Tahiti to Easter Island Tahiti to Easter Island October 2003 OK, right off the bat we confess: this wasn't a cruise aboard Raven. But it was a cruise, albeit aboard a small, expedition-type cruise ship called Clipper Odyssey, and we did go to some pretty exotic places and had a great time. We hope this report will bring a little warmth to these dark winter days. We had never taken an organized trip before, much less on a cruise ship, perish the thought. But this cruise, titled a little pretentiously "Beyond Rapa Nui II" and organized by a Seattle company named Zegrahm (click for their website), seemed like the place and time to give it a shot. Besides, it would take us to some South Pacific islands that are tough to reach in a sailboat, including Easter and Pitcairn. This log update is going to be mostly a photo gallery, as the Zegrahm website has an excellent log ( click here ) of the full cruise. We'll just add a little of our own perspective. Don't forget: Click on any photo to see it full size.

Clipper Odyssey and Zegrahm After flying to Tahiti, we boarded the ship at the commercial dock in Papeete, to the music of a Tahitian dance troupe. This was a bit of warm nostalgia for us, since we spent a month there last year during Heiva (see the Tahiti and Moorea log). We rode on le truck, changed some money, and visited the wonderful market for a flower crown and a pareo for Signe. We felt like old hands when the tour took us on a round-the-island trip to familiar places. Clipper Odyssey seemed huge compared to Raven, but next to the real cruise ship across the dock, it looked like a dinghy. Our cabin was on the top deck -- a disadvantage because of the extra motion at sea, it turned out later -- and had a tiny little terrace with just enough room for a couple of chairs. There were only 80 of us passengers and a crew of cheery and competent Filipinos who outnumbered us. In addition, the ship carried several Zegrahm's organizers, leaders, and lecturers.

We had a fish guy (easier to say than ichthyologist), a bird guy (there were some varsity birders, all sporting their "life lists" among the passengers), an oceans and reefs guy, an archeologist, and a literature guy who told tales and recited poems about the storied South Pacific. All the days were action-packed and, if there was a free hour, we would have a lecture on some pertinent subject. Following is a very short version of a cruise that we thoroughly enjoyed. Tahiti and Moorea Even though this was a revisit for us, there's no getting around the beauty of the bays of Moorea. This is when Jan figured out how to shoot panoramic shots with our new digital camera, so brace yourself for a panoramic overload! Austral Islands We visited Tubuai, Raivavae, and Rapa in this group of islands, part of France Polynesia. They're several hundred miles south of Tahiti, more subtropical in climate, and far less used to tourists. They get a few yachts every year but never any cruise ships, so our arrival was the event of the year on each island.

We received big receptions everywhere, with music, dancers, buffets of native delicacies, and flowered crowns or leis. Rapa was the most rugged and remote island, and the whole island turned out to greet and entertain us. School was canceled for the day and locals and guests enjoyed a performance by the local dancers with the school teacher as an emcee. His only English was a loud, "Clap now!" Rapa was the site of our most spectacular hike, up to one of the hilltop forts that date from the prehistoric wars on the island. Mangareva Mangareva is at the extreme southeast end of the Tuamotu chain -- you remember we visited Makemo and Fakarava in the Tuamotus last year -- but still has those wonderful pearl farms. Signe spread the word and everyone indulged a little. We even discovered a Catholic-run school t hat teaches teenagers from all over Polynesia to carve beautiful mother-of-pearl necklaces, bracelets, etc. The island also had an immense cathedral, far beyond the needs of the island, built in the 19th century on the orders of a megalomaniac priest from France.

Pitcairn This is the remote island where the Bounty mutineers hid from the British Navy for thirty years, and where 41 of their descendents still live. It seems that half the population is named "Christian" and claims Fletcher Christian as an ancestor. We were lucky enough to be taken ashore in the islanders' longboats on two successive days. The sea was rough, so boarding the longboats was no picnic, but the crew handled it with no mishaps. Pitcairn sees a dozen cruise ships a year, but the passengers never get to land, both because of the rough seas, and the number of people on those big ships would overwhelm the island. The entire population also came out to the ship for dinner and lunch. Tom Christian, the island patriarch, and his wife sat with us for dinner and a lesson in living on a totally isolated island. Henderson and Ducie These are two uninhabited islands, part of the Pitcairn group, that are well known to biologists for their unique bird life. Most birders would kill to visit these islands and put the Henderson island crake or reed warbler on their life lists.

Landing in the Zodiacs over the reef and onto the beaches was no mean feat, but again our crew was magnificent in safely landing all 80 of us to explore ashore. Easter Island Yes, Easter was the highlight of our cruise and we even stayed an extra four days for an intensive tour. We are always most interested in the people of the islands, so the history and archeology of Easter we top on our list. The guide Zegrahm provided was Claudio Cristino, the Chilean archeologist who has spent 27 years excavating on Easter (it's a province of Chile). By the way, the Polynesian name for Easter is Rapa Nui. It's not until you reach the volcano/quarry where the moai statues were carved that you realize there are hundreds and hundreds of these immense carvings, most never having reached their intended altars. There are quite a few half-finished figures still attached to the living rock. One of the photos shows Claudio Cristino in front of his magnum opus, the restoration of the immense altar and statue at Tongariki. It's hard to convey with a photo the overwhelming impression this site makes on you.

We marveled at the skill of Polynesians, first in navigating to this remote island, then in building the statues. Many of the altars still contain human bones, as Claudio shows in the photo. All in all, a tremendously successful trip. We hope to do a few more of these Zegrahm voyages to exotic destinations. Love . . . Signe & Jan Easter Island The history "In the middle of the Great Ocean, in a region where no one ever passes, there is a mysterious and isolated island; there is no land in the vicinity and, for more than eight hundred leagues in all directions, empty and moving vastness surrounds it. It is planted with tall, monstrous statues, the work of some now vanished race, and its past remains an enigma." Pierre Loti, pseudonym of Julien Viaud (1850-1923) French novelist and naval officer. Location Easter Island is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. Rapa Nui (its eastern Polynesian name) is half way between Tahiti and South America.

