Se ~ EASTER’S END IN JUST A FEW CENTURIES, THE PEOPLE OF mong the most riveting teries of human history are those posed by vanished civiliza- tions. Everyone who has seen the abandoned buildings of the ‘Khmer, the Maya, or the Anasazi is immediately moved to ask the same question: Why did the societies chaterected chose DROVE THEIR PLANTS AND ANIMALS TO srrucures dsappea? ‘Their vanishing touches us as the disappearance of other an- eacielaa ees ce Re eecNomamer how emicthore EXTINCTION, AND SAW THEIR COMPLEX is to say we won't succumb to the same fare? Perhaps someday New Yorks skyscrapers will seand derelict and overgrown with ‘vegetation, like the temples at Angicor Wat and Tikal. peaeeed pp i red Gilastions thatof the former SOCIETY SPIRAL INTO CHAOS AND CANNIBALISM. Polynesian sociery on Easter Island remains unsurpassed in mystery and isolation. The myscery stems especially from the island's gigantic stone statues and its impoverished landscape, ? torts eebanced yon uations ee ee anSP®, ARE WE ABOUT TO FOLLOW THEIR LEAD? involved: Polynesians represent for us the ultimate in exotic ‘romance, the background for many a child's, and an adults, vi- sion of paradise. My own interest in Easter was kindled over 30 years ago when I read Thor Heyerdahl’s fabulous accounts of his Kon-Tiki voyage. ‘But my interest has been revived recently by a much more exciting account, one not of heroic voyages but of painstaking research and analysis. My friend David Steadman, a paleon- ‘login, ‘has been working wih a numberof other re a ee Os athe phoea ce ‘our the first systematic ex- cavavons on Ear incended dena he amas and plans that once lived there. Their work is contributing to a new in- ‘terpretation of the island’s history that makes it a tale not only ‘of wonder but of warning as well. Easter Island, with an area of only 64 square miles, is the world’s most isolated scrap of habitable land. Ic lies in the Pacif- ic Ocean more than 2,000 miles west of the nearest continent | EASTER ISLAND WIPED OUT THEIR FOREST, ANRAMS LACACNINA n avoust is iJ ovscover |(South America), 1,400 miles from even the nearest habitable stand (Pitcairn, Iss subtropical location and latitude—at 27 degrees south, its approximarely as far below the equator as Houston is north of ithelp give ica rather mild climate, while its volcanic origins make ssl fer- tle. In theory, this combination ofbess- ings should have made Easter 3 minia- ture paradise, remote from problems that beset the rest ofthe world. ‘The island derives its name from its “discovery” by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, on Easter (April §) in 1722. Roggeveen’ frst impression was not of 4 paradise but of a wasteland: “We orig- When Europeans. ar than insects—not inally, from a further distance, have considered the said Easter Island as sandy, the reason for thats this, chat we counted as sand the withered grass, hay, or other scorched and burnt vegeration, because its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of singular poverty and barrenness.” The island Roggeveen saw was a grassland without single wee or bush cover ten feet high. Modem boranists have identfled only $7 species of higher plans native to Easter, most of them grasses, sedges, and fers. The lis includes just ‘wo species of small trees and evo of woody shrubs. With such flora, the is- landers Roggeveen encountered had no source of real firewood to warm them- selves during Easter’s cool, wee, windy winters. Their native animals included nothing larger than insects, not ever a single species of native bat, land bird, land snail, or lizard, For domestic ani mals, they had only chickens European visitors throughout the cighteenth and early nineteenth centuries estimated Easter’s human population at shout 2,000, a modest number consider- ing the island's fereity. As Captain James (Cook recognized during his brief visi in 1774, the islanders were Polynesians (a ‘Tahitian man accompanying Cook was able to converse with them). Yer despite the Polynesians’ well-deserved fame asa great seafaring people, the Easter Is- landers who came our to Roggeveen’s and Cook’ ships did so by swimming oF paddling canoes that Roggeveen de- seribed as “bad and fai.” Their erafy he wrote, were “put together with manifold small planks and light inner timbers, which they cleverly stitched together with very fine twisted threads... Bue as they lack the knowledge and particularly the materials for caulking and making tight the great number of seams of the ‘canoes, chese are accordingly very leaky, for which reason they are compelled to spend half the time in bailing.” The ca- ‘oes, only ten feet long held at most ewo people, and only three or four canoes were observed on che ene island. With such flimsy craft, Polynesians could never have colonized Easter from ven the nearest island, nor could they have mrveled far ofshore wo fish. The is- a single species of bat, Land an landers Roggeveen met were toally iso- lated, unaware that other people existed. Investigators in all the years since his visit. have discovered no wace of the islanders? having any ouside contacts: nota single Easter Island rock or product has turned up