How the Civilization on Easter Island Collapsed

Easter Island is a Chilean island located in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. If you know only one thing about Easter Island, it's that it has those giant stone heads all over the place. But you might not know that building those stone heads may have inadvertently destroyed the culture of the people who created them.

When the Polynesians first discovered Easter Island, the land was nothing short of a tropical paradise. Covered by a vast palm forest, the tiny island was inhabited by roughly 30 different species of birds. While most of the soil was too low in nutrients to be useful for agriculture, the island's coastal plains made it possible to grow crops such as yams, taros, and sweet potatoes. Over time, these people, known as the Rapa Nui, would grow into a complex society. And for reasons that remain unknown to this very day, that complex society would embark on one of the most unique building projects in the history of the world- the construction of the large stone sculptures known as moai.

The first Europeans visited the island under the direction of a Dutch explorer named Jacob Roggeveen. It was then that the name Easter Island was adopted, as he first happened upon the mysterious island on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722. Roggeveen reported seeing about 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants at the time of his visit. But by the mid-19th century, the population of the Island had nearly gone extinct.  It was sometime around 1200 CE that a small group of Polynesian farmers first settled on a tiny 63 square mile island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. At that point, the island is believed to have been covered with roughly 16 million trees.

According to one theory, these farmers practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. And as their population grew, they had to burn down more and more trees in the palm forest to make room for crops. Before too long, there were too many inhabitants and too few trees. This theory suggests a man-made ecological disaster that some believe is one of the clearest known examples of a society unintentionally destroying itself by over-exploiting its natural resources. Standing at an average height of 13 feet tall and weighing an average of 14 tons apiece, moving the moai around the island was no easy feat.

To accomplish the task, the islanders reportedly used wood from the palm forest to clear the paths that they needed. One theory state that after clearing the land for crops, they used the leftover logs to both move the huge stone sculptures and build their deep-sea fishing canoes. Whether this excessive use of resources really led to their starvation is still an open question. However, when Captain James Cook visited the island in 1774, he and his crew noted that the Rapa Nui were living in very poor conditions. According to Cook, the canoes were worn ragged and pieced together haphazardly. This would suggest they could no longer build new canoes, which supports the deforestation theory.

While the slash-and-burn agriculture theory has many supporters, not everyone agrees that it holds up to scrutiny. In fact, two anthropologists, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo from the University of Hawaii, have a completely different theory about the collapse of the Easter Island civilization. In their book, The Statues That Walked, they argue that despite the popularity of the agriculture theory, fossil hunters and paleobotanist haven't found any concrete evidence of slash-and-burn farming actually being used on Easter Island. While the anthropologists do acknowledge that the trees across the island seem to have died in large numbers, they believe the cause was actually an infestation of rats.

The rodents likely arrived on the island by stowing away with the Polynesians. Once there, they multiplied voraciously and decimated the environment, including the trees. Regardless of what the cause may have been, the effect of the rapid loss of trees on the island was clear, and it wasn't good. The topsoil began to slowly wash away each time it rained. And as the land eroded, the Rapa Nui found themselves struggling to find the space they needed to grow enough crops to feed everyone. Compounding the problem was that they were also quickly running out of the wood that they needed to build their canoes. This prevented them from taking drastic action, like relocating to another island when things got worse. While it's unclear if they blame the moai for their problems, the islanders are known to have vandalized them by poking out their eyes, toppling them over, and even decapitating them. 

For a long time, it was believed that Easter Island had once been inhabited by a large civilization. According to this theory, the combined effects of extreme deforestation, a rapidly expanding population, warfare, and famine eventually caused that civilization to collapse. By the time the Europeans arrived, the population of the island had already dwindled significantly to the few thousand reported by Roggeveen. As a result of this assumption, it was also believed that the inhabitants of Easter Island fought with one another over scarce resources, and eventually even resorted to cannibalism to survive. However, according to research published by the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this did not actually contribute to the civilization's downfall.

In February 2020, the Journal of Archaeological Science published a study that proposed the Rapa Nui people were still actively building new moai figures and maintaining existing ones up until at least 1750. If true, this would have the Rapa Nui long outliving any previously held beliefs about when their civilization was eradicated. In fact, the whole thing might be a case of circular reasoning. The statues weren't found in ruins until 1770. And because of the pre-existing mystery surrounding their supposed collapse, the degree to which the Rapa Nui people's cultural heritage was passed on may have been overlooked, or even ignored.

When foreigners first began visiting the Rapa Nui, the islanders were excited to learn about the strangers. They thought the travelers were strange, but they also appreciated the new source of clothing and goods from across the ocean. Unfortunately, many of those visitors didn't come with the best of intentions. Some even traveled to the island with the intent of making the Rapa Nui their slaves. These Peruvian raids first started in the 1960s, with Easter Island being a prime target due to its location. An estimated 2,000 Rapa Nui were captured during this period. And those who managed to survive the trip to Peru faced incredible hardships.

They battled disease and were dangerously overworked. As a result, nearly 90% died within a few years. When the Europeans first arrived on Easter Island, they brought more than clothing and goods with them. They also brought various diseases, including syphilis and smallpox. In fact, some scientists believe that the islanders were actually able to survive when the trees disappeared, but that the population suffered most dramatically when the Dutch and English came to Rapa Nui. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on average, 3 out of every 10 people who got smallpox died. Syphilis, while it's treatable today, people frequently died from it in the 18th century.

When British Explorer Captain James Cook arrived on Easter Island in 1774, he quickly spotted the Rapa Nui carrying lancets and spears with sharp pointed pieces of black glassy lava attached to the ends. At the time, it was assumed that the triangular tips, made from obsidian and known as mata'a, were used for warfare. However, when researchers analyzed the artifacts thought to be spear points, they determined that they were actually used as tools. Carl Lipo, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, believes that when you look at the shape of the so-called spear tips, they don't actually look like weapons at all, and probably wouldn't be very reliable for killing in combat situations. He also notes that the mata'a are found all across the island since they were used for all sorts of tasks, such as tattooing or plant processing. 

When food starts running out, people get desperate, and they'll try just about anything. Often, this desperation can lead to war and conflict. But sometimes, people can surprise you. When the Rapa Nui started running out of food, different factions started to form on the island. One group became known as the Birdman cult, and they turned to a new god for help-- Make-make. Through their efforts, the cult helped to rebuild the culture and population of Rapa Nui with crops such as sweet potatoes, again, beginning to flourish. Not only do scientists not agree on what caused the collapse of the Rapa Nui civilization, not everyone even agrees that there was really a collapse in the first place.

According to research conducted by Christopher M. Stevenson of Virginia Commonwealth University, saying that the Rapa Nui civilization collapsed may be both overstated and more than a little misleading. According to Stevenson, after examining whether the prehistoric population of Rapa Nui experienced a significant demographic collapse prior to European contact, he determined that while food production declined, it wasn't disastrous for people. In fact, Stevenson believes that the population of the island didn't decline due to starvation at all. Rather, he believes the disruption was ultimately the result of changing weather patterns. 

Another thing that modern researchers have been questioning is how big the Rapa Nui population really was to begin with. Archaeologist Carl Lipo and his colleagues who studied Easter Island for years don't believe that the 3,000 people that Captain Roggeveen met in 1722 were actually the remaining members of a once great civilization. According to Lipo, when Easter Island was discovered by Europeans, it was inconceivable that such a small group of people could create and move the enormous moai statues. But today, Lipo and other researchers believe it was entirely within the capabilities of a smaller sized population. Research shows that ancient people did, in fact, possess the special engineering knowledge and techniques that were necessary to construct and relocate the moai without large numbers of people.