The nearest inhabited land is Pitcairn Island at 2,075 kilometres (1,289 mi), and the nearest continental point lies in central Chile, at 3,512 kilometres (2,182 mi). Easter Island is a special territory of Chile that was annexed in 1888. Administratively, it belongs to the Valparaíso Region as the Province Isla de Pascua. It has about 5,800 residents, of which some 60% are descendants of the Rapa Nui polynesian inhabitants. Geography and climate The island is about 24.6 km (15.3 mi) long by 12.3 km (7.6 mi) at its widest point; its overall shape is triangular. It has an area of 163.6 square kilometres (63.2 sq mi), and a maximum altitude of 507 meters (1,663 ft). There are three Rano (freshwater crater lakes), at Rano Kau, Rano Raraku and Rano Aroi, near the summit of Terevaka, but no permanent streams or rivers.

It's a volcanic island, consisting mainly of three extinct volcanoes: Terevaka (altitude 507 metres) forms the bulk of the island, while two other volcanoes, Poike and Rano Kau, form the eastern and southern headlands and give the island its roughly triangular shape. The climate is classified as a tropical rainforest climate (Af) that borders on a humid subtropical climate. The lowest temperatures are recorded in July and August (18 °C or 64 °F) and the highest in February (max 28 °C or 82 °F), the summer season in the southern hemisphere. The rainiest month is May, though the island experiences year-round rainfall. Getting there, accomodation The only way to get to Easter Island is by air. The island is served by LAN Airlines. They have direct flights to Easter Island from Santiago (Chile), Tahiti (French Polynesia) and seasonally from Lima (Peru). The flight, takes about 5 hours and operated by modern aircrafts. There are also several companies who can arrange package trips, including hotels, tours etc. Island's airport is Mataveri (IPC).

As for the currecny, the island uses a dual currency of both Chilean Pesos and US Dollars. Some shops and restaurants will also accept Euros, and credit cards are increasingly accepted. Accomodations vary from larger hotels to small residenciales. Many provide meals and can arrange for rental cars, guided tours and other acitivities. You may wish to make reservations before traveling to the island, although the adventurous traveler can probably find a place to stay upon arrival. Keep in mind that during the annual Tapati festival and during other holidays, it is important to arrange for accomodations in advance. Easter Island is small, so it is possible to get around fairly easily. There are rental cars and a few dirt bikes. With a car, it's possible to see most of the sights on the island in a few hours. Bicycles can be hired on a daily basis. There has been much controversy and confusion concerning the origins of the Easter Islanders. Thor Heyerdahl proposed that the people who built the statues were of Peruvian descent, due to a similarity between Rapa Nui and Incan stonework. Some have suggested that Easter Island is the remnant of a lost continent .

Archaeological evidence, however, indicates discovery of the island by Polynesians at about 400 AD - led, according to legend, by Hotu Matua. Upon their arrival, an impressive and enigmatic culture began to develop. In addition to the statues, the islanders possessed the Rongorongo script; the only written language in Oceania. The first-recorded European contact with the island was on April 5 (Easter Sunday), 1722, when Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen visited the island for a week and estimated a population of 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants. The number may have been greater, since some may have been frightened into hiding by a misunderstanding that led Roggeveen's men to fire on the natives, killing more than a dozen and wounding several more. The next foreign visitors (on November 15, 1770) were two Spanish ships, San Lorenzo and Santa Rosalia. Moai are human figures carved from the rock of the island.

Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the island's perimeter. Almost all moai have overly large heads three-fifths the size of their bodies. The moai are the living faces of deified ancestors. The production and transportation of the statues are considered remarkable creative and physical feats. The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tons; the heaviest erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tons; and one unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately 21 metres (69 ft) tall with a weight of about 270 tons. The moai were either carved by a distinguished class of professional carvers who were comparable in status to high-ranking members of other Polynesian craft guilds, or, alternatively, by members of each clan.

Easter Island: A Remote Luxury Destination Easter Island: A Remote Luxury Destination by Luxury Property : August 14, 2008 Easter Island (Rapa Nui locally or Isla de Pascula in Spanish), is arguably one of the most remote islands on the planet. Certainly one of the most remote luxury destinations we’ve reviewed! Located roughly half-way between Tahiti and Chile, Easter Island’s nearest inhabited neighbour is 2075 kilometres away, tiny Pitcairn Island or 3,600 kilometers to Chile. At only 163.6 km² (63 sq mi), and with a high point of 507 metres Rapa Nui is easy to explore over 3 or 4 days which more airline’s schedules allow you. The island is a volcanic peak, not an atoll. You don’t come to Easter Island for the diving or snorkeling. Nor do you come for the nightlife or the beach scene. Rapa Nui is far enough south to have a cool winter and a mild summer. Why should you add Easter Island to your must see list? Because of the strange statues – the Moai – and the even stranger history of Easter Island.

Because Rapa Nui does deserve that over-used adjective: unique. The combination of Pacific Island (if you speak Maori or Hawaiian you will understand the local’s language) and South America – with a side-order of Thor Heyerdahl and Von Daniken. The mystery of what happened to the statue builders. What happened to destroy an apparently vibrant and unique culture whose decline started before the arrival of the Europeans? When Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen discovered the islands on – yes – Easter Sunday 1722 he estimated there were 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants on the island. The next western visitors didn’t come by until 1770, and they reported that the gardens were uncultivated, 4 years later when Captain James Cook visited, he described the statues as being neglected with some having fallen down. By 1825, another British ship, HMS Blossom, visited and reported no standing statues. Every statue had fallen face down. Many have since been resurrected. In the 1860’s the combination of Peruvian slave traders, and introduced European diseases decimated the island.

In less than a decade, 97% of the population was dead or removed – and with them went most of the Rapa Nui’s cultural knowledge. Uniquely in the Pacific Rapa Nui had a written language: which is yet to be translated. Today Rapa Nui has a population of 3,700, all but 500 of which live in the only settlement: Hanga Roa. Around 60% of the population are ethnic Rapa Nui, the remainder are Chilean immigrants. Rapa Nui Map of Easter Island Chile and Easter Island Map and Information - World Atlas Easter Island Description Easter Island History Rapa Nui, or Easter Island as it is known today, is a Polynesian island positioned in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 3,510 km (2,180 mi) west of continental Chile . Easter Island is one of the world's most isolated inhabited islands, with its nearest inhabited neighbor (Pitcairn Island), located some 2,075 km (1,289.35 mi) to the west.