elsewhere, nor has anything been found on the island chat could have been ‘brought by anyone other than the origi- nal setters or the Europeans. Yer the people living on Easter claimed memo- ries of visiting the uninhabited Sala y Gomes reef 260 miles away, far beyond she range of the leaky canoes seen by Roggeveen. How did the islanders’ an- ‘estors reach that reef from Easter, of reach Easter from anywhere else? Easeer Island's most famous feature is its huge stone seaues, more than 200 of ‘hich once stood on massive stone plae- forms lining the coast. Atleast 700 more, in all stages of completion, were aban- ddoned in quarries or on ancient roads be- ‘ween the quarries and the coast, a if the carvers and moving crews had thrown down their tools and walked off the job. ‘Mose of the erected stares were carved in a single quarry and then somehow ‘wansported as far as six miles—despice heights as great a 33 feecand weights up to 82 tons. The abandoned statues, meanwhile, were as much as 65 feet rll and weighed up to 270 tons. The stone platforms were equally gigantic: up to 500 feet long and 10 feer high, with fuc- ing slabs weighing up to 10 tons. Roggeveen himself quickly recog nized the problem the statues posed: "The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment.” he wrote, 2 2. “beeause we could not comprehend how icwas possible chat these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber for making any machines, as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images.” Roggeveen might have added thatthe islanders had no wheels, no draft atimals, and no source of power except their own muscles. How did they trans- Port che giant starues for miles, even be- fore erecting them? To deepen the mys- tery, the seatues were still standing in 1770, but by 1864 all of them had been palled down, bythe islanders themselves. ‘Why then did they carve them inthe fst place? And why did they stop? ed, the native animals included nothing larger or lizard. ‘The statues imply a sociery very dif ferent from the one Roggeveen saw in 1722. Their sheer number and size sug- i854 population much larger than 2,000 people. What became of everyone? Fur- thermore, that society must have been highly organized. Easter’ resources were scanered across the island: the best seone for che statues was quarried at Rano Rarakas near Easter's norcheast end; red stone, used for large crowns adorning some ofthe seamues, was quaried at Puna ‘Pau, inland in the southwest; sone carv- ing tools came mostly from Avoi in the northwest. Meanwhile the best farmland lay in the south apd east, and the best fishing grounds on the north and west coasts. Excracting and rediseribusing all ‘those goods required complex political ‘organization. What happened to that or- ganization, and how could it ever have arisen in such a barren landscape? Eamer Island’ mysteries have spavmed ‘volumes of speculation for more than two and a half centuries. Many Europeans ‘were incredulous that Polymesians—com- ‘monly characterized as “mere savages" — ‘could have created the statues or thé ‘beautifully constructed stone platforms. In the 1950s, Heyerdahl argued that Polynesia must have been setded by ad- vanced societies of American Indians, who in rurn must have received civilization across the Adantic from more advanced societies of che Old World. Heyerdahl’s raft voyages aimed to prove the feasibil- iy of such prehistoric wransoceanic con~ ‘acs In the 1960s the Swiss writer Erich von Diniken, an ardent believer in Earth Visits by extraterrestrial astronauts, wentclaiming cha: Esc sues were the work of incligene beings who owned ultamoder tools, became stranded on, Eascer, and were finally rescued. Heyerdahl and Von Diniken both brushed aside overwhelming evidence that che Easter Islanders were typical Polynesians derived from Asia rather than from the Americas and that cheir culture (including their satues) grew out of Polynesian culeure. Their language was Polynesian, as Cook had already con. cluded. Specifically, chey spoke an ease em Polynesian dialect celated to Hawai. ian and Marquesan, a dialect isolated since about 4.0. 400, as estimated from slight differences in vocabulary. Their Sshhooks and stone adzes resembled carly Marquesan models, Last year ONA entaceed ffom 12 Easter Iland skeletons as also shown to be Polynesian. The i landers grew bananas, caro, sweet poo toes, sugarcane, and paper mulberry— gypical Polynesian crops, mostly of Southease Asian origin. Their sole do- ‘mestc animal, the chicken, was also eyp- ‘cally Polynesian and ultimately Asian, as the rats that arrived as stowaways in the canoes of the first serdlers. HAT HAPPI to those settlers? ‘The fanciful the- ories of che past must give way eo evidence gathered by hardworking practitioners in three fields: archeology, pollen analysis, and paleontology. Modern archeological excavations on Easter have continued since Heyerdahl’s 1955 expedition. The earliest radiocar- 23 bon dates associated with human accivi- des are around 4. 