Two New Books Out On Easter Island - New York Review Of Books

[hatrack]

Twilight at Easter

Source: Copyright 2004, New York Review of Books
Date: March 16, 2004
Byline: Jared Diamond

The Enigmas of Easter Island
by John Flenley and Paul Bahn
Oxford University Press, 256 pp., $28.00

Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island
by Jo Anne Van Tilburg
Scribner, 351 pp., $27.00

EDIT

"From Flenley and Bahn's and from Van Tilburg's accounts, it becomes clear how both Heyerdahl and von Däniken brushed aside overwhelming evidence that the Easter Islanders were indeed typical Polynesians, speaking a Polynesian language and making stone tools in the usual Polynesian styles. Around AD 900 they colonized Easter Island from Polynesian islands to the west and built up a population that peaked at around 15,000 people. At the time of the European arrival they were subsisting mainly as farmers, growing yams, taro, bananas, sugar cane, and sweet potatoes, as well as raising chickens, their sole domestic animal. While Easter Island was divided into about eleven territories, each belonging to one clan under its own chief and competing with other clans, the island was also loosely integrated religiously, economically, and politically under the leadership of one paramount chief. On other Polynesian islands, competition between chiefs for prestige could take the form of inter-island efforts such as trading and raiding, but Easter's extreme isolation from other islands precluded that possibility. Instead, the excellent quality of Rano Raraku volcanic stone for carving eventually resulted in chiefs competing by erecting statues representing their high-ranking ancestors on rectangular stone platforms (termed ahu)."

EDIT

The ahu-building period seems to have begun around AD 1000 or 1100, within a few centuries of the island's settlement. An increase in statue size with time suggests competition between rival chiefs commissioning statues to outdo each other. (In case that strikes you as weird, try imagining what a dispassionate observer would say about the increasingly lavish cars, mansions, and jewelry by which modern American "chiefs" compete.) The strong possibility of such competition also seems evident from an apparently late feature called a pukao: a cylinder of red volcanic stone, weighing up to twelve tons, mounted as a separate piece to rest on top of a statue's flat head, and possibly representing a chief's headdress or hat of red feathers. (See photograph on the cover.) All pukao are from a single quarry, Puna Pao, where (just as with the statues themselves in Rano Raraku quarry) I saw unfinished pukao, plus finished ones awaiting transport. We know of only about sixty pukao, reserved for statues on the biggest and richest ahu. I cannot resist the thought that they were produced as a show of one-upmanship. They seem to proclaim: "All right, so you can erect a statue 32 feet high, but look at me: I can lift this 12-ton pukao on top of my statue; you try to top that, you wimp!"

EDIT

Botanical surveys of plants living on Easter Island within the twentieth century have identified only forty-eight native species, even the biggest of them hardly worthy of being called a tree (just seven feet tall), and the rest of them low ferns, grasses, sedges, and shrubs. However, beginning especially with John Flenley's and Sarah King's studies in 1984, several methods for recovering and identifying pollen and wood charcoal from vanished plants have shown that, long before human arrival and still during the early days of human settlement, Easter was not a barren wasteland but supported a subtropical tall forest. As Flenley and his colleagues recognized, the most interesting of those extinct trees was what used to be the world's largest palm tree, related to but dwarfing the largest existing palm, the Chilean wine palm, which grows up to 65 feet tall and 3 feet in diameter. Chileans prize their palm today for several reasons, and Easter Islanders would have done so as well. As the name implies, the trunk yields a sweet sap that can be fermented to make wine or boiled down to make honey or sugar. The nuts' oily kernels are a delicacy. The fronds are ideal for fabricating into house thatching, baskets, mats, and boat sails. And of course the stout trunks would have served to transport and erect statues, and to make rafts.

EDIT

The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields. Raw materials lost or else available only in greatly decreased amounts consisted of everything made from native plants and birds, including wood, rope, bark to manufacture bark cloth, and feathers. Lack of large timber and rope brought an end to the transport and erection of statues, stopped the construction of seagoing canoes, and left people without wood for fires to keep themselves warm during Easter's winter nights of wind and driving rain at a temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, after 1650 the islanders were reduced to burning herbs, grasses, and crop wastes for fuel. There would have been fierce competition for the remaining woody shrubs, among people trying to obtain thatching and small pieces of wood for houses, implements, and bark cloth. Most sources of wild food were lost. Without seagoing canoes, the bones of porpoises, tuna, and pelagic fish vanished from middens by 1500. The numbers of fishhooks and fish bones in general also declined, leaving mainly just fish species that could be caught in shallow water or from the shore. Land birds and wild fruits vanished from the list, sea birds were reduced to relict populations, and the shellfish consumed became fewer and smaller. The only wild food source whose availability remained unchanged was rats."

EDIT

http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=30194

Long, fascinating article.

[Pale Blue Dot]

1. Really interesting article

A good cautionary tale as well.

[NNadir]

2. There was an excellent Nova on this some years ago.

At the conclusion the camera panned from a view of Easter Island from earth, finally encompassing the Earth as a whole.

It was one of the most moving and telling shots I saw in the series. This is very much a microcosm of what is being done right now to the planet as a whole.