Its history is captivating and mysterious to this day mainly because of the nearly 900 (still surviving) monumental statues, called Moai, created by the early Rapanui people. Over the centuries Easter Island and its durable inhabitants lived through colonialism, epidemics, food shortages, internal wars and slave raids....and they still survive. Archaeologists believe that the initial inhabitants arrived between 700–1000, and they journeyed here in canoes or catamarans from the Marquesas Islands of Polynesia. Important remnants of that culture are the massive Moai statues, reportedly representing deified ancestors. Most early settlements were located along the coastline and Moai were erected there so they could watch over their descendants, with their backs toward the spirit world in the sea. Like most cultures. as population increased different factions surfaced, and internal war was inevitable. On Easter Sunday, 1722, Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen arrived, named it Easter Island. He later reported the island was lined with massive stone statues. In 1770 that was still the case when two Spanish ships sailed in. Captain Felipe Gonzalez y Haedo claimed Easter Island for Spain and renamed it San Carlos.

He also reported the island lined with statues When James Cook visited in 1774, he noted that several Moai were lying face down. History reports that Moai toppling continued into the 1820s because of fierce internal fighting, and the British ship HMS Blossom reported seeing no standing statues in 1825 In the 1860s slave raiders from Peru captured 1,500 men and women, half of the island's population. Later those same raiders spread smallpox to the island; a disease that eventually caused a fatal epidemic in the Marquesas islands. A few years later, tuberculosis, introduced by whalers, killed 25% of the remaining population. In the following years, the managers of a sheep ranch and missionaries started buying the newly available lands of the deceased, and this led to great confrontations between natives and settlers. In the 1870s, because of unsolveable disputes, missionaries evacuated most of the Rapanui population to the Gambier islands. By the end of the decade a mere 100 people lived on the island, and much of its cultural knowledge had been lost.

Easter Island was annexed by Chile on September 9, 1888, and the validity of that land grab is still contested by some of the Rapanui to this day. At that time the surviving Rapanui were confined to the settlement of Hanga Roa. The rest of the island was rented to the Williamson-Balfour Company as a sheep farm. In 1914 British citizen Katherine Routeledge visited for a yearlong expedition. It was the first in-depth study of local artifacts and inhabitants. She and her team found connections between elders’ tattoos and the Moai. She detailed the clan system in a 1919 book called "The Mystery of Easter Island" In the mid-1950s Thor Heyerdahl organized the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island. After several months on the island the expedition published two large volumes of scientific reports In 1995 an airport was constructed and the island was then managed by the Chilean Navy.

In 1966, Chile declared Easter Island a province and the Rapanui given Chilean citizenship Today tourism is the major industry, and although isolated and a bit difficult to reach, thousands visit here to experience for themselves the culture and mystery that is Easter Island. Cheap Flights & Holiday Travel Packages in Easter Island - Direct Flights MULTI CITY STOPOVER SOUTH AMERICA : CHILE: EASTER ISLAND Easter Island is in the middle of nowhere, a small Polynesian island in the Pacific Ocean that's more than 2,000 miles from Tahiti to the west and more than 2,000 miles from Chile to the east. But its extreme isolation is also responsible for Easter Island being one of the most fascinating places a holiday traveller can possibly visit. Make a travel booking for Easter Island with Direct Flights and enjoy a one-of-a-kind holiday in this incredible land. Easter Island, Chile Easter Island is in the middle of nowhere, a small Polynesian island in the Pacific Ocean that's more than 2,000 miles from Tahiti to the west and more than 2,000 miles from Chile to the east.

The nearest habitable land is Pitcairn Island, 1,250 miles away, making Easter Island one of the most isolated places on the planet. But its extreme isolation is also responsible for Easter Island being one of the most fascinating places a holiday traveller can possibly visit. There is absolutely nowhere in the world that is quite like Easter Island. Book your Easter Island and Chilean travel package today with Direct Flights. A small triangle of volcanic rock, Easter Island (Rapa Nui) features amazing landscapes, with three extinct volcanoes, many volcanic caves and lava tubes, brilliant beaches and sparkling blue water. But it is of course best known for its archaeological sites - the giant stone monoliths, known as Moai, that dot its coastline. Much of the island is protected within Rapa Nui National Park, a fascinating UNESCO World Heritage Site that's enveloped in mystery. Easter Island, now a special territory of Chile, received its English name when a European explorer encountered it on Easter Sunday in 1722. The large stone statues were carved during a relatively short period of time long before the island's discovery by the western world.

Although some are buried up to their necks by shifting soils, the common name "Easter Island Heads" is a misnomer: the statues are actually complete torsos, kneeling on their knees and holding their hands over their stomachs. Roughly half of the 887 statues found to date are still in the immediate vicinity of Rano Raraku, the quarry in which they were produced. Most of the other Moai were somehow transported to, and placed upon, a variety of ceremonial structures called ahu, a feat that is one of the great achievements of Pacific prehistory. Visit these fascinating statues on Easter Island when you book Easter Island holiday packages and flights from Australia to Easter Island with Direct Flights. A curious place, Easter Island has long been the subject of much speculation. The paramount questions raised by this enigmatic island are how - and why - did its ancient inhabitants carve and transport the massive Moai? How, in fact, did the Easter Islanders even get to this isolated place? There are no answers. Easter Island is one of the most unique places visitors will ever encounter; an open-air museum that showcases a fascinating, but unfortunately lost, culture. Book a holiday to Easter Island today with Direct Flights.