400 t0 700, in rea. sonable agreement with the approximave settlement date of 400 estimated by lin. sguist. The period of save constriction eaked around 1200 eo 1500, wich few if any statues erected thereafter. Densities of archeological sites suggest large pop- slation; an estimate of 7,000 people is widely quoted by archeologiss, bur other ‘estimates range up to 20,000, which does ‘ot seem implausible for an island of Easter’ area and fertly Archeologists have aso enlisted sur- viving islanders in experiments aimed at figuring out how the stwes might have been carved and erected, Twenty people, using only stone chisels, could have carved even the largest completed setue within a year, Given enough timber and Biber for making ropes, eeams of ar most«few hundred people could have loaded ‘he statues onto wooden sleds, dragged them over lubricated wooden tracks or rollers, and used logs as levers to ma- neuver them into a standing position, Rope ebuld have been made from the fiber ofa small native wee, related tothe linden, called the hauhau. However, chat tree is now extremely scarce on Easter, and hauling one statue would have re- quired hundreds of yards of rope. Did Easter now barren landscape once sup- ort the necessary trees? ‘That question can be answered by the technique of pollen analysis, which in- volves boring out a column of sediment Cannibalism replaced structing large canoes. The palm would also have been a valuable food source, since its Chilean relative yields edible ‘huts as well a sap from which Chileans make sugar, syrup, honey, and wine. ‘What di the fits seers of Easter Is- land eat when they were not glutting themselves on the local equivalent of ‘maple syrup? Recent excavations by David Steadman, of the New York Stace ‘Museum at Albany, have yielded a pic- ture of Easter’ original animal world 2s surprising as Flenley and King’s picture of its plant world. Steadman’ expecta- sions for Easter were conditioned by his experiences elsewhere in Polynesia, only part of Easter’s lost ‘rel, prions, shearwater, storm perrels ‘terns, and tropic birds. With at least 25 nesting species, Easter was the richest seabird breeding site in Polynesia and probably in the whole Pacific. Land birds as well went into early Easter Island cooking pots. Steadman ‘identified bones of at lease six species, in- cluding bam owls, herons, parrots, and rail. Bird stew would have been seasoned with meat from large numbers of rats, which the Polynesian colonists inadver- tently brought with them; Easter Island is the sole known Polynesian island ‘where rat bones oumumber fish bones at archeological sies. (In case you're foods. Statuettes with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest people were starving. fom a swamp or pond, with the most re- ccent deposits atthe top and relatively ‘more ancient deposits at the borwom. The absolute age of each layer can be dated by radiocarbon methods. Then be- gins the hard work: examining tens of ‘thousands of pollen grains under a mi- croscope, counting them, and idencify- ing the plant species that produced each fone by comparing the grains with mod- em pollen from inown plant species. For Easter Island, the bleary-eyed sciencists ‘who performed that task were John Flen- ley, now at Massey University in New Zealand and Sarah King ofthe Univer- sity of Hull in England. Flenley and King’s heroic fore were rewarded by the suiking new picture that emerged of Easter’ prehistoric landscape For atleast 30,000 years before human arrival and during the early years of Poly- nesian serdement, Easer was nota waste land avall. Instead, a subsopical forest of ‘wees and woody bushes towered over a ground layer of shrubs, herbs, ferns, and grasses. Inthe forest grew wee daisies, the rope-yielding hauhau cree, and the ‘oromiro tee, which furnishes a dense, ‘mesquite-like frewood. The most com. ‘mon eree in the forest was a species of palm now absent on Easter but formerly S0 abundant thatthe bortom serata of the sediment column were packed with its pollen. The Easter Island palm was closely related to the sll-surviving Chil- fan wine palm, which grows up to 82 feet tall and 6 feet in diameter. The tll, un- branched trunks of the Easter Island palm would have been ideal for trans- porting and erecting statues and con- ‘where fish are overwhelmingly the main food at archeological sites, typically ac- ‘counting for more than 90 percent ofthe bones in ancient Polynesian garbage heaps. Easter, though, is too cool for the coral reefs beloved by fish, and ies cliff- girded coastline permits shallow-water fishing in only few places. Less than a quaret of the bones init early garbage hheaps (from the period 900 to 1300) be- longed to fish; instead, nearly one-third of all bones came from porpoises. ‘Nowhere else in Polynesia do por- poises account for even I percent of dis- carded food bones. But most other Poly- nesian islands offered animal food in the form of birds and mammals, such as New Zealand's now extinct giant moas and Hawai’s now extinct flightless geese. ‘Mose other islanders also had domestic igs and dogs. On Easter, porpoises ‘would have been the largest animal aval- sable—other than humans. The porpoise species identified at Easter, the common dolphin, weighs up to 165 pounds. It generally lives out at sa, 0 it could not have been hunted by line fishing or