Rapa Nui

Origins and History

People arrived on Rapa Nui from Polynesia in 300–800 CE. It's a very isolated island, but the Polynesians were phenomenal open-water navigators. The people who settled here established a tradition of carving mo'ai, large statues depicting deified ancestors. The mo'ai are today's common image of the island and its culture.

At some point in the late 1700s and early 1800s, everyone had long since adopted the Bird-Man cult and the mo'ai were all toppled. They had been largely ignored for ages, why were they tipped over then? We don't know.

The first Europeans stumbled upon the island in 1722, bringing diseases and unwanted attention that led to slave raids from Peru, the nearly complete genocide of the Rapa Nui people, and the erasure of their culture during the 1860s to 1880s.

By 1877 the population had dropped to just 110 people. All Rapa Nui today are descended from just 36 people who lived through that population bottleneck and had children.

Chile took control in 1888 and things became a little less bad. But a change of Chile's government soon after led to the island being purchased and run by remote corporations. The Rapa Nui people were confined to the town in one corner of the island from 1895 until 1966. In the 2020s, when I visited, the Rapa Nui people were still struggling for control of their home.

Many researchers and writers have been deeply into hyperdiffusion theories, in which only people from northwestern Europe and Britain, along with lands described in the Bible, were intelligent — the rest of the world was populated by ignorant savages who needed help from superior beings. With the writing system destroyed in the 1860s, and with almost all elders killed off, oral history was heavily influenced by leading questions from foreigners including Thor Heyerdahl. "So when did the tall blond smart people originally from the Middle East arrive?", and so on. Much of the history remains unknown.

That's enough depressing history, let me jump to another page

Settlement

The local legends say that Hotu Matu'a was the first settler and the ariki mau or supreme chief of the island. He led a colonizing party from far to the west in Polynesia. Their homeland is referred to as Hiva or Hawaiki, the original home of the Polynesian people before they spread out across the widely scattered islands. Linguistic analysis suggests that this was in the Marquesas Islands, 3,800 km to the northwest.

They crossed that open water in two canoes, or one double-hulled canoe, piloted by the captain Tu'u ko Iho. They landed at Anakena beach, the only white coral sand beach on the island, and one of the few landing places sheltered from heavy waves and wind. They stayed there briefly, then divided the island (of about 164 km²) between clans descended from the sons of Hotu Matu'a.

The Polynesians arrived on Rapa Nui long ago. Analysis of linguistics, DNA, and ancient pollen indicate that they probably arrived at some time in 300–800 CE, probably having sailed some 3,700 kilometers from the Marquesas Islands.

We don't know just how far the Polynesians traveled, but archaeologists have found Polynesian middens and ovens on Enderby Island. That's the northern-most of the Auckland Islands group at 50°29.92' S 166°17.73' E, 465 km south of the South Island of New Zealand. The explorers arrived around 1250–1320 CE. Their earth ovens contained bones of seals and sea lions, fish, sea birds, and shells of mussels.

Phys.org overview Archaeology in Oceania paper

What are the Mo'ai?

The mo'ai, represent deified ancestors, typically male but some seem to represent females. They're large statues carved from volcanic tuff, volcanic ash compacted into stone. The people began carving mo'ai around 1200–1300 CE.

Each mo'ai is unique, representing one specific person within the mo'ai style of a much enlarged head, a heavy brow-line, elongated nose and ears, fish-hook-shaped nostrils, a thin pout, and a large chin. The style changed over time becoming taller with more elongated facial features.

They're often referred to as "heads" (see, I did it in the title of this page!), but that's because many of the pictures we outsiders see show mo'ai that have been partially buried by shifting soil. The mo'ai actually have torsos, although most are without legs.

Here's a completely visible mo'ai at the outdoor departure lounge at the airport. Notice the torso, arms, and hands!

Yes, there is a Unicode character for a mo'ai:
🗿 = 🗿

The mo'ai were thought to be repositories of spiritual power. Properly fashioned ritual objects in Polynesian religions were believed to be charged with a magical spiritual power called mana.