The Rapanui, the current inhabitants of this mysterious place and the descendants of the statue-carvers, call Easter Island "the navel of the world." They are among the friendliest people in the world and happily welcome visitors on cheap holidays to Easter Island. Many locals who provide accommodation in Easter Island greet visitors at the airport. Staying in a private home is a great way to meet the islanders and experience their local culture. Flights to Easter Island from Santiago , Chile or Papeete, Tahiti can be booked through Direct Flights, allowing you the opportunity to ponder the Pacific's largest and most awe-inspiring collection of prehistoric monuments. And connecting flights to Tahiti from Australia are easy to obtain through Direct Flights. The volcanic craters of Rano Raraku and Rano Kau are two of the most remarkable sites on Easter Island. The volcanic rock quarry at Rano Raraku is the birthplace of the Moai and the scene of what must have been hundreds of labourers carving full-time. Visitors there can see partially-finished Moai on one side of the quarry, and a hike down and then up to the opposite side will reward you with one of the most dramatic sites on the island.

Rano Kau has a crater lake which forms one of the island's only three natural bodies of fresh water. Easter Island also boasts one of the richest collections of petroglyphs (prehistoric pictures carved into rock) in all of Polynesia. The island is riddled with caves that show signs of human use, with defensive fortifications as well as the fabulous petroglyphs. About 25 restaurants cater to Easter Island visitors, with menus that tout a wide range of seafood. The port town of Hanga Roa offers a number of small shops and an open market where you can pick up souvenirs (mostly inspired by the Moai) to bring home from your once-in-a-lifetime trip to Easter Island. Easter Island features two dive shops for deep-sea offshore scuba diving, with unique caves, corals and fish for divers to explore. And Rapa Nui also offers some wonderful hiking and surfing, along with inexpensive horseback riding along the rocky coastline. Discount travel to Easter Island is a perfect holiday getaway for those who love history, mystery and nature.

Catch one of the cheap flights to Easter Island that Direct Flights can arrange for you, and enjoy a one-of-a-kind holiday at this fascinating prehistoric enigma. Easter Island – was it really so isolated? Easter Island – was it really so isolated? by Edward Pegler on 27 January, 2011 The fate of prehistoric Easter Island was an environmental catastrophe… but was it really, as Jared Diamond argues, in isolation? Perhaps Easter Islanders were trading both with other Pacific islands and with South America. In Jared Diamond’s bestseller, Collapse, Prof. Diamond outlined various examples of environmental over-exploitation, including Viking Greenland, the Maya of central America and modern Rwanda. But his first example, Easter Island (aka Rapanui), was his ace. The collapse of Easter Island Easter Island is less than 15 miles long and is sited in one of the most isolated parts of the Pacific, lying 1300 miles east of the nearest inhabited island, Pitcairn, and 2300 miles west of the coast of South America. Jared Diamond used the work of John Flenley and Paul Bahn to argue that Easter Island is a microcosmic metaphor for our modern world.

Isolated from all other human life, it typifies what humans can do to destroy themselves when their resources are limited and over-exploited. We, like the Easter Islanders of prehistory, are bound for disaster unless it can only think ahead. From the evidence that Diamond could gather he told the following story: Easter Island was first inhabited around 900AD or a little earlier. The population gradually expanded then ballooned. Every inch of the island was farmed, the trees were all felled and the wildlife eaten. The population during this time may well have exceeded 15,000. This was probably the time when Easter Islanders erected their famed statues, the ‘moai’. But soil erosion and depletion lead to decline. By the seventeenth century Easter Island was in a permanent state of warfare. When the first recorded European account of Easter Island was made in 1722 the population was reduced to perhaps 2000 people. Diamond’s and rats’ Overall I don’t really have a problem with Diamond’s main story. Easter Island is clearly a wreck, it’s devastation probably caused by the arrival of people.

But there have been some significant disagreements, particularly between Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo on the one hand, and the original researchers, Flenley and Bahn, on the other. Hunt and Lipo firstly suggest that Easter island was not colonised until perhaps as late as the 13th century AD. While this has caused much argument between them and Bahn and Flenley, I suspect that Prof. Diamond wouldn’t be too concerned. For him this would only highlight the scale of the human disaster. Hunt and Lipo also argue that imported rats were the main culprits for deforestation, preventing the regrowth of trees. Again, who brought the rats? Perhaps the biggest criticism by Hunt and Lipo is that they say there is insufficient evidence for a population explosion of the proportions Bahn, Flenley and Diamond argue for. They estimate that population numbers were never much higher than about 3000 people. The problem with either argument is that it’s difficult to prove what size of population existed before recorded history. So much devastation was wrought on the island’s population after the arrival of Europeans that it dwindled to almost nothing, making genetic studies difficult.

Sweet potatoes To me a much more important issue is just how isolated Easter Island was during this time. Jared Diamond justifiably points out that there is no evidence of trade to or from the island. As an island it appears to have been entirely self-sufficient in food and tools (albeit stone ones). However, there is one sentence in Diamond’s book that is worth quoting. “Easter’s crops were bananas, taro, sweet potato, sugarcane, and paper mulberry, typical Polynesian crops mostly of Southeast Asian origin.” Note the ‘mostly’. The one exception, the sweet potato, comes from the Americas. Links to South America The sweet potato, a tropical tuber (Ipomoea batatas), is thought to originate somewhere in Mesoamerica, probably southern Mexico. It was first cultivated there around or before 3000BC. By the first millennium its cultivation had spread east, around the Caribbean, and south, down the western spine of South America into Peru and Chile (see map ) The domestic form of the sweet potato cannot be grown from seed and has to be propagated by tuber cuttings (a bit like a some commercial varieties of normal potato). It also gets killed by seawater.

Yet it is grown widely across the tropical and sub-tropical Polynesian islands of the Pacific and appears to have been grown there since pre-Columbian times. Perhaps most revealing is the sweet potato’s name, generally variants on the word ‘kumara‘ in Polynesian dialects (including Easter Island’s)%. If it had been brought by Spanish or other European sailors it would have had names reflecting that European origin, such as ‘batata‘, ‘kamote‘ or some such. However, the name is remarkably similar to a Quechua (Peruvian) name for the sweet potato, ‘khumara‘. Easter Island not isolated Generally speaking, people such as Jared Diamond talk of the colonisation of Easter Island as a one off event, followed by isolation. Colonists took seventeen days to get there from Pitcairn (say) and thought ‘Well, that’s me done travelling.” No one else then followed them. Well perhaps this was so but… Easter island is the most easterly of the Polynesian islands.

