http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stoneheads-easter-island-20120620,0,6247582.story
Easter Island has stone heads, but little else. What happened? [Updated June 21]
Stone head.
Volunteers "walk" an imitation stone head on Easter Island to show how
the statues could have been moved. (Sheela Sharma)
By Thomas H. Maugh II
June 20, 2012, 11:20 a.m.
Most everyone is familiar with the enigmatic stone heads of Easter
Island, the massive carved rocks that sit on stone platforms on the
coast and lie scattered across the landscape.
The heads, called moai, and a small native population are virtually
all that is left of the Polynesian civilization that once flourished
on the island. The once-lush forests that covered the 63-square-mile
island, known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui, have all been lost and
the fertile soil that once supported a vital farming community has
been blown away by tradewinds.
Something else has been left behind: two great mysteries. How did the
islanders manage to transfer the massive heads, some weighing as much
as 80 tons, from the quarries to the shore, and what happened to the
forests? This month's National Geographic magazine examines the two
competing theories for each of those questions.
UCLA anthropologist Jared Diamond famously detailed what the called
the "ecocide" of Rapa Nui in his 2005 book "Collapse." When
Polynesians first settled the island about AD 800, they had the
misfortune to select one that was dry, cool and remote -- and thus
poorly fertilized by windblown dust or volcanic ash. They chopped down
forests to provide wood for construction and for moving the moai, and
the trees didn't return. The denuded landscape allowed winds to blow
off the topsoil, and fertility fell sharply. When the natives no
longer had wood for building fishing canoes, they killed and ate all
the birds. Before the Dutch arrived at the island on Easter Sunday in
1722, the population had descended into cannibalism and barbarity.
Diamond called it "the clearest example of a society that destroyed
itself by over-exploiting its own resources."
But archaeologists Carl Lipo of Cal State Long Beach and Terry Hunt of
the University of Hawaii have a different take on the events based on
more recent research. They agree that the island was an ecological
disaster, but argue that the inhabitants share a smaller portion of
the blame. Their research indicates that the Polynesian settlers did
not arrive at Rapa Nui until about AD 1200, which would not leave
nearly enough time to devastate the forests solely by slashing and
burning.
Unfortunately, the settlers brought Polynesian rats with them. The
first inhabitants dined on the rats, but the animals had no other
natural predators and overran the island. Buried nuts from the extinct
Easter Island palms show distinctive teethmarks from the rats. They
probably also ate birds' eggs. With the rats eating the palm nuts, the
trees could not be reseeded naturally, Lipo and Hunt argue in their
recent book, "The Statues That Walked," and the forests disappeared.
The stone for the moai came from a quarry at Rano Raraku, the island's
southeastern (extinct) volcano, several miles from the coast. Diamond
and others have argued that the inhabitants put the moai on wooden
sledges and dragged them to the shore on wooden rails -- an effort
that would have required both large amounts of labor and massive
quantities of wood. Last year, however, Hunt and Lipo showed that the
stones could be "walked" by as few as 18 people with ropes by tilting
them back and forth on their bases. That version jibes well with the
islanders' own mythology, which claims that the moai walked across the
island.
The island is now a part of Chile and its 5,000 inhabitants are vastly
outnumbered by the 50,000 tourists who visit each year. All food, fuel
and other necessities have to be flown or shipped in, and water
supplies are growing scarce. Residents worry about the future and how
long the economy can survive in its present condition. The past is
grim. The future might be grimmer.
A documentary about the island will appear on "Nova" in November.
[Updated June 21: A video is available here.]
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Twitter/@LATMaugh
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