spearfshing from shore. Instead, ic must hhave been harpooned far offthore, in big seaworthy canoes built from the extinct palm tree. In addition to porpoise meat, Stead- ‘man found, the early Polynesian serders were feasting on seabirds. For those birds, Easter’s remoteness and lack of predators made it an ideal haven as a breeding site, atleast unc humans ar- rived. Among the prodigious numbers of seabirds that bred on Easter were alba- ‘oss, boobies, frigate birds, Fulmars, pe- 24 squeamish and consider rats inedible, sul recall recipes for creamed laboratory rat that my Brish bilogis fends used to supplement their diet during their years of wartime food rationing) Porpoises, seabirds, land birds, and rats did not complete the list of meat sources formerly available on Easter. A few bones hint at the possbiigy of breed- ing seal colonies as wel. ll these delica- ‘es were cooked in ovens fred by wood from the islands forests. [UGH EVIDENCE LETS US IMAGINE the island onto which Easter’ frst Polynesian colonists stepped shoe some 600 years ago a rer along cance voyage from eas- ‘em Polynesia. They found them- selves in a pristine paradise. What then happened to it? The pollen grains and the bones yield a grim answer. Pollen records show that destruction of Easter’ forests was well under way by the year 800, just a few cencuries after the sar of human settement. Then charcoal fom wood fires came to fil the sediment cores, while pollen of palms and other ‘wees and woody shrubs decreased or dis- appeared, and pollen of the grasses that replaced the forest became more abun- dant. Not long after 1400 the palm finally tenume cans noon ars touteti ing chopped down ba also betas the now ubiquitous rats prevented is regen- eration: of the dozens of preserved palm ‘hus discovered in eaves on Easter, all had been chewed by ras and could no longer germinace, While the hauhau tee did not become extinct in Polynesian times, its > xre rnutnbers decined drastically until there weren't enough lefeto make ropes from. By the time Heyerdahl visived Easter, only a single, nearly dead toromiro tree remained on the island, and even that lone survivor has now disappeared. (For- tunately, the toromiro still grows in botanical gardens elsewhere) ‘The fifteenth cennury marked the end not only for Ester’ palm but forthe for- ‘st iself Is doom had been : 4s people cleared land to plant gardens, 4s they felled trees to build canoes, to ‘ransportand erect statues, and to burn; as rats devoured seeds; and probably as the native birds died out that had polli- ee land with fertile soil, abundant food, bountiful building materials, ample lebensraum, and all the prerequisites for ‘comformable living. They prospered and ‘multiplied. After a few centuries, chey began erecting stone strues on platforms, ike the ones their Polynesian forebears had carved. With passing years, the statues and platforms became lager and larger, and the stacues began sporting ten-ton red crowns-—probably in an escalating spiral of one-upmanship, a rival clans ‘ied to surpass each other with shows of wealth and power. (in the same way, suc- cessive Egyptian pharaohs built ever- With the disappearance of food sur- pluses, Easter Island could no longer feed the ai, ‘bureaucrats and priests who a complex society running. Sur- viving landers deseribed to early Bure. pean visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers, made by the warriors ducing their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, sll lier the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, che population began to ‘rash toward berween one-quarter and ‘one-tenth of ts former number. People took ta living in caves for protection Earth's inhabitarits have no emigration valve. We can no more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean. nated the tees’ flowers and dispersed their fruit. The overall picrare is the most exreme exmples of forest de- struction anywhere in the world: the whole forest gone, and most of ies ree species extinet. ‘The desruction ofthe stand animals ‘yas as enreme as that ofthe forest with out every species of native land bird became excince. Even shellsh were coverexploited, until people had to sete for smal sea sail instead of larger cow- ties. Porpoise bones diseppeared abruptly fom garbage heaps around 1500; no one could harpoon porpoises anymore, since the trees used for constructing the big seagoing canoes no longer existed. The colonies of more chan half ofthe seabird species breeding on Easter or on its off shore islets were wiped out In place of these meat supplies, che Easter Islanders intensified cheir pro- duction of chickens, which had been only an occasional food item. They also tumed to the largest remaining meat source available: humans, whose bones became common in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Ora traditions ofthe is- Ianders are rife with cannibalism; the ‘most inflammatory taunt chat could be snarled at an enemy was “The flesh of your mother sticks berween my teeth.” ‘With no wood available to cook these new goodies, the islanders resorted to sugarcane saps, gras, and sedges to fuel their fires. All chese strands of evidence