Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (21 page)

mountain means "place to get canoes": before its slopes were stripped of
their trees to convert them to plantations, they were used for timber, and
they are still littered with the stone drills, scrapers, knives, chisels, and other
woodworking and canoe-building tools from that period. Lack of large tim
ber also meant that people were without wood for fuel to keep themselves
warm during Easter's winter nights of wind and driving rain at a tempera
ture of 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, after 1650 Easter's inhabitants were
reduced to burning herbs, grasses, and sugarcane scraps and other 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, wood for implements, and bark cloth. Even funeral prac
tices had to be changed: cremation, which had required burning much wood per body, became impractical and yielded to mummification and bone burials.

Most sources of wild food were lost. Without seagoing canoes, bones of porpoises, which had been the islanders' principal meat during the first cen
turies, virtually disappeared from middens by 1500, as did tuna and pelagic fish. Midden 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 disappeared completely, and seabirds were re
duced to relict populations of one-third of Easter's original species, con
fined to breeding on a few offshore islets. Palm nuts, Malay apples, and all
other wild fruits dropped out of the diet. The shellfish consumed became
smaller species and smaller and many fewer individuals. The only wild food
source whose availability remained unchanged was rats.

In addition to those drastic decreases in wild food sources, crop yields
also decreased, for several reasons. Deforestation led locally to soil erosion
by rain and wind, as shown by huge increases in the quantities of soil-
derived metal ions carried into Flenley's swamp sediment cores. For exam
ple, excavations on the Poike Peninsula show that crops were initially grown
there interspersed with palm trees left standing, so that their crowns could
shade and protect the soil and crops against hot sun, evaporation, wind, and
direct rain impacts. Clearance of the palms led to massive erosion that
buried ahu and buildings downhill with soil, and that forced the abandon
ment of Poike's fields around 1400. Once grassland had established itself on
Poike, farming was resumed there around 1500, to be abandoned again a
century later in a second wave of erosion. Other damages to soil that re
sulted from deforestation and reduced crop yields included desiccation and

nutrient leaching. Farmers found themselves without most of the wild plant leaves, fruit, and twigs that they had been using as compost.

Those were the immediate consequences of deforestation and other hu
man environmental impacts. The further consequences start with starva
tion, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism. Surviving islanders'
accounts of starvation are graphically confirmed by the proliferation of lit
tle statues called
moai kavakava,
depicting starving people with hollow
cheeks and protruding ribs. Captain Cook in 1774 described the islanders as
"small, lean, timid, and miserable." Numbers of house sites in the coastal
lowlands, where almost everybody lived, declined by 70% from peak values
around 1400-1600 to the 1700s, suggesting a corresponding decline in
numbers of people. In place of their former sources of wild meat, islanders
turned to the largest hitherto unused source available to them: humans,
whose bones became common not only in proper burials but also (cracked
to extract the marrow) in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral traditions of
the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt
that could be snarled at an enemy was "The flesh of your mother sticks be
tween my teeth."

Easter's chiefs and priests had previously justified their elite status by
claiming relationship to the gods, and by promising to deliver prosperity and bountiful harvests. They buttressed that ideology by monumental ar
chitecture and ceremonies designed to impress the masses, and made possi
ble by food surpluses extracted from the masses. As their promises were
being proved increasingly hollow, the power of the chiefs and priests was
overthrown around 1680 by military leaders called
matatoa,
and Easter's
formerly complexly integrated society collapsed in an epidemic of civil war.
The obsidian spear-points (termed
mata'a)
from that era of fighting still lit
tered Easter in modern times. Commoners now built their huts in the
coastal zone, which had been previously reserved for the residences
(hare paenga)
of the elite. For safety, many people turned to living in caves that
were enlarged by excavation and whose entrances were partly sealed to cre
ate a narrow tunnel for easier defense. Food remains, bone sewing needles,
woodworking implements, and tools for repairing tapa cloth make clear
that the caves were being occupied on a long-term basis, not just as tempo
rary hiding places.

What had failed, in the twilight of Easter's Polynesian society, was not only the old political ideology but also the old religion, which became dis
carded along with the chiefs' power. Oral traditions record that the last ahu

and moai were erected around 1620, and that Paro (the tallest statue) was
among the last. The upland plantations whose elite-commandeered pro
duction fed the statue teams were progressively abandoned between 1600
and 1680. That the sizes of statues had been increasing may reflect not only
rival chiefs vying to outdo each other, but also more urgent appeals to ancestors necessitated by the growing environmental crisis. Around 1680, at the time of the military coup, rival clans switched from erecting increas
ingly large statues to throwing down one another's statues by toppling a
statue forwards onto a slab placed so that the statue would fall on the slab
and break. Thus, as we shall also see for the Anasazi and Maya in Chapters 4
and 5, the collapse of Easter society followed swiftly upon the society's
reaching its peak of population, monument construction, and environmen
tal impact.

We don't know how far the toppling had proceeded at the time of the
first European visits, because Roggeveen in 1722 landed only briefly at a sin
gle site, and Gonzalez's Spanish expedition of 1770 wrote nothing about their visit except in the ship's log. The first semi-adequate European de
scription was by Captain Cook in 1774, who remained for four days, sent a
detachment to reconnoiter inland, and had the advantage of bringing a
Tahitian whose Polynesian language was sufficiently similar to that of Easter
Islanders that he could converse with them. Cook commented on seeing
statues that had been thrown down, as well as others still erect. The last Eu
ropean mention of an erect statue was in 1838; none was reported as stand
ing in 1868. Traditions relate that the final statue to be toppled (around
1840) was Paro, supposedly erected by a woman in honor of her husband,
and thrown down by enemies of her family so as to break Paro at mid-body.

