Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (16 page)

former large population? Carving, transporting, and erecting statues would
have called for many specialized workers: how were they all fed, when the Easter Island seen by Roggeveen had no native land animals larger than insects, and no domestic animals except chickens? A complex society is also
implied by the scattered distribution of Easter's resources, with its stone
quarry near the eastern end, the best stone for making tools in the southwest,
the best beach for going out fishing in the northwest, and the best farmland in the south. Extracting and redistributing all of those products would have
required a system capable of integrating the island's economy: how could it
ever have arisen in that poor barren landscape, and what happened to it?

All those mysteries have spawned volumes of speculation for almost
three centuries. Many Europeans were incredulous that Polynesians, "mere
savages," could have created the statues or the beautifully constructed stone
platforms. The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, unwilling to attribute
such abilities to Polynesians spreading out of Asia across the western Pacific,
argued that Easter Island had instead been settled across the eastern Pacific by advanced societies of South American Indians, who in turn must have
received civilization across the Atlantic from more advanced societies of the
Old World. Heyerdahl's famous
Kon-Tiki
expedition and his other raft voy
ages aimed to prove the feasibility of such prehistoric transoceanic contacts,
and to support connections between ancient Egypt's pyramids, the giant
stone architecture of South America's Inca Empire, and Easter's giant stone
statues. My own interest in Easter was kindled over 40 years ago by reading
Heyerdahl's
Kon-Tiki
account and his romantic interpretation of Easter's history; I thought then that nothing could top that interpretation for excite
ment. Going further, the Swiss writer Erich von Daniken, a believer in vis
its to Earth by extraterrestrial astronauts, claimed that Easter's statues were the work of intelligent spacelings who owned ultramodern tools, became
stranded on Easter, and were finally rescued.

The explanation of these mysteries that has now emerged attributes
statue-carving to the stone picks and other tools demonstrably littering
Rano Raraku rather than to hypothetical space implements, and to Easter's
known Polynesian inhabitants rather than to Incas or Egyptians. This his
tory is as romantic and exciting as postulated visits by
Kon-Tiki
rafts or
extraterrestrials
—and much more relevant to events now going on in the
modern world. It is also a history well suited to leading off this series of
chapters on past societies, because it proves to be the closest approximation
that we have to an ecological disaster unfolding in complete isolation.

Easter is a triangular island consisting entirely of three volcanoes that arose
from the sea, in close proximity to each other, at different times within the last million or several million years, and that have been dormant
throughout the island's history of human occupation. The oldest volcano,
Poike, erupted about 600,000 years ago (perhaps as much as 3,000,000 years
ago) and now forms the triangle's southeast corner, while the subsequent
eruption of Rano Kau formed the southwest corner. Around 200,000 years
ago, the eruption of Terevaka, the youngest volcano centered near the triangle's north corner, released lavas now covering 95% of the island's surface.

Easter's area of 66 square miles and its elevation of 1,670 feet are both modest by Polynesian standards. The island's topography is mostly gentle,
without the deep valleys familiar to visitors to the Hawaiian Islands. Except
at the steep-sided craters and cinder cones, I found it possible almost any
where on Easter to walk safely in a straight line to anywhere else nearby,
whereas in Hawaii or the Marquesas such a walking path would have quickly taken me over a cliff.

The subtropical location at latitude 27 degrees south
—approximately as
far south of the equator as Miami and Taipei lie north of the equator—gives
Easter a mild climate, while its recent volcanic origins give it fertile soils. By
themselves, this combination of blessings should have endowed the island with the makings of a miniature paradise, free from the problems besetting much of the rest of the world. Nevertheless, Easter's geography did pose
several challenges to its human colonists. While a subtropical climate is
warm by the standards of European and North American winters, it is cool
by the standards of mostly tropical Polynesia. All other Polynesian-settled
islands except New Zealand, the Chathams, Norfolk, and Rapa lie closer to
the equator than does Easter. Hence some tropical crops that are important
elsewhere in Polynesia, such as coconuts (introduced to Easter only in modern times), grow poorly on Easter, and the surrounding ocean is too cold for
coral reefs that could rise to the surface and their associated fish and shellfish. As Barry Rolett and I found while tramping around on Teravaka and
Poike, Easter is a windy place, and that caused problems for ancient farmers
and still does today; the wind makes recently introduced breadfruits drop
before they are ripe. Easter's isolation meant, among other things, that it is
deficient not just in coral-reef fish but in fish generally, of which it has only
127 species compared to more than a thousand fish species on Fiji. All of
those geographic factors resulted in fewer food sources for Easter Islanders
than for most other Pacific Islanders.

