adses. These are woodworking tools that could be used for felling truels, trees and carving wooden artifacts like bowls or even images, small images, small human figurines, for example, and in wood to be used in handles and other things, wood to be used in construction of houses. So these were common tools. There's some good basalt on the island that makes very high quality stone tools. And the islanders found these fairly quickly and began to use them extensively. So they also, out of the same kind of basalt, they also made something unusual in

Polynesia, and that is stone fish hooks. So they used this fine grain basalt. They would grind it down into a fish hook, and instead of using only bone or shell, they use stone fish hooks as well. So Rapa Nui, there really are, really the fish hooks in Rapa Nui are bone, and the only thing big enough to make fish hooks would be human bone, and then stone. And so these make the fish hooks that we see in Rapa, Neu. Important tools as we were just talking about use of marine resources and marine portion of the diet. So, Terry, let's move on and get closer to this time of the moai, of these incredible statues that I know you've done a lot of work about. But do we have a sense, has archaeology and all these other source of information, have they revealed much about what happens in those generations, in those early centuries following this first arrival, this settlement?

How does this isolated population? How does it grow? How does it develop in those early generations following that? We think that like any colonizing population, the population probably grew very quickly, so that within a few generations there would be a pretty significant number of people on the island. We think that probably within a couple of centuries, we had about 3,000 people on the island in that it was reaching kind of the maximum sustainable population on the island. We don't think that there were ever more than three or four thousand people on the island, which has implications for the success or the potential failure of that population on the island. If you had too many people, you would face problems with food shortages, et cetera.

But we think that the population probably stabilized around 3,000 people. We see this in multiple lines of evidence, including the human genetics, including the early European observations and estimates of population. And so people would have filled the island, as I said, within a couple of centuries. That means that they would spread out over the island, develop their settlements, and begin the really extraordinary story of Rapa Nui, and that included making these giant statues. Now, did they make giant statues on day one?

Probably not, but the idea was there. So perhaps they were making smaller images out of wood, and then they found this great stone resource that we can talk about. And they began making stone statues that would eventually get larger and larger. All right, Terry, you've guessed the next question. What is this incredible stone resource that they discover? So there is a volcanic crater on the island. It's called Rano Raraku. It is a volcanic cone that is comprised of a welded tough. That is a volcanic material that's ejected

during an eruption. It flies up into the air and falls back down on itself and it's still hot and it melts back together again. So that's the welding part of it. Now, it's an aggregate of ash with stones in it and it's comparatively soft. It's not like really hard basalt stone. but it's a volcanic ash, and it has larger pieces in it, so it's not really homogeneous, but in its softness, it can be shaped and carved with harder basalt tools that could be held in your hand and used to shape this volcanic ash. And that is the material that more than 95% of the statues were made from. Nearly a thousand of these statues called Moai were made from this source, and that is where the famous statue quarry is located that visitors to the island sea today and are absolutely,

you know, it's absolutely mind-boggling thing to see is more than 400 statues in various stages of completion at this quarry at Rano Raraku. I just want to repeat that point, Terry, because it is such an incredible location, looking it up last night in preparation for our interview, the fact that you can go there and see so many of those statues unfinished, not quite out of the quarry yet in so many different stages, it almost makes you think also of maybe the ancient Egypt, somewhere like Aswan, where you have unfinished obelisks in there,

granite quarries down there. Here you can go to East Island to Rappanui and see the process when it just hasn't quite finished. You can see them in situ from the rock in which they've been created from. It's an amazing site. Absolutely. And every time I go there with visitors who come to the island for the first time, they just say it's the most incredible thing they've ever seen. And, you know, my astonishment never ends. I mean, every time I go, I look at it. And it is a record of hundreds of years, perhaps about

400, 500, 500 years of working in the quarry. And it's important to realize that what we're looking at is not a moment frozen in time. It's not like Pompeii, when every, everybody dropped their tools and ran away. They're actually old statues in the quarry and younger statues in the quarry, more recent statues, because some statues were abandoned over time because they were perhaps flawed in some way. They were the wrong shape or they had, you know, there might be a bolder inclusion in the ash that didn't look right. So they would leave it. You see examples that look like that.