Rapa Nui mythology describes a symbiotic relationship between the living and the dead. The living made offerings which provided the dead with a better existence in the spirit world. In return, the dead provided good health, good fortune, and the fertility of the land and animals.

Most of the settlements were near the coastline. The mo'ai stood along the coastline with their backs to the spirit world in the sea, looking inland to watch over their descendants' settlements.

The mo'ai were installed on ahu, stone platforms that evolved from the traditional Polynesian marae, communal or sacred spaces. They are generally a cleared rectangular area bordered with stones. On Rapa Nui, an ahu had a central stone platform, and one or more mo'ai were often erected there. Some 350 ahu locations are known on Rapa Nui. Most marae and ahu were destroyed or abandoned when Christianity arrived in the 19th century, but the locations remain tapu or sacred. There were other changes in the late 19th century, as Tahitian further influenced the Rapa Nui language and Ure, the old Rapa Nui word for "penis", was dropped from many people's names.

After the Mo'ai, the Bird-Man

Mo'ai construction ended around 1550 CE after inter-clan warfare had broken out over dwindling natural resources.

At some point the Tangata Manu or Bird-Man cult arose, with Make-make as its primary deity. There are parallels to widespread Polynesian beliefs. It was still believed that the ancestors provided for their descendants, but now the ritual for the living to contact the dead shifted from statues to a competition.

Bird-Man cult figures at the outdoor departure lounge at the airport.

Priests, who could be either men or women, revealed the identities of the competing sponsors, high-ranking men. Each sponsor would appoint one or possibly two active contestants, adult men of lesser status.

The contestants would swim to the Moto Nui islet close to the coast below the Rano Kau extinct volcano at the southwestern end of the island. They would carry provisions in reed bundles, waiting for the return of the first sooty terns. Meanwhile, their sponsors would wait at a village on the volcano's rim.

When the first contestant collected an egg, he called to the shore telling his sponsor to go shave his head and paint it red or white. The unsuccessful contestants would swim back while the egg-finder stayed on the islet and fasted. Then he would swim back with the egg in a reed basket tied to his forehead, climb the 300-meter cliff, and give the egg to his sponsor.

That sponsor would be declared the new Tangata Manu, entitled to tributes of food and other gifts, and his clan would now have the sole rights to collect that season's eggs and fledglings from the islet.

Many contestants died along the way by drowning, being eaten by sharks, or falling from the cliff.

The Ongoing Nightmare of European Contacts and Control

A Dutch explorer was the first European to find the island. His ship arrived on 5 April 1722, Easter Sunday, so he called the island Paasch-Eyland, 18th century Dutch for "Easter Island". During the first encounter there was a nervous misunderstanding, and the Dutch opened fire and killed about a dozen of the Rapa Nui including the tumu ivi 'atua, a bearer of the island's culture, history, and genealogy. That foreshadowed much of Rapa Nui's future encounters with Europeans.

A pair of Spanish ships arrived in 1770, followed by the British explorer James Cook in 1774. None of these visits lasted longer than a few days, and the Europeans did not venture inland. But the island began to appear on maps, and whaling ships began visiting to obtain fresh water and food.

Slave capture raids from Peru began in December, 1862. Violent abductions continued for a few months, killing or capturing about half the island's population including the top chief, his heir, and all the holders of knowledge about the island's history and culture. The captives were taken to Peru and forced to work in the mines. Many died quickly from hazardous conditions, overwork, and European diseases to which they had no immunity.

By autumn of 1863 international outrage forced an end to Peruvian slave raids on Rapa Nui. Peru was able to round up a dozen Rapa Nui slaves who were still alive, and shipped them back to the island. However, they were infected with smallpox and that led to an epidemic on the island that killed many of those who had avoided enslavement.

Then European whalers brought tuberculosis to the island, which became an epidemic through the mid 1860s and killed a quarter of the remaining population.

The French adventurer Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier had been arrested for arms trafficking in Peru and sentenced to death, then was released through the influence of the French consul. He arrived on Rapa Nui in 1868 and "purchased" most of the island in a transaction that the Rapa Nui people did not understand. To own land, and to buy and sell it? Those were completely alien concepts. He and the missionaries had a falling out, and the missionaries evacuated all but 171 Rapa Nui, most of them elderly men, to the Gambier Islands of French Polynesia. Dutrou-Bornier was killed in 1876 in an argument supposedly over a dress, although his continued kidnapping of adolescent girls probably was a factor.