Although just under 2300 miles from Chile (and just over 2300 miles to Peru) there is no Polynesian island nearer to either South America or, in fact, the Americas. It is, admittedly, marginal. Hawaii, to the north, is slightly further away (2400 miles), its near point the California coast of North America. However, while Hawaiians may or may not have reached California in Pre-Columbian times, the prehistoric natives of the California coast, as far as anyone can tell, never grew sweet potatoes. Map of the southwest Pacific, showing a possible connection between Easter Island and South America. Evidence presented by Henri Dumont and others also argues for an influx of pollen from other South American plant species into Easter Island, perhaps between the 14th and 16th centuries. This indicates some sort of South American connection. To me the evidence of the sweet potato and the pollen is almost unequivocal (that’s the best I’m ever prepared to say). Easter island may not be ideally located for importing the sweet potato into the Polynesian world but there’s pretty much no other choice.+ However minor, Easter Island had some form of contact with South America.

But equally importantly, if Easter Island was the first Polynesian island to get the sweet potato then its spread throughout the Polynesian islands indicates some form of contact through Easter Island back to the rest of the Polynesian islands. Following this logic, Easter Island was not isolated. In fact it may have been a bottleneck or pinchpoint on the only route between the Pacific Islands and South America. All boat traffic would end up stopping at Easter Island. Not Thor Heyerdahl Chimu mask from Peru If there were any connection between South America and Easter Island it would probably have been with the coast of Peru or Chile. The linguistic evidence suggests Peru. The period of contact would perhaps have been from 900 or 1200 AD, when the Polynesians first arrived, and the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, when the Spanish took control of Peru. According to Jo Anne Van Tillburg, radiocarbon dates suggest a florescence of culture in Easter island between the mid 14th century and the beginning of the 16th century (added 3/8/11). In the north of Peru the Moche culture had given way to the Sicàn state and Chimú ’empire’ by this time.

These in turn lasted until around 1470AD when the coast was absorbed into the Inca empire. This fell to the Spanish around the 1530s. I am not proposing the colonisation and diffusion of civilisation to Easter Island from South America. Nor am I proposing the opposite. Yes, there are similarities between the extended ears of Easter Island statues and Chimú and Sicàn gold masks from Peru but this is arguably a coincidence. Furthermore the (admittedly limited) DNA evidence indicates that prehistoric Easter island never experienced a great influx of South Americans, even if there was an influx of South American pollen around the 14th century. So whatever the connection between Easter and South America, it could never have been huge. So what am I arguing for? The unlikely voyage of Tupa Inka Yupanki There is an Inca legend, luckily recorded in 1572 by a Spanish explorer of South America, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. It tells of the great Inca leader Tupa Inka Yupanki who was fascinated by the merchant sailors arriving on the Peruvian coast, bringing gold from islands out in the western sea.

So Tupa Inka sailed west, supposedly around 1480, with a great fleet of balsas to the islands of Avachumbi and Ninachumbi. He was gone almost a year, but when he returned he brought back ‘black’ people, gold, a brass chair and bits of a horse. Most of this story is likely to be nonsense. The items listed were unavailable on the Pacific islands. Indeed, Tupa Inka would have had to sail to the other side of the world to collect any of these items. However, the story may be a folk memory of distant islands to the west and of merchant sailors coming from those islands. Was this a genuine memory of an earlier time? Was it instead something arising from a desire for the indigenous people to have a sailing history equal in magnitude to that of the Spanish? Who knows. Light trade? This is where I push the data too far and potentially fall flat on my face. What if there were once Polynesian merchants bringing something highly prized to the shores of Peru from the Pacific Islands? Well, as already stated, there’s no evidence for Easter Island trade, either between South America or the other Polynesian islands. Easter island was largely self sufficient in tools.

There are, of course, good reasons for that lack of trade. It would have been unlikely that anybody would have bothered to carry stone tools or pots such vast distances either to or from Easter Island because they are heavy and you could make them yourself. But I have one chance. What if the trade was in something really light and easily transportable but something that, given time, would rot away, leaving no evidence. Something really light… as light, indeed, as a feather. Luxury feathers Gold ‘feather’ headdress from Sican culture, Peru One of the major trade items of both Mesoamerica and South America was feathers – red feathers, green feathers, irridescent feathers of all kinds. Just think native American headdress. Some were just valued, others were as prized as gold, if not more so. Feathers could be a high status item, a king’s trade good. Feathers were also highly valued in Polynesian society. The red feathers of, for example, the Scarlett Honeyeater, were a significant form of currency in Santa Cruz and neighbouring islands.

Jared Diamond himself points out the significance to Polynesians of feathers twice in Collapse, making the often argued point that the red scoria discs (pukao) on the top of some Easter Island statues probably represented red feather headdresses. David Steadman has stated that something like twenty percent of all Pacific bird species went extinct in the period between the Polynesian colonists arrival and the subsequent arrival of European ships. This effect may well have been due to the predations of rats on bird eggs.* However, David Houson suggests that a significant part of this may have been due to the feather trade. In this light the example of Henderson Island, discussed by Jared Diamond in Collapse, is intriguing. As Diamond points out, Henderson Island is difficult to live on. It has almost no fresh water and the ground is uplifted coral, almost impossible to farm. Yet in pre-Colombian times it contained a small resident population of people who eked out a living there, even managing to import high quality tools from other, relatively nearby islands. The island’s middens are dominated by masses of bird bones. Were bird feathers an exported trade item? Were they in fact the main reason why people lived on the island at all?

Is there just the remotest possibility that these two societies, those of South America and of the Pacific Islands, somehow met and traded in such things as feathers? The collapse of civilisation Diamond argues for the collapse of societies on the Polynesian Islands of Henderson and Pitcairn around 1450 AD or a little later. He also argues for the collapse of Easter Island society around 1600AD. Jo Anne Van Tillburg argues for a peak around 1500 AD with a collapse sometime shortly after (added 3/8/11). For comparison, the collapse of Inca civilisation in South America followed the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas. The Spanish invaded the Inca heartland in 1532 AD and the final phase of Inca control dates to around 1538 AD. However, smallpox was probably already hitting the west coast of South America by this time. So overall the collapse occurred during the first half of the sixteenth century. Is there a link between these events? Could the collapse of Inca civilisation have, in some way, caused the collapse of the Easter, Henderson and Pitcairn societies?

