A brief history of Rapa Nui
Trapped by the things on Easter Island
Easter Island is so named for its ‘discovery’ on Easter Sunday by Dutch explorers in 1722. It is known as Rapa Nui to its current inhabitants, as Isla de Pascua in Spanish, as L’île de Pâques in French, and as Te Pito Kura (translated as ‘The Navel of the World’) to its inhabitants’ ancestors (probably). Today, Easter Island is a fascinating ‘open museum’. Some of the island’s archaeological sites exist untouched, exactly as they were left during times of upheaval, and others have been restored to show how they would have looked in their former glory.
After a week exploring with two friendly and ultra-knowledgeable local guides, Uri and Matthias, amongst wonderfully few island visitors, one of the biggest surprises to me about the island was how much of its history is actually quite well understood now. That said, the coolest thing about the island is that there are remaining mysteries and discoveries that are still being made. For example, the number of moai that we know about (moai is the name for the familiar upper-body, stone-carved statues averaging around 4 metres in height) has risen from 800 to around 1,300 in the last few years alone!
Settling Rapa Nui and the first moai
Rapa Nui – a small, isolated, volcanic (now extinct) island in the middle of the Pacific – was first inhabited by seafaring Polynesian settlers coming from the west in the early A.D. centuries. In the next few hundred years, the population on the island grew, became isolated, and began to develop its own, unique culture. At some point, the tribes on the island began to carve and erect small statues, out of solidified lava with simple rock tools, in honour of deceased chiefs to watch over their descendants. These moai (loosely translated as ‘images’ or ‘portraits’) of their ancestors were thought to channel the ‘mana’ (the ethereal universe/life force) of the past chiefs to help the tribe grow and prosper.
The rise of the moai
What came next was a (slightly predictable) game of tribal one-upmanship, with different tribes competing to build bigger and bigger statues in honour of their ancestors. During the golden age of production (by the end over 1,000 moai were carved… the biggest, unfinished moai in the quarry, being 21m long!), natural resources (namely wood and food) on the small ~60 sq mile island started to dwindle. At some point, as evidenced by the physical differences displayed in the biggest and latest moai, it appears that increasingly ornate statues were ordered in order to honour living tribal leaders who were the ruling ‘long-ears’(so called because these ruling families choose to elongate their ear lobes). This is likely to have happened for two main reasons:
- The tribes reached a point where they had to compete for resources and a tribe’s moai came to demonstrate its leader’s strength and combined power to ward off other tribes seeking to pillage for resources
- The population had reached unsustainable levels (estimated to reach, at its peak, as many as 15,000) and the ruling class needed a way to control the masses or the ‘short-ears’ (so called because they didn’t elongate their ear lobes like the ruling class). I find this interesting to ponder… this is the real answer to the ‘mystery’ of these statues. This is why the situation reached such extremes… the ruling class, as it does again and again throughout human history, wanted to retain power. Unlike other civilisations, the ‘masses’ of Easter Island had no external enemies on which to wage a war, no organised religion in which to be indoctrinated, too few ‘tribal jobs’ by which to be occupied (e.g. only so many people can go fishing or farm or collect water on such a small island), no new land to explore and expand to… With this in mind, one begin’s to view the biggest and best moai in a new light — like the pyramids, they are the result of oppressive, mass slave labour and cost countless lives. Viewing them in this light is sobering and incredibly sad.
One unusual thing worth mentioning is that the fighting tribes’ moai-carvers all had to use the same quarry. It’s assumed the ground was deemed sacred or otherwise off limits to fighting.
It was during this period that the island was first discovered by Europeans. This is thought to have had a profound impact on the outlook of the Rapa Nui people… and it’s easy to imagine why since by this stage they had been isolated as a people for hundreds of years. Those first European explorers must also have been awed by this tropical island with these extraordinary statues — statues which they assumed the primitive people weren’t actually capable of producing and erecting. Like Stonehenge in England, there are now various theorised and demonstrated methods by which they must have moved and erected the statues.