In 1877 the population had dropped to just 110 people. All Rapa Nui today are descended from just 36 people who lived through that population bottleneck and had children. I thought that I might see people on crutches, wearing thick glasses, and showing signs of who knows what other unfortunate results of recessive genes. Luckily, those 36 individuals seem to have been in pretty good shape, unlike the exclusively cousin-marrying royal family that has ruled most European countries.

The English merchant-adventurer Alexander Salmon Jr, son of an English merchant-adventurer, then arrived from Tahiti and he purchased the entire island outside the mission compound in 1878. The Rapa Nui couldn't fish, as most trees were gone so they had no boats. And they couldn't farm, because Salmon owned all the land. So, they had to work for Salmon to earn money to buy food, or starve.

Herman Melville described Alexander Salmon Sr. this way: "This adventurer rose late, dressed theatrically in calico and trinkets, assumed a dictatorial tone in conversation, and was evidently on excellent terms with himself." Junior behaved similarly.

Chile took control of the island in 1888, intending to end cruel outside control. But in 1891 there was a civil war and change of government in Chile, and that ended Chile's colonization plan for the island. By 1892 a census found only 101 Rapa Nui people living on the island, 12 of whom were adult men. In 1895, Enrique Merlet's aptly named Easter Island Exploitation Company obtained control of the island. Merlot's company enforced prohibitions on living and farming outside the settlement of Haŋa Roa, forcing the islanders to work for his company.

In 1903 the English sheep-farming company Williamson-Balfour bought the island and turned it into one enormous sheep ranch. And, they continued the restrictions under which the islanders had to live within the town and work for the company.

Williamson-Balfour remained in control of the entire island outside the town until 1953, when control of the island went to the Chilean Navy.

The airport was built in 1965. Until then, access by air was limited to long-distance seaplane flights from the coast of Chile.

In 1966 Chile opened the island outside of the town, and the Rapa Nui people were granted Chilean citizenship. The people were finally able to re-enter their island after being confined to the town for 71 years. Most of the island was covered with grassland and had suffered a great deal of erosion after having been used to graze thousands of sheep for almost a century.

NASA operated a tracking station on Rapa Nui in 1965–1975.

Commercial flights between Rapa Nui and Santiago began in 1967.

After the US-backed Chilean coup d'état that put Augusto Pinochet in power in 1973, Rapa Nui was placed under martial law. Chile remained a military dictatorship until 1990.

Rongorongo

Rongorongo, or Roŋoroŋo in the Rapa Nui language, is an undeciphered set of glyphs. Only 25 wooden objects bearing Rongorongo are known to exist, most of them small tablets. Many are heavily damaged, many are in private collections, and none are on Rapa Nui. The writing had ceased and most tablets were lost or destroyed in the 1860s.

The glyphs are human, animal, vegetable, and geometric shapes. Nearly all with heads are depicted head-up or looking to the right, in what seems to be the direction of reading. They were incised in the wood with small obsidian flakes or small shark teeth. Researchers have catalogued roughly 120 unique glyphs, many of which can be combined with a second glyph.

A row of Rongorongo glyphs around the roofline of a building next to the tourist information center in Hoŋa Roa.

The twenty-five objects each bear from 2 to 2,320 simple glyphs or components of compound glyphs, making a total of over 15,000 glyphs in all. Of those twenty-five objects, about half are universally accepted by researchers as bearing authentic Rongorongo inscriptions made by literate scribes. The others may be later copies created by scribes who did not understand what they were copying. Academic debates continue as to which of those are truly authentic.

Only a small elite was ever literate, and the tablets were sacred, tapu or tabu, and kept hidden away. The modern name Roŋoroŋo means "to recite, to chant out." The original name seems to have been kōhau motu mo roŋoroŋo, "lines incised for chanting out". They seem to have been mnemonic devices for reciting a litany, and not historical records.

