About Easter Island
Excerpted from Big Stone Head: Easter
Island and Pop Culture, by James Teitelbaum.
©2009 James Teitelbaum
Rapa Nui (Easter Island) was formed when three volcanoes -
Poike, Rano Kau, and Terevaka - merged together, creating a
landmass between them. The oldest of the three, Poike,
is about three million years old, while the newest and largest
- Terevaka - rose from the South East Pacific Plateau about
100,000 years ago. Other volcanic features make up the
landscape, including lava tubes, caves, the crater Rano
Raraku, and the cinder cone Puna Pau.
The best guess we have about when Rapa Nui was settled is
about 400 a.d. According to legend and lore, the
settlers were led by one Hotu Matu’a. They came from
what is now known as French Polynesia, probably the vicinity
of the Marquesas islands and more specifically from the island
of Mangareva. Theories about a South American
origin for the Rapanui people were finally disproved
definitively after Erika Hagelber’s 1994 DNA study of twelve
ancient Easter Island skeletons.
Hotu Matu’a must have been some great navigator: Easter Island
is a tiny, tiny speck of land, some 64 square miles in
size. It is in the middle of nowhere. It is the
most remote inhabited spot in the world, bar none. When
Jacob Roggeveen came across it, the inhabitants had been
completely isolated for 1,300 years (assuming a colonization
date of 400 a.d.), and were completely unaware that there were
any other people in the world. If you were standing on
the slopes of Ranu Raraku, you would be about 2,300 miles
(3,701 km) west of the Chilean coast, about 1,260 miles (2,027
km) southeast of Pitcairn, the nearest inhabited landmass
(home of the descendants of the HMS Bounty), 3,700 miles
(5,955 km) from freezing Antarctica, 4,300 miles (6,920 km)
southeast of Hawai’i, and 2,515 miles (4,050 km) from Tahiti.
I wouldn’t try to swim it, if I were you.
And in a canoe?
That’s how Hotu Matu’a did it.
Matu’a set off with a small fleet on a voyage of discovery and
colonization. How many others before him tried and
failed - or tried and died? Had the ragtag fleet changed
their course by a single degree, or less, they would have
sailed right past their new home. Landing at the next
landmass in their path - South America - entailed spending
several weeks further at sea, in the unlikely event that the
mariners lived that long, or that their vessels remained
seaworthy. However, these people were expert sailors,
reading the waves, observing the stars, following the
birds. They knew what they were doing. The small
fleet of Hotu Matu’a carried chickens, seeds, and women,
everything the settlers needed to start over on their new
island paradise. Still, these provisions could not have
been without limit, and the travelers could not have been in
very good shape when land was miraculously sighted.
After what must have been four to six weeks at sea, they
landed at Anakena beach, the only sand beach on the
island. The rest of the shore is made up of jagged rocky
volcanic cliffs.
Somehow they managed to survive and prosper. The early
history of this island seems rather uneventful (perhaps they
were resting up from the arduous journey!) but a few centuries
after landing at Anakena beach, the settlers - who never
advanced technologically beyond the stone age, inventing
neither metals nor the wheel - began to carve the moai in
tribute to the greatest of their deceased clan leaders.
Over a period of at least six hundred years, peaking somewhere
between 1200 a.d. and 1500 a.d., the moai were carved from the
volcanic tuff of Rano Raraku. The vast majority of the
moai were coaxed from the southwest side of the Rano Raraku
crater with stone axes and a lot of hard work. They were
set upright on the hillside just yards from the quarry, where
the carving on their backs was completed. At last they
were dragged across the island to their ahu. After being
erected on the ahu, their eye sockets were carved out, and
their eyes installed. Only then were they considered to
be alive, and imbued with their spiritual power. The
moai were also called aringa ora, or “living faces”,
since each represented a particular ancestor. Completed
moai - placed upon their ahu and with eyes and pukao installed
- embodied the spirit of the ancestor, and were named after
that ancestor, whose mana protected his land and his
family. The great ahus were also unmistakable markers
defining a clan’s territory. The moai building became a
feverish obsession for the Rapanui, with each clan competing
to outdo each other, not unlike Egyptian Pharoahs each
striving to make a pyramid bigger than his
predecessor’s. The idea of keeping up with the Joneses,
of living beyond one’s means to give an impression that one’s
clan is more wealthy or more powerful than their neighbor is a
concept that was understood just fine by this society, who
believed that they were the only people on Earth.
All of this toil wasn’t completed without a heavy cost to the
people and to the ecosystem, however. The deforestation
of this paradise began sometime before the year 800 a.d., or a
few centuries after the settlement of Easter
Island. The growing Easter Island population,
which may have maxed out at as many as 20,000 people by a
millennia after Hotu Matu’a’s landing, had a large need for
resources that their island just couldn’t sustain. Wood
was needed to make canoes, to move moai, to build homes, and
to burn for warmth and cooking. Rats and birds consumed
seeds and were in turn killed for food. The vital palm
trees were gone by about 1400 a.d., a victim of the moai
builders’ insatiable need for timber. The lack of trees
also meant soil erosion, which in turn made growing crops more
difficult. Wind and rain took their toll on the soil
without the grass, shrubs, and trees to keep the soil system
stable. By the end of the fifteenth century, the forest
was more or less gone. The hauhau tree dwindled in
numbers, and the toromiro tree, a source of a good, useful,
hard wood, finally became extinct just after Heyerdahl’s
mid-twentieth century visits.
©2009 James Teitelbaum