So it is a historical picture rather than a snapshot late in time. It's more like you're seeing a chronology of statue making at that location. And if you're using the tool you're using a harder rock like basalt to carve out, you know, this softer rock, this incredible ash that you mentioned earlier, Terry, the tools they're using, would it have required a lot of time and effort, a lot of manpower, should we be imagining big communities of people? You mentioned when it gets to a few thousand people total population in Rapanui. Can we imagine them all potentially coming together to that crater side to carve out one of these great statues being a big communal effort

because of how much time it would have taken to make one of those, to carve it out of the softer rock, the ash, the two for rock? It's a good question. And what we actually see when we really study the quarry is that there are about 30 different workshops in the quarry. And by workshops, what we see is a set of activities that is creating the beginnings of a statue, further along with the statue, an area where people are working, extracting, and then bringing the statue down, the slopes of the quarry, et cetera. And in these 30 workshops, there's only space for about 10 to 15 people that would fit within the physical confines of that area of the quarry. And so what we believe, after really close examination of the quarry, is that different communities are coming from all parts of the island and they're working their part of the quarry and making their statues to take to their part of the island rather than it being an island.

island-wide endeavor. It is a local community endeavor, and everyone's doing it, kind of sharing the quarry with their space in the quarry that's their own. Now, what's interesting, and we're experimenting with something that's showing us, the early pattern we're seeing, it's not really complete yet, but what we're seeing in early analysis is that there are similarities in the faces in the quarry by location. So one area has similar faces that are different from another area that has similar faces. And then we could link, say, for example, in one area, we can link those faces with a place on the island where the statues have been taken.

Now, it's hard to get all these measurements because sometimes the statues aren't finished or they're eroded or they're face down so we can't measure the face. We can't measure attributes of the faces, but we are seeing in a preliminary way connections between those workshops and different parts of the island, which reinforced the idea that different communities are using their workshops in the quarry. So it's a different pattern than some have imagined. I guess some have imagined that there was a chief standing there telling everybody to make more statues, but it probably wasn't the case. No, I think people might think in that case of something like Stone Age, or. or the like where everyone's coming together to build a monumental tomb for a chief or something like this, but as you say, this seems to be quite different.

And that's so interesting about those different workshops, Terry, does it give a sense that in the statues, when you examine the facial features of these moai that survive, you can see variation in the style of these faces and maybe get a sense of who was making it and when? No, that's exactly right. And that's, and that actually complicates things because what we're seeing is chronology, where the styles change through time. Today's moai is different than yesterday's moai in style because something goes out of fashion.

But then we're also seeing this part of the island does it in a certain way versus that part of the island, but both of them are changing through time. So we have those dimensions that we have to take into account. So it makes it a little more complex that both time and location are adding to the characteristics of the statues. People, you know, visitors to the island, well, let me say, before people visit the island, they imagine that all the statues look the same.

When you do visit the island, you say, oh, well, no, they don't all look the same. There are actually quite a lot of variation in the facial features of the statues and in their body form and some of the other elements that are used in decorating them. Very simplistic question from me, but are some of the bodies fatter than others? Yes, they actually take on different forms. Some of them are very tall and slim. Some of them are a little more squat. There's actually a kneeling statue that's in the quarry probably never meant to be moved.

And very marquesan looking in its style. So we think it's a very early style, speaking of chronology and styles that changed. So there's quite a bit of variation. And there's some statues that are a small number that are made of other materials, like a red scoria, another volcanic material that's quite red in color. and some are made of vesicular basalt. For example, the moai that's in the British Museum is made of basalt, not of the Raraku tuff.