Ahu themselves were desecrated by pulling out some of the fine slabs in
order to construct garden walls
(manavai)
next to the ahu, and by using
other slabs to create burial chambers in which to place dead bodies. As a re
sult, today the ahu that have not been restored (i.e., most of them) look at
first sight like mere piles of boulders. As Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Claudio
Cristino, Sonia Haoa, Barry Rolett, and I drove around Easter, saw ahu after ahu as a rubble pile with its broken statues, reflected on the enormous effort
that had been devoted for centuries to constructing the ahu and to carving
and transporting and erecting the moai, and then remembered that it was
the islanders themselves who had destroyed their own ancestors' work, we
were filled with an overwhelming sense of tragedy.

Easter Islanders' toppling of their ancestral moai reminds me of Rus
sians and Romanians toppling the statues of Stalin and Ceausescu when the

Communist governments of those countries collapsed. The islanders must have been filled with pent-up anger at their leaders for a long time, as we
know that Russians and Romanians were. I wonder how many of the statues
were thrown down one by one at intervals, by particular enemies of a
statue's owner, as described for Paro; and how many were instead destroyed in a quickly spreading paroxysm of anger and disillusionment, as took place
at the end of communism. I'm also reminded of a cultural tragedy and re
jection of religion described to me in 1965 at a New Guinea highland village
called Bomai, where the Christian missionary assigned to Bomai boasted to
me with pride how one day he had called upon his new converts to collect
their "pagan artifacts" (i.e., their cultural and artistic heritage) at the airstrip
and burn them
—and how they obeyed. Perhaps Easter Island's matatoa is
sued a similar summons to their own followers.

I don't want to portray social developments on Easter after 1680 as
wholly negative and destructive. The survivors adapted as best they could,
both in their subsistence and in their religion. Not only cannibalism but
also chicken houses underwent explosive growth after 1650; chickens had
accounted for less than 0.1% of the animal bones in the oldest middens
that David Steadman, Patricia Vargas, and Claudio Cristino excavated at
Anakena. The matatoa justified their military coup by adopting a religious
cult, based on the creator god Makemake, who had previously been just one of Easter's pantheon of gods. The cult was centered at Orongo village on the
rim of Rano Kau caldera, overlooking the three largest offshore islets to which nesting seabirds had become confined. The new religion developed
its own new art styles, expressed especially in petroglyphs (rock carvings) of
women's genitals, birdmen, and birds (in order of decreasing frequency),
carved not only on Orongo monuments but also on toppled moai and
pukao elsewhere. Each year the Orongo cult organized a competition between men to swim across the cold, shark-infested, one-mile-wide strait
separating the islets from Easter itself, to collect the first egg laid in that season by Sooty Terns, to swim back to Easter with the unbroken egg, and to be
anointed "Birdman of the year" for the following year. The last Orongo
ceremony took place in 1867 and was witnessed by Catholic missionaries, just as the residue of Easter Island society not already destroyed by the is
landers themselves was being destroyed by the outside world.

The sad story of European impacts on Easter Islanders may be quickly sum
marized. After Captain Cook's brief sojourn in 1774, there was a steady

trickle of European visitors. As documented for Hawaii, Fiji, and many
other Pacific islands, they must be assumed to have introduced European diseases and thereby to have killed many previously unexposed islanders,
though our first specific mention of such an epidemic is of smallpox
around 1836. Again as on other Pacific islands, "black-birding," the kidnap
ping of islanders to become laborers, began on Easter around 1805 and cli
maxed in 1862-63, the grimmest year of Easter's history, when two dozen Peruvian ships abducted about 1,500 people (half of the surviving popula
tion) and sold them at auction to work in Peru's guano mines and other
menial jobs. Most of those kidnapped died in captivity. Under international
pressure, Peru repatriated a dozen surviving captives, who brought another
smallpox epidemic to the island. Catholic missionaries took up residence in
1864. By 1872 there were only 111 islanders left on Easter.

European traders introduced sheep to Easter in the 1870s and claimed
land ownership. In 1888 the Chilean government annexed Easter, which ef
fectively became a sheep ranch managed by a Chile-based Scottish com
pany. All islanders were confined to living in one village and to working for
the company, being paid in goods at the company store rather than in cash.
A revolt by the islanders in 1914 was ended by the arrival of a Chilean warship. Grazing by the company's sheep, goats, and horses caused soil erosion
and eliminated most of what had remained of the native vegetation, includ
ing the last surviving hauhau and toromiro individuals on Easter around
1934. Not until 1966 did islanders become Chilean citizens. Today, islanders
are undergoing a resurgence of cultural pride, and the economy is being
stimulated by the arrival of several airplane flights each week from Santiago and Tahiti by Chile's national airline, carrying visitors (like Barry Rolett and
me) attracted by the famous statues. However, even a brief visit makes obvi
ous that tensions remain between islanders and mainland-born Chileans,
who are now represented in roughly equal numbers on Easter.

Easter Island's famous rongo-rongo writing system was undoubtedly in
vented by the islanders, but there is no evidence for its existence until its
first mention by the resident Catholic missionary in 1864. All 25 surviving objects with writing appear to postdate European contact; some of them are pieces of foreign wood or a European oar, and some may have been manu
factured by islanders specifically to sell to representatives of Tahiti's Catholic
bishop, who became interested in the writing and sought examples. In 1995
linguist Steven Fischer announced a decipherment of rongo-rongo texts as
procreation chants, but his interpretation is debated by other scholars. Most
Easter Island specialists, including Fischer, now conclude that the invention