If there was pre-Colombian trade between Easter and South America then the arrival of the Spanish provides a convenient point for it to stop. The new economic conditions in the mid sixteenth century could have been enough on their own. Alternatively, smallpox or some other infection could have caused trade to cease.^ Environmentally sound? I have no idea whether the case I’ve put forward above is reasonable. Whatever, I’m sure that the destruction of natural habitats like Easter Island’s really did have a major effect on the people who lived there. I think it ultimately left them isolated. But in fact pretty much everything that people the world over have done since they started trading and farming has had negative environmental consequences. Every field opened up is a reduction in biodiversity. Every precious item collected involved digging holes in the ground or the pointless killing of animals and plants. Yet people everywhere, not just on on Pacific islands, have achieved something amazing since the start of the Neolithic Revolution. They’ve managed to wreak all this damage but somehow manipulate the odds so far in their favour that there are more of them now than ever before. So what impresses me, as it does all of civilisation, is not that people wrecked Easter Island.

It’s that they, like us, have managed to survive what they’ve done. Notes % The following are words for sweet potato – In Peru – cumara, kumar, kumal; In Ecuador, kumara, cumar’, umar’; In Colombia – umala, kuala; On Easter Island and New Zealand – kumara, On the Marquesas – kuma’a; On Aitutaki – ku’ara; On Tahiti – umara; On Tonga and Fiji – kumala. (from here ) +Some people have suggested a direct route from the Marquesas or Societies Islands to South America. To me this view seems surprising as the distance to be travelled would then be at least 3800 miles. * The volcanic Galapagos Islands have been lucky. All the evidence suggests the occasional rare visit from South Americans in Pre-Columbian times. However, there is no evidence of the presence of Polynesians, or their rats. This is why the island is such an important nature reserve. ^It would have been possible to transmit smallpox to Easter Island by boat from South America at this time.

However, the epidemic of the 1860s perhaps suggests that the population hadn’t developed immunity to it so maybe they’d never experienced it before. References Photos from Sheep”R”us ‘ photostream, Britannica Online Encylopedia , Additional References Gunn, B.F., Baudouin, L. & Olsen, K.M. 2011 Independent Origins of Cultivated Coconut (Cocos nucifera L.) in the Old World Tropics , PLoS One (online) Another additional argument, pointing out that coconuts were probably taken to northwestern South America by Polynesians in Pre-Colombian times. The dates they suggest, around 200-300BC, are perhaps a little early, but… Roullier, C. et al. 2012 Historical collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination , PNAS110, p2205–2210. Article making a strong genetic case for westward trade in the sweet potato from Peru or Ecuador back through Polynesia during the period from 1000 AD onward.

In fact it’s enough to make my entire article pointless, as this is much better and really invalidates Jared Diamond’s argument. Van Tillburg, J. A. 2011 The Easter Island Statue Project, University of Pennsylvania Podcast, Itunes U (see also EISP website ) Gives approximate dates for statue development and also discusses the structure of society during their building. Bill Kennedy October 22, 2011 at 10:55 pm Have you read “Song of Waitaha” by various elders of the Waitaha Nation? This suggests frequent,to-and-from visits between Easter Island(Waitangi ki roto) and Aotea Roa(South Island,New Zealand) It would seem that these frequent journeys were made about 3000BC(my estimation) The map shows the use of the Sea Currents,Te Tai Araroa(from Nz to Easter) and return by the Northern stream,Te Tai Mahunui. These ‘Waitaha’ people introduced the Kumura to NZ,and took Greenstone back to Easter Island. All very intrigueing Edward Pegler October 24, 2011 at 10:50 am Dear Bill An interesting comment.

No I haven’t read the Song of Waitaha. I would, of course, find any evidence of repeated contacts between Pacific Island peoples plausible. The greenstone evidence is interesting, although I don’t lnow of any archaeological evidence for imported greenstone (referring, I presume to a metamorphic rock) being found on Easter Island. As for dating, I think that radiocarbon dating from all of the Pacific Islands would tend to contradict your early estimated dates. I don’t know how long folk memory is supposed to be able to go back, anyway, but a few hundred years seems more reasonable. thanks Ned National Geographic Magazine - NGM.com Easter Island If They Could Only Talk “The statues walked,” Easter Islanders say. Archaeologists are still trying to figure out how—and whether their story is a cautionary tale of environmental disaster or a celebration of human ingenuity. By Hannah Bloch Video Animation by Hans Weise, Spencer Millsap, Fernando G.

Baptista, and Fanna Gebreyesus On a winter night last June, José Antonio Tuki, a 30-year-old artist on Easter Island, did one of the things he loves best: He left his one-room home on the southwest coast and hiked north across the island to Anakena beach. Legend has it the earliest Polynesian settlers hauled their canoes ashore at Anakena a thousand years ago or so, after navigating more than a thousand miles of open Pacific. Under the same moon and stars Tuki sat on the sand and gazed directly before him at the colossal human statues—the moai. Carved centuries ago from volcanic tuff, they’re believed to embody the deified spirits of ancestors. Sleepless roosters crowed; stray dogs barked. A frigid wind gusted in from Antarctica, making Tuki shiver. He’s a Rapanui, an indigenous Polynesian resident of Rapa Nui, as the locals call Easter Island; his own ancestors probably helped carve some of the hundreds of statues that stud the island’s grassy hills and jagged coasts.

At Anakena seven potbellied moai stand at attention on a 52-foot-long stone platform—backs to the Pacific, arms at their sides, heads capped with tall pukao of red scoria, another volcanic rock. They watch over this remote island from a remote age, but when Tuki stares at their faces, he feels a surge of connection. “It’s something strange and energetic,” he says. “This is something produced from my culture. It’s Rapanui.” He shakes his head. “How did they do it?” Easter Island covers just 63 square miles. It lies 2,150 miles west of South America and 1,300 miles east of Pitcairn, its nearest inhabited neighbor. After it was settled, it remained isolated for centuries. All the energy and resources that went into the moai—which range in height from four to 33 feet and in weight to more than 80 tons—came from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed on Easter Sunday in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture.