So it's a harder material, it's darker in color, and the petroglyphs that are carved on the back of that moai are very well preserved because that rock is harder and more dense and thus better preserved. So if you see petroglyphs, I mean, we'll get. I'm sure we'll explore this as we go on as well. And if you see the material basalt being using, as you said with the chronology, do those both indicate, along with looking at certain facial features, that this was a moai constructed later in the generations, in the centuries of Rapa Nui's story? Could be. It's a little hard to say we can't date the statues directly,

but the petroglyphs that link to other traditions that we think might be later in time is one of those clues. So, for example, the moai, the statue at the British Museum, has petroglyphs on his back that relate to a what we call the Birdman cult or Tangatamanu cult that is another part of the island. And it may very well date to later times because it is something that persists into historic times. And that may be a clue that that was a later moai. Some of the moai in the quarry that were not transported away from the quarry also have similar petroglyphs, and that gives us a clue to their perhaps later chronology. So these are, without dating them directly, sometimes indirectly, with the sediments that are surrounding them as they were buried using radiocarbon dates. We can get an indirect measure, and we get a really broad picture, not a very detailed one, but a broad picture of,

chronological differences. Well, let's move on to a question that I know you've done so much work around Terry, and it's absolutely fascinating. I know it's fascinated people for so long. Some more far-fetched theories than other. Getting the statues, having carved them in the quarry, moving them to that part of the island where they're ultimately set up, how do we think they did this?

How did they move the moai? Let me give you a little context here. there are about a thousand statues on the island. About 400 are still in the quarry. And the other five to six hundred in various condition around the island. So that means that more than 500 were transported. Some of them significant distances up to like 18 kilometers in various parts of the island. You know, the wild theories are that this is all done by aliens. That's just not in our, not on our list of possibilities, because there are people there who have been doing all these things. Some have proposed that they were moved using logs. There's a big problem with that

because there's not the right kind of wood that existed on the island for that to have been feasible. That theory also completely ignores the archaeological evidence itself. It ignores the statues, the roads that we find the statues on, etc. We studied 62, statues that were found along ancient roadways leading from the quarry to various parts of the island. And those 62 statues on the roads give us some very important clues. They have a different shape. They're broken in revealing ways, and their position on the roads tell us that they were moved in an upright position. Not that they were moved in a horizontal position on logs, either on their back or face down, but that they were moved in a vertical position.

Now, when you ask the islanders, how did your ancestors move these statues? Their answer is very simple. It's very straightforward. They walked. They walked. And the oral tradition is very clear about this. We couldn't go on the oral tradition alone because they're also, as a lot, I mentioned earlier, very fanciful parts of the oral tradition. So this may have been metaphorical.

It may have been something that was not literal. And so we couldn't just say, well, that's the answer. But it was an interesting clue. In all of the evidence that we looked at, walking really became evident. But that wasn't enough. And what we did was we used basically the technology of 3D printing, where lots of photographs can be turned into a 3D model. A 3D model can be turned into a mold, and we made a 4.35 ton perfect replica, millimeter by millimeter replica of a statue that had fallen on a roadway. We used concrete mixed with styrofoam so that it would be like the volcanic tough of Raraku, and working with National Geographic, we experimented with transporting that perfect replica. So, first time this has been done because the other so-called replicas

were not replicas. Sometimes they call them facsimiles because they were just kind of looked like statues, but they didn't have the right proportions. And what we found is that the statues on the roads have a forward lean and a low center of gravity, and that when they reach the platforms where they are going to be permanently installed and displayed, the base is carved so that they no longer have a forward lean, but they can stand in a vertical position without falling forward. And the center of gravity is changed by reducing some of the mass and the weight, some of the mass in the lower portion of the statue, bringing the center of gravity up by removing stone in the lower portion of the statue. These were all clues to how they were transported.

Now, with the replica, with some ropes, it turns out three ropes, one in the back, one on each side, we were able to rock the statue side to side, in the rear, let it fall forward a little bit, and in that coordinated effort, the statue walks. It literally does the physics of walking, where it's a control, fall forward, shifting the center of gravity from side to side. And there is a kind of a pendulum effect with the weight of the statue that means that the rope swing from side to side, control fall forward, walking. We were able to walk our 4.35 tonne statue about 100 meters in 40 minutes. quite easily with, you know, rope from the hardware store and really demonstrated that this was