The fall of the moai
Eventually, everything came to a head. The shit hit the fan, so to speak. The short-ears, rebelled, ceased moai carving and overthrew and ultimately killed the ruling long-ears (and in some cases ate them since there’s evidence of cannibalism, presumably partly driven by the desperate food situation). It’s not completely clear how the uprising unfolded… there might have been a successful revolution in one tribe followed by a domino effect or there might have been an all out civil war. The end result was that every single moai on the island was symbolically toppled over, and this is the state in which most of them (those which haven’t been restored) can still be found today. And the ruling class were removed. We know when the uprising and war played out fairly accurately because when the Dutch first visited statues were still standing and subsequent visits by Europeans recounted fallen statues until a visit later confirmed that none were left standing.
The Birdman Contest
This is when Easter Island gets weird for a bit (and we’ve only just got past the giant lava people carvings and cannibalistic civil war…). In the wake of a full scale revolution and no rulers, the only hierarchy left was a military one. Somehow an annual competition emerged, steeped in the symbolism of rebirth and fertility, in which a young, trained challenger from each tribe would have to climb down from the island’s picturesque extinct volcano crater and swim to the largest ‘motu’ (rock islet) (avoiding sharks) where their task was to be the first to find an egg laid by the annually migrating frigate birds. The first to find the egg would shout back to the island and sort of become the winner but they’d still have to be first to return and present it intact to their tribe’s leader… and then their tribe’s leader would become the island’s Birdman. His eyebrows and hair would be shaved and there’d be a big procession down the hill and he’d be put up in one of two places (depending on which side of the island he came from) for one whole year, where he’d only be in contact with and fed by just one servant, and not allowed to cut his fingernails or hair, with the aim of regaining ‘mana’ for the island in a sort of spiritual atonement for the collapsed civilisation of their elders. In practical terms the winning tribe would have bragging and bullying rights for the year and be entitled to more control over the island’s minimal resources. Erm… OK. During this period, the islanders also developed their unique written language, ‘Rongorongo’, which remains one of the genuine mysteries of Easter Island because today linguists are still unable to decipher it. This strange tradition was uprooted after 150 years with the arrival of European missionaries in the 19th Century who sort to destroy the ‘false gods’ associated with the competition.
Modern Easter Island
Unfortunately, Easter Island’s tumultuous times were not over. At the end of the 19th Century, Peru raided Easter Island and kidnapped 1,500 inhabitants as slaves. After international outcry, Peru returned the by-that-time-100-or-so surviving slaves but, to add insult to injury, they also delivered smallpox which decimated the remaining Rapa Nui people down to as few as 111 inhabitants. Chile then took sovereignty of the island but leased ownership to a sheep farming company. Sadly, the company abused both the residents and its power over the island and effectively imprisoned the few inhabitants in Hanga Roa, the island’s only town, and limited their rights. After World War II, the company’s profits tanked and Chile finally took responsibility for the island. It’s mind-boggling to think how recent this is and to imagine this being the upbringing of the eldest inhabitants still alive on the island today.
The last few decades, with affordable global air travel and the emergence of the tourism industry, are finally bringing some ‘good to de island’ (in the words of our guide Matthias). Development and immigration need to be handled carefully and sustainably but things are definitely looking up. There’s a nice conclusion in a guide book we picked up, The Companion Guide to Easter Island, (which I strongly recommend for anyone visiting… it’s a great guidebook for visitors and it contains some wonderful anecdotes — like the time every inhabitant with a car was asked to light up the runway at night for an inbound plane when the airport backup generator failed in the 90s!). The conclusion: the author, James, recalls that the original goal in building the moai statues was to generate prosperity, wealth, and growth for the Rapa Nui people… this is precisely what the statues are finally bringing to the inhabitants today. I have to assume the ancestors didn’t expect it to take a few hundred years to actually pay off though!