The moai were carved with stone tools, mostly in a single quarry, then transported without draft animals or wheels to massive stone platforms, or ahu, up to 11 miles away. Tuki’s question—how did they do it?—has vexed legions of visitors in the past half century. But lately the moai have been drawn into a larger debate, one that opposes two distinct visions of Easter Island’s past—and of humanity in general. The first, eloquently expounded by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, presents the island as a cautionary parable: the most extreme case of a society wantonly destroying itself by wrecking its environment. Can the whole planet, Diamond asks, avoid the same fate? In the other view, the ancient Rapanui are uplifting emblems of human resilience and ingenuity—one example being their ability to walk giant statues upright across miles of uneven terrain. When the Polynesian settlers arrived at Rapa Nui, they had been at sea for weeks in open canoes. There were probably only a few dozen of them.

Nowadays 12 flights arrive every week from Chile, Peru, and Tahiti, and in 2011 those planes delivered 50,000 tourists, ten times the island’s population. Just three decades ago, cars, electricity, and phone service were scarce; now Hanga Roa, the only town, buzzes with Internet cafés, bars, and dance clubs, and cars and pickup trucks clog the streets on Saturday nights. Wealthy tourists drop a thousand dollars a night at the poshest of scores of hotels. A Birkenstock shop caters to footsore ramblers. “The island is not an island anymore,” says Kara Pate, 40, a Rapanui sculptor. She’s married to a German she met here 23 years ago. Chile annexed Easter Island in 1888, but until 1953 it allowed a Scottish company to manage the island as a giant sheep ranch. The sheep ranged freely, while the Rapanui were penned into Hanga Roa. In 1964 they revolted, later obtaining Chilean citizenship and the right to elect their own mayor.

Ambivalence toward el conti (the continent) runs high. Easter Islanders depend on Chile for fuel and daily air shipments of food. They speak Spanish and go to the mainland for higher education. Meanwhile, Chilean migrants, lured in part by the island’s income tax exemption, gladly take jobs that Rapanui spurn. “A Rapanui will say, What, you think I’m going to wash dishes?” says Beno Atán, a 27-year-old tour guide and a native himself. Though many Rapanui have married mainlanders, some worry their culture is being diluted. The population is now around 5,000, nearly double what it was 20 years ago, and fewer than half the people are Rapanui. Just about every job on Easter Island depends on tourism. “Without it,” says Mahina Lucero Teao, head of the tourism chamber, “everyone would be starving on the island.” The mayor, Luz Zasso Paoa, says, “Our patrimony is the base of our economy. You’re not here for us, but for that patrimony.” That is, for the moai.

Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer whose Pacific expeditions helped ignite the world’s curiosity about Easter Island, thought the statues had been created by pre-Inca from Peru, not by Polynesians. Erich von Däniken, the best-selling Swiss author of Chariots of the Gods, was sure the moai were built by stranded extraterrestrials. Modern science—linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence—has proved the moai builders were Polynesian but not how they moved their creations. Researchers have tended to assume the ancestors dragged the statues somehow, using a lot of ropes and wood. “The experts can say whatever they want,” says Suri Tuki, 25, José Tuki’s half brother. “But we know the truth. The statues walked.” In the Rapanui oral tradition, the moai were animated by mana, a spiritual force transmitted by powerful ancestors. There are no reports of moai building after Europeans arrived in the 18th century. By then Easter Island had only a few scrawny trees.

In the 1970s and 1980s, though, biogeographer John Flenley of New Zealand’s Massey University found evidence—pollen preserved in lake sediments—that the island had been covered in lush forests, including millions of giant palm trees, for thousands of years. Only after the Polynesians arrived around A.D. 800 had those forests given way to grasslands. Jared Diamond drew heavily on Flenley’s work for his assertion in Collapse, his influential 2005 book, that ancient Easter Islanders committed unintentional ecocide. They had the bad luck, Diamond argues, to have settled an extremely fragile island—dry, cool, and remote, which means it’s poorly fertilized by windblown dust or volcanic ash. (Its own volcanoes are quiescent.) When the islanders cleared the forests for firewood and farming, the forests didn’t grow back. As wood became scarce and the islanders could no longer build seagoing canoes for fishing, they ate the birds. Soil erosion decreased their crop yields. Before Europeans showed up, the Rapanui had descended into civil war and cannibalism.

The collapse of their isolated civilization, Diamond writes, is “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources” and “a worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead of us in our own future.” The moai, he thinks, accelerated the self-destruction. Diamond interprets them as power displays by rival chieftains who, trapped on a remote little island, lacked other ways of strutting their stuff. They competed by building ever bigger statues. Diamond thinks they laid the moai on wooden sledges, hauled over log rails—a technique successfully tested by UCLA archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Project—but that required both a lot of wood and a lot of people. To feed the people, even more land had to be cleared. When the wood was gone and civil war began, the islanders began toppling the moai. By the 19th century none were standing. Easter Island’s landscape acquired the aura of tragedy that, in the eyes of Diamond and many others, it retains today.

Rearrange and reinterpret the scattered shards of fact, though, and you get a more optimistic vision of the Rapa Nui past—that of archaeologists Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo of California State University Long Beach, who have studied the island for the past decade. It’s a vision peopled by peaceful, ingenious moai builders and careful stewards of the land. Hunt and Lipo agree that Easter Island lost its lush forests and that it was an “ecological catastrophe”—but the islanders themselves weren’t to blame. And the moai certainly weren’t. There is indeed much to learn from Easter Island, Hunt says, “but the story is different.” His and Lipo’s controversial new version, based on their research and others’, begins with their own excavation at Anakena beach. It has convinced them that the Polynesians didn’t arrive until A.D. 1200, about four centuries later than is commonly understood, which would leave them only five centuries to denude the landscape. Slashing and burning wouldn’t have been enough, Hunt and Lipo think. Anyway, another tree killer was present.