not only feasible, but that the engineering on the statues was so ingenious that it worked and it only works that way. Now, we were able to move our statue with only 18 people, four on each side, 10 in the back. That's quite remarkable. It doesn't take 100, hundreds of people to move the average size statue. Now, the largest statue ever moved was about 80 tons, and it was moved a few miles. That's actually really incredible, but it is within all of the limitations that we've analyzed in terms of the physics of moving the statues, the size of the rope you would need, and the number of people you would need. And the number of people with an 80-ton statue goes up to, you know, like 50 or 60 people, but all of it's

quite feasible. So when we know it's feasible, they did it, and we can see how they did it. And the statues walked, and the oral traditions are correct, and the physics tell us exactly how that worked. That's absolutely incredible. I guess further evidence as to why these MoI statues could have been built, could have been carved out and then moved, not by multidis. communities, but by just one community, you know, who passed it down again and again, you know,

and as you say, wasn't a multi-communal effort. It was a one community effort, and they could have done it all themselves. They didn't need all that manpower, as you were saying there, Terry. That's right. And imagine, imagine my community bringing a moai from the quarry. Our community puts the ropes on it and walks it down the communal road across the island. and your community sees it. And we're saying, my community is saying to your community, look what we can do. Can you do the same? How big a moai are you going to move?

Are you going to move one next year? And is it going to be as big as ours? Are you as cool as we are? My moai is bigger than yours. Yeah, that's right. There's some competition in this that in a way probably really led to the success of the island in a basically a friendly competition that engaged community. rather than people fighting with each other, they competed in a way of honoring their ancestors,

which is what these statues are, their deified ancestors, parading them, if you will, by walking them across the island on these communal roads, and showing off that your community is capable of all of these things. Really a collaborative, cooperative, competitive, if all of those things can be true at the same time, effort in making and walking these giant statues across the island. That you also mentioned the purpose of them there. So kind of ancestor worship, as you were saying, and some of them also have headdresses or a hat on top. Yes. They're called Pukau. They're red scoria volcanic stone. And one of them that was successfully placed on the largest boi ever transported, the 80-ton statue, was nearly 11 tons. Absolutely incredible.

astonishing. I mean, mind-boggling. Well, let's move on. And as we get towards the end of the prehistoric story, I want to get back to that idea, that vision we have earlier of during those early generations, Easter Island, Rappanui, was heavily forested. But if you look at Rappanui today, you'll notice that those forests, I mean, they're in no way near as extensive as that image suggests. So what happens, Terry? Why is there so much? much deforestation. Is this caused by these inhabitants, by these communities over the centuries? Yes. We have an island with literally tens of millions of palm trees was the dominant vegetation,

and then a small number of other hardwood species, smaller trees and shrubs, grasses and ferns, etc. People arrive, and they are agriculturalists, and they have rats. Now, the rats could have been intentional could have been unintentional. Doesn't matter. The consequence would be the same. They were a food source, so maybe they were intentional. But rats would arrive, and they're an invasive species in the classical sense. Islands do not have predators for rats. They have an unlimited food supply in the nuts produced by the palm trees, and so rats would explode in numbers. and a pair, just to give you the parameters of this, one male, one female, we could literally have millions of rats within three years. We just do the math. That's what happens. They're very

successful invaders as invasive species. And nothing's stopping them. People can't really stop them because they'll just advance ahead of people. And what they will do is they will eat the seeds of the plants, the trees, the palms, and this has the effect of stopping the regeneration of this native vegetation, and it will slowly but surely contribute to deforestation, because if nothing new is growing and the older trees are dying, the forest is slowly disappearing. Now add to that the efforts of people who are burning areas to plant crops, and together, there is no new trees or very few new trees growing because of rat predation on seeds, plus fire, and over hundreds of years, the forest will disappear.