can be wound into a coherent narrative of a so- ciety’ decline and fll. The fist Polyne~ sian colonists found themselves on an is- larger pyramid. Today Hollywood movie ‘moguls near my home in Los are displaying their wealth and power by building ever more ostentatious man- sions. Tycoon Marvin Davis ‘ious mogals wth plan for 4 $0,000- square-foot house, s0 now Aaron Spelling has topped Davis with a 56,000-square- foot house. All chat chose buildings lack to make the message explicit are ten-ton, red crowns.) On Easter, sin modern America, society was held together by a complex political system co rediseibute locally available resources and to inte- grate the economies of diferent areas. ‘Eventually Easter’ growing popula- tion was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used the land for gardens and the ‘wood for fuel, canoes, and houses—and, of course, for lugging statues. As forest cisappeared, the islanders ran our of im- ber and rope to transport and erect heir sxarues. Life became more uncomfort- Able—springs and streams dried up, and ‘wood was no longer available for fies. People also found ic harder to fl their stomachs, as land birds, large sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared. Because timber for building seagoing canoes van- ished, sh catches declined and porpoises disappeared from che able. Crop yields ‘also declined, since deforesation alowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to be leeched from it Incensfied chicken pro- duction and cannibalism replaced only part ofall chose lose foods. Preserved seat- ‘eres with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving. 25 ‘aguinst their enemies, Around 1770 rival clans started to topple each other’ stac- ues, breaking the beads off By 1864 che last statue had been thrown down and desecrated, AS we wy to imagine the decline of Easter’ citation, we ask ourselves, “Why didn't they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they ct down apm re? Tsuspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper. After all, chere are those hun- deeds of abandoned statues to consider. ‘Te forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope didn’t simply disappear (one day-—ic vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted che moving ‘eams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interest of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforesa- ‘ion. Our Pacific Northwest loggers are only the latecin along line of loggers 0 cay, ‘Jobs over teas!” The changes in for fest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect: yes, this year we cleared those woods over there, but tes are searing to grow back again on this abandoned garden site here. Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized difference. Their children could no more have comprehended their parents’ tales than my eight-year-old sons today cancomprehend my wife’s and my tales of what Los Angeles was ike 30 years ago (Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By che time the last fruit-bearing adule palm mee was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of eco nomic significance. That let only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treeless. No one would have noticed the felling ofthe last small palm, Y NOW THE MEANING OF EASTER Island for us should be chillingly obvious. Eascer Island is Earth writ small. Today, again arising. population confronts shrinking esources. We too have no em= ‘gration valve, because all human soci- ties are linked by international trans- ort, and we can no more escape into space than che Easter Islanders could fice {nw the ocean. If we continue to follow ur present course, we shall have ex- haused the world’s major Ssheres,op- ical rain forests, fos fuels, and much of our soil by the time my sons reach my current age, Every day newspapers report dewails of famished countries—Afghanistan, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Soma- la, the former Yugoslavia, Zaire —where soldiers have appropriated the wealth ‘or where central government is yielding £0 local gangs of thugs. With the rsk of nuclear war receding, the threat of our ending with a bang no longer has a chance of galvanizing us co hale our course. Our risk now is of winding down, slowly, in a whimper. Corrective action is blocked by vested inceress, by well-intentioned political and business 26 leaders, and by their electorates, all of hom are perfectly correcin not notic- ing big changes from year to year. In stead, each year there are just somewhat more people, and somewhat fewer re- sources, on Earch, Tewould be easy to close our eves or to give up in despair. IF mere thousands of Easter islanders with only stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their socery, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine ower fal to do worse? Bur there is one crucial difference. The Easter Islanders had no books and no histories of other doomed societies. Unlike the Easter Is- landers, we have histories ofthe past— information that can save us. My main hope for my sons’ generation i that we ‘may now choose to lear from the fares of societies like Easters.