When archaeologists dig up nuts from the extinct Easter Island palm, the nuts are often marred by tiny grooves, made by the sharp teeth of Polynesian rats. The rats arrived in the same canoes as the first settlers. Abundant bones in the Anakena dig suggest the islanders dined on them, but otherwise the rodents had no predators. In just a few years, Hunt and Lipo calculate, they would have overrun the island. Feasting on palm nuts, they would have prevented the reseeding of the slow-growing trees and thereby doomed Rapa Nui’s forest, even if humans hadn’t been slashing and burning. No doubt the rats ate birds’ eggs too. Of course, the settlers bear responsibility for bringing the rats; Hunt and Lipo suspect they did so intentionally. (They also brought chickens.) But like invasive species today, the Polynesian rats did more harm to the ecosystem than to the humans who transported them. Hunt and Lipo see no evidence that Rapanui civilization collapsed when the palm forest did; based on their own archaeological survey of the island, they think its population grew rapidly after settlement to around 3,000 and then remained more or less stable until the arrival of Europeans.

Cleared fields were more valuable to the Rapanui than palm forests were. But they were wind-lashed, infertile fields watered by erratic rains. Easter Island was a tough place to make a living. It required heroic efforts. In farming, as in moai moving, the islanders shifted monumental amounts of rock—but into their fields, not out. They built thousands of circular stone windbreaks, called manavai, and gardened inside them. They mulched whole fields with broken volcanic rocks to keep the soil moist and fertilized it with nutrients that the volcanoes were no longer spreading. In short, Hunt, Lipo, and others contend, the prehistoric Rapanui were pioneers of sustainable farming, not inadvertent perpetrators of ecocide. “Rather than a case of abject failure, Rapa Nui is an unlikely story of success,” Hunt and Lipo argue in their recent book. It’s called The Statues That Walked, and the Rapanui enjoy better spin in it than they do in Collapse. Hunt and Lipo don’t trust oral history accounts of violent conflict among the Rapanui; sharp obsidian flakes that other archaeologists see as weapons, they see as farm tools.

The moai helped keep the peace, they argue, not only by signaling the power of their builders but also by limiting population growth: People raised statues rather than children. What’s more, moving the moai required few people and no wood, because they were walked upright. On that issue, Hunt and Lipo say, evidence supports the folklore. Sergio Rapu, 63, a Rapanui archaeologist and former Easter Island governor who did graduate work with Hunt, took his American colleagues to the ancient quarry on Rano Raraku, the island’s southeastern volcano. Looking at the many moai abandoned there in various stages of completion, Rapu explained how they were engineered to walk: Fat bellies tilted them forward, and a D-shaped base allowed handlers to roll and rock them side to side. Last year, in experiments funded by National Geographic’s Expeditions Council, Hunt and Lipo showed that as few as 18 people could, with three strong ropes and a bit of practice, easily maneuver a 10-foot, 5-ton moai replica a few hundred yards. In real life, walking miles with much larger moai would have been a tense business. Dozens of fallen statues line the roads leading away from the quarry.

But many more made it to their platforms intact. No one knows for sure when the last statue was carved. The moai cannot be dated directly. Many were still standing when the Dutch arrived in 1722, and Rapanui civilization was peaceful and thriving then, Hunt and Lipo argue. But the explorers introduced deadly diseases to which islanders had no immunity, along with artifacts that replaced the moai as status symbols. Snatching Europeans’ hats—Hunt and Lipo cite many reports of this—became more appealing than hoisting a multiton red pukao onto a moai. In the 19th century slave traders decimated the population, which shriveled to 111 people by 1877. As Hunt and Lipo tell it, Easter Island’s story is a parable of genocide and culturecide, not ecocide. Their friend Sergio Rapu buys some but not all of it. “Don’t tell me those obsidian tools were just for agriculture,” he says, laughing. “I’d love to hear that my people never ate each other. But I’m afraid they did.” Today islanders confront a fresh challenge: exploiting their cultural legacy without wrecking it.

A growing population and thousands of tourists are straining a limited water supply. The island lacks a sewer system and a place to put the swelling volume of trash; between 2009 and mid-2011 it shipped 230 tons to the mainland. “So what do we do?” asks Zasso Paoa, the mayor. “Limit migration? Limit tourism? That’s where we are now.” The island recently started asking tourists to take their trash home with them in their suitcases. Tourists are forbidden to touch moai, but horses happily rub against them, wearing away the porous tuff. Though cars are now the preferred mode of transport, more than 6,000 horses and cattle—“more than people,” grumbles tour guide Atán—still run free, trampling ground once trodden by Scottish-owned sheep and relieving themselves on once sacred platforms. But the islanders’ own desire to develop their ancestral lands may be a greater threat to their densely packed heritage: more than 20,000 archaeological features in all, including walled gardens and stone chicken houses as well as moai and ahu.

More than 40 percent of the island is a protected national park, which limits available land. “People have to learn that archaeology isn’t their enemy,” says Rapu. Decades ago he himself helped get the moai at Anakena back upright. In the process he and his colleagues also discovered how the moai builders had breathed soul into their colossal statues after the long trek from the quarry: As a finishing touch, they placed eyes of white coral and pupils of obsidian or red scoria into the empty sockets. A grove of coconut palms, imported from Tahiti, overlooks Anakena beach today, reassuring sunbathers and Chilean newlyweds that they really are in Polynesia, even if the wind is shrieking and the grassy rolling hills behind them look like the Scottish Highlands. The moai are eyeless now and not confiding—to the tourists, José Tuki, or anyone else—how they got there or which story of Easter Island is true. Tuki, for one, can handle the ambiguity. “I want to know the truth,” he says. “But maybe the island doesn’t tell all its answers.

And maybe knowing everything would take its power away.” Hannah Bloch was a Pakistan correspondent for Time before joining the Geographic as an editor. Randy Olson has shot 27 features, including ones on war-torn Sudan and Congo’s Mbuti Pygmies . Society Grant Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo’s moai experiment was funded by your Society membership. |

Question: Which isolated British island is half way between Easter Island and Tahiti?
Answer: PITCAIRN ISLAND