At least we have that corpus, and some knowledge of the Rapi Nui language before European contact (current Rapa Nui being heavily influenced by Tahitian). The Rongorongo script seems to have been created on Rapa Nui, and not brought from elsewhere in Polynesia.

Our limited understanding isn't as hopeless as it is for the Phaistos Disc, a single object with 241 glyphs from a set of 45, made by a people who spoke a local variant of whatever was spoken on Crete before the Mycenaean Greeks arrived. However, decipherment of Rongorongo is still pretty hopeless. There is some calendrical content, and some that may be either genealogy or records of who killed and replaced who through a series of three or four rulers.

The Peruvian slaving raids of 1862–1863 had put an end to creating and reading Rongorongo. A French lay missionary landed on the island in 1864 and later wrote an account of his nine months on the island, during which he saw wooden objects covered with Rongorongo "in every hut", although the islanders had little interest in them. He left the island in extremely poor health, was ordained as a priest, returned to the island, and died there of tuberculosis within two years. During that final time on the island he wrote that account.

In 1868 the Bishop of Tahiti received a gift from the recent Roman Catholic converts of the island, partially made from a small wooden tablet bearing a Rongorongo inscription. The Bishop wrote to the priest on the island, instructing him to collect all the tablets and find natives who could translate them. But the priest found only a few tablets, and the remaining islanders who had survived the slave raids and following epidemics could not read them. The surviving son of a wise man said that there was no one left who could read the tablets, and so "the pieces of wood were no longer of interest to the natives who burned them as firewood or wound their fishing lines around them."

There had been very little wood during the last century of Rongorongo creation, so driftwood and objects such as oars discarded or lost by European visitors were used for the tablets.

After the ability to read and create Rongorongo was lost, there was a period of Rapa Nui people copying, often roughly, the old glyphs. Some of that could have been done as an incompletely understood devotional act, but much was to create items for trade. And then that seems to have been followed by people creating vaguely Rongorongo-ish artifacts into the early 20th century purely to better sell wood carvings to outsiders.

The British archaeologist and anthropologist Katherine Routledge undertook the first real scientific expedition to Rapa Nui in 1914–1915. She found two elderly men who allegedly had some knowledge of Rongorongo. However the two contradicted each other. My guide for an all-day tour told me that her great-great-grandfather had been summoned early one morning to translate between Tomenika, one of the two men, and Routledge. Tomenika was delirious all morning and then died of leprosy at mid-day.

Routledge's notes and her popular book of 1919 were largely overlooked by other researchers, who relied on oral history that had been strongly influenced by published accounts. Misinterpretations and wild assumptions were flowing back into the local culture.

Thor Heyerdahl and Other Nonsense

Yes, the Kon-Tiki guy. Between the World Wars, Thor Heyerdahl studied zoology and geography at the University of Oslo, and privately studied Polynesian culture and history from an Oslo wine merchant's collection of books, the world's largest on the topic at the time.

He and his newlywed wife left for a year of field study in the South Pacific in 1936.

To his credit, after Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Norway starting in April 1940, Heyerdahl served with the Free Norwegian Forces in the far northern province of Finnmark starting in 1944. And he was an early innovator and advocate of experimental archaeology. However...

After the end of World War II, Heyerdahl further expanded his Aryan Atlantean theory. "Of course", he said, "the Pacific islands must have been settled by tall, bearded, red and blond haired sun-worshipping people, because only they could have possibly navigated the open ocean." Or, carved stone, built houses, caught fish, and so on. By then, Lemuria and Mu had fallen from favor in the views of all but the fringiest crackpots.

Heyerdahl's theories claimed that the tall blond settlers of Polynesia had started out in the Middle East (lots of blond-haired people in that area...) and had initially crossed the Atlantic to found the great civilizations of Mesoamerica and then become the ruling class of the Inca Empire. Only then did they continue west by balsa rafts to spread their knowledge into Polynesia.

To support his theories, he built a balsa raft, the Kon-Tiki, and drifted west for 101 days from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in 1947.