And at some point, the palms are far enough apart and scattered enough that reproduction becomes a problem anyway. And we're not sure, but by Easter Sunday 1722, the Dutch may be describing some palm tree still existing on the island? Because they say there are tracks of woodland in the distance and they mentioned that the islanders are eating nuts that probably could come from palm trees. So there could still have been

palms since 1722, but the island was largely deforested by that time and it really was a combination of agriculture and rats preying upon these seeds. Now rat numbers would be tied to the trees so their numbers would

explode and then they would decline as the food decline. So that's kind of the typical trajectory of an invasive species. Boom and bust is what ecologists will call it. So that would have been the story in Rapa Nui. Now, was deforestation catastrophic for the islanders? No, it didn't have much to do with their subsistence. They were planting crops and the palm trees were basically in the way. So the idea that this was some kind of ecological suicide is just misreads the evidence completely. Fair enough. And then that leads us nicely on this idea that there had been for a long time, Terry, that there was a collapse, a societal collapse of the people themselves on Rapa Nui.

Now, what's the story behind this? What do we now know today? The notion of collapse really comes from early European visitors to the island, and we can probably trace it most directly to Captain James Cook and Johann Forrester, the naturalist with Cook on his visit to Rapa Nui. They begin to speculate that there were more people in the past and that something had happened. And they're surprised about these giant statues and the small number of people. Well, they also, in illustrations of the island, show human bones scattered on the surface of the island. What had happened is that four years earlier, the Spanish had been on the island for several days

and almost certainly introduced epidemic disease, old world diseases that Pacific Islanders and Native Americans had no natural immunity to. And these encounters led to epidemic diseases and great population loss. And what Cook and his men may have been seeing is the aftermath of an epidemic from a visit four years earlier. And not understanding old world diseases and germ theory, et cetera, they began to speculate about other things. And other visitors around that time would speculate that deforestation had something to do with the loss of population. This was really the beginning of trusting sort of what Europeans were speculating about. And then in modern times, people saying, oh, well, something terrible happened. There must have been a collapse. For researchers

like Hyerdahl, it was basically a race war between two different races that he thought were on the island. None of that has any evidence to support it. And then by the 1990s, it was really environmental interest that said, no, it was an environmental catastrophe that led to a collapse. When really, truly the collapse was one that occurred because of epidemic disease that came after European contact and because of European contact had nothing to do with palm trees or deforestation but was confused with that by early visitors and then modern scholars trusting that what early visitors were saying must have been true because they were seeing something that they were speculating and they didn't understand what they were seeing.

The collapse story really misreads something that happened because of European contact and attributes it to something like the loss of trees. It really is a mismatch between sort of consequences of deforestation and consequences of disease. Terry, this has been an absolutely fascinating chat. I wish I could ask so many more questions. But what an incredible island with an amazing archaeological story, all those megalithic monuments, the statues. but also the insights into their life and how they adapted to that temperate zone with their rock mulch gardens, their manoevite and so much more. It sounds like archaeologically there's still so much more also to be found in the future. Are you hoping to get back out there very soon?

Yes, indeed. We work with the island, and there's much more that we can learn, many more details to be deciphered from the island's story. and work continues with ancient DNA, the rats, and the people, and modern DNA with the people. We're learning a lot about the history. And like I mentioned earlier, this is historical science. Modern archaeology relies on many disciplines working together to understand our human past. And you and your many colleagues are doing amazing work on that. And I feel I should also mention Terry that you take people out there too. You take tours out to Rappanoi to see these amazing sites.

they can see them firsthand as well? I do. I organize groups to the island and take them on a tour with our local Rapa Nui guides. And you come with me, you'll see and learn more than you ever wanted to. That's a nice way to leave it on, Terry. This has been an absolute blast, an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Terry Hunt talking all things Rapper Nui,

All Things Easter Island. What an amazing archaeological story. One of, in my opinion, one of the coolest in all of the world. And I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode just as much as I did recording it. Do let us know your thoughts. Leave us a comment on Spotify. We really want to encourage the community, want to encourage growth, want to hear your thoughts on all the episodes and how we can improve what you like about them and so on and so forth. So yes, I really do hope you enjoyed the episode. Let us know what else you'd like to cover in the future regarding the ancient Pacific Polynesian voyaging. We've done Hawaii. We've now done Easter Island. We've done New Zealand, Altaireoa, but there's still many other parts of the Pacific that we can cover. Fiji, Tahiti,

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