The remaining problem associated with Easter's geography is its rainfall,

on the average only about 50 inches per year: seemingly abundant by the standards of Mediterranean Europe and Southern California, but low by Polynesian standards. Compounding the limitations imposed by that modest rainfall, the rain that does fall percolates quickly into Easter's porous volcanic soils. As a consequence, freshwater supplies are limited: just one intermittent stream on Mt. Teravaka's slopes, dry at the time of my visit; ponds or marshes at the bottoms of three volcanic craters; wells dug down where the water table is near the surface; and freshwater springs bubbling up on the ocean bottom just offshore or between the high-tide and low-tide lines. Nevertheless, Easter Islanders did succeed in getting enough water for drinking, cooking, and growing crops, but it took effort.

Both Heyerdahl and von Daniken brushed aside overwhelming evidence that the Easter Islanders were typical Polynesians derived from Asia rather than from the Americas, and that their culture (including even their statues) also grew out of Polynesian culture. Their language was Polynesian, as Captain Cook had already concluded during his brief visit to Easter in 1774, when a Tahitian man accompanying him was able to converse with the Easter Islanders. Specifically, they spoke an eastern Polynesian dialect related to Hawaiian and Marquesan, and most closely related to the dialect known as Early Mangarevan. Their fishhooks, stone adzes, harpoons, coral files, and other tools were typically Polynesian and especially resembled early Marquesan models. Many of their skulls exhibit a characteristically Polynesian feature known as a "rocker jaw." When DNA extracted from 12 skeletons found buried in Easter's stone platforms was analyzed, all 12 samples proved to exhibit a nine-base-pair deletion and three base substitutions present in most Polynesians. Two of those three base substitutions do not occur in Native Americans and thus argue against Heyerdahl's claim that Native Americans contributed to Easter's gene pool. Easter's crops were bananas, taro, sweet potato, sugarcane, and paper mulberry, typical Polynesian crops mostly of Southeast Asian origin. Easter's sole domestic animal, the chicken, was also typically Polynesian and ultimately Asian, as were even the rats that arrived as stowaways in the canoes of the first settlers.

The prehistoric Polynesian expansion was the most dramatic burst of overwater exploration in human prehistory. Until 1200
b.c.,
the spread of ancient humans from the Asian mainland through Indonesia's islands to Australia and New Guinea had advanced no farther into the Pacific than the Solomon Islands east of New Guinea. Around that time, a seafaring and farming people, apparently originating from the Bismarck Archipelago northeast of New Guinea, and producing ceramics known as Lapita-style

pottery, swept nearly a thousand miles across the open oceans east of the
Solomons to reach Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, and to become the ancestors of
the Polynesians. While Polynesians lacked compasses and writing and metal
tools, they were masters of navigational arts and of sailing canoe tech
nology. Abundant archaeological evidence at radiocarbon-dated sites
—
such as pottery and stone tools, remains of houses and temples, food debris,
and human skeletons—testifies to the approximate dates and routes of their expansion. By around
a.d.
1200, Polynesians had reached every habitable
scrap of land in the vast watery triangle of ocean whose apexes are Hawaii,
New Zealand, and Easter Island.

Historians used to assume that all those Polynesian islands were discovered and settled by chance, as a result of canoes full of fishermen happening
to get blown off course. It is now clear, however, that both the discoveries
and the settlements were meticulously planned. Contrary to what one
would expect for accidental drift voyages, much of Polynesia was settled in a
west-to-east direction opposite to that of the prevailing winds and currents,
which are from east to west. New islands could have been discovered by voy
agers sailing upwind on a predetermined bearing into the unknown, or
waiting for a temporary reversal of the prevailing winds. Transfers of many
species of crops and livestock, from taro to bananas and from pigs to dogs and chickens, prove beyond question that settlement was by well-prepared
colonists, carrying products of their homelands deemed essential to the sur
vival of the new colony.

The first expansion wave of Lapita potters ancestral to Polynesians
spread eastwards across the Pacific only as far as Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga,
which lie within just a few days' sail of each other. A much wider gap of
ocean separates those West Polynesian islands from the islands of East Poly
nesia: the Cooks, Societies, Marquesas, Australs, Tuamotus, Hawaii, New
Zealand, Pitcairn group, and Easter. Only after a "Long Pause" of about
1,500 years was that gap finally breached
—whether because of improve
ments in Polynesian canoes and navigation, changes in ocean currents,
emergence of stepping-stone islets due to a drop in sea level, or just one
lucky voyage. Some time around
a.d.
600-800 (the exact dates are debated),
the Cooks, Societies, and Marquesas, which are the East Polynesian islands
most accessible from West Polynesia, were colonized and became in turn
the sources of colonists for the remaining islands. With New Zealand's occupation around
a.d.
1200, across a huge water gap of at least 2,000 miles, the settlement of the Pacific's habitable islands was at last complete.

By what route was Easter itself, the Polynesian island farthest east,