Later he built two more rafts, the Ra and Ra II, from Ethiopian papyrus reeds and with sails. He and his crew attempted to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Morocco. The second one managed to reach Barbados.

Scientists across many domains had already rejected these types of outlandish "hyperdiffusion" theories, and his boat journeys changed no reputable scientists' minds.

Over the last two decades of his life, Hereydahl searched for evidence that Odin was from today's Azerbaijan. He had concluded that it must be true and then set out to find evidence, reversing how one is supposed to do science.

Jared Diamond has done a lot of field work in Papua New Guinea, so he tends to see cannibals wherever he looks. He interpreted the existing records of Rapa Nui oral traditions, which many researchers strongly doubt are truthful, as showing that the recent and current islanders are obsessed with cannibalism, and that the cannibalism was part of their society's collapse.

Cannibalism has been widespread across Polynesian cultures. However, on Rapa Nui, the only human bones found in earth ovens have been behind the ahu, the religious platforms, indicating that it was only a limited ritualistic practice. And, recent studies of bones show that only a very small percentage of human bones show signs of damage that would result from the supposed widespread violence, and outside the ritual earth oven locations, none have shown signs of butchering.

Diamond's first widely popular science book was Guns, Germs, and Steel, in 1998, describing how technology and immunology led to Eurasians displacing or killing off the indigenous people of Africa, the Americas, and Australia. Collapse, from 2011, is his follow-up with the theory of a pre-European-contact population boom and collapse on Rapa Nui, complete with warfare and widespread cannibalism that simply isn't supported by research in 2024.

Amazon 0393354326

Amazon 0143117009

Routledge's 1914 study recorded that the indigenous population strongly rejected any suggestions that they or their ancestors had practiced cannibalism. But, she was a woman, and she didn't write about the lurid theories, and so her work was largely disregarded for several decades.

Science Explains Things

More recent science is gradually debunking the pseudo-scientific myths. Many people point to the sweet potato, domesticated in South America and raised on Rapa Nui, as supposed proof of wise people originally from Europe and the Middle East transporting it to the backward Polynesians. But recent studies of plant genetics show that Polynesians reached the Pacific shore of the Americas, picked up locally domesticated sweet potatos along with another dozen food plants, and took them back home across the Pacific.

Similarly, Europeans assumed that Europeans brought the first chickens to the Americas. No, they brought more chickens, of different varieties. But chickens were already in the Americas because Polynesians brought them there centuries before any Europeans arrived.

Another common claim has to do with the bulrush reeds growing in the crater lakes. Those reeds are also found in South America, so proponents of hyperdiffusion say that they're evidence of superior outsiders having arrived from South America. However, pollen analysis of lake sediment layers show that those reeds have been growing on the island for over 30,000 years.

As for claims of inter-clan warfare causing a population crash, studies of bones show fairly low occurance of severe injuries, no higher during the purported times of warfare than at other times.

Some further studies of genetics, anthropology, and archaeology were published shortly before I started my trip to Rapa Nui. They show that there wasn't an "ecological suicide", that there was no pre-European-contact population collapse, and that the Rapa Nui and probably other Polynesians reached the west coast of the Americas, picking up crops and having sex with the locals, long before even the Norse knew that the Americas existed.

There was a slight decrease in the population immediately after the initial settlement, as they figured out the local environment. For example, the initial settlers would have brought tropical plants, but they had traveled significantly south to subtropical Rapa Nui. But once they got established, the population slowly but steadily grew until the Europeans arrived with all the diseases and slavery. There were never more than about 3,000 people living on Rapa Nui. Their agriculture was much more like gardens rather than farms.

"No 'collapse' for ancient people on Rapa Nui" — Science "Island-wide characterization of agricultural production challenges the demographic collapse hypothesis for Rapa Nui (Easter Island)" — Science Advances "Rapa Nui’s population history rewritten using ancient DNA" — Nature "Ancient Rapa Nui Genomes Reveal Resilience and Pre-European Contact With the Americas" — Nature

So there you have my result of trying to untangle the conflicting sources of information. Now on to pages you will likely find more interesting, each with lots more pictures:

Next❯ Observing the Annular Eclipse