I was reading about Easter Island and the monoliths (Moai) on Atlas Obscura.
I vaguely remembered from school that there were almost no trees on the island and that there were all of these mysteries that surrounded them. Who built them? Why? How?
I didn’t realize that we know the answers to most of these questions, nor did I realize just how horrible the history of the island was.
I started to think about the island based just on the Atlas Obscura entry. It got me thinking about use of resources and problem solving. There was an idea forming in the back of my mind that was saying: “Be careful what you consider to be a solution to your problems” which then developed into: “Easter Island is what happens when you don’t pay attention to the environmental impact you have as a human being and rely too much on spiritualism and/or religion to solve your problems”.
The island is only 45 square miles total. In the 16th and 17th centuries, statue building accelerated, and the population grew, reaching around 40,000. Then, around the year 1160, the whole thing collapsed. Some 2,000 people live on the island now, and the landscape is barren. No trees grow here except for a few invasive and problematic eucalyptus groves.
The article describes how the island’s original inhabitants at one point used the lumber on the island to build fishing boats and move the giant moai. It briefly describes how the monoliths were created and moved into place, but the most interesting thing is what they were:
These sculptures (often called heads, though they are in fact disproportionately sized full-body figures, often seen buried halfway in dirt) represent specific ancestors. These representations were erected between the village and chaos — the ocean — as a wall of protection. The two major tribes of Easter Island lived in a tropical rain-forest, a paradise of food and fishing, with plenty of time to put into the Great Work of the statues.
This was leading me to think of the island in comparison to the West in the 21st century. How we think about our resources, how we rely on religion and spiritualism as a means of problem solving instead of really looking at the problems that surround us.
Are we going to be as stuck as the original island’s inhabitants were when the oil runs dry or becomes too expensive? How will we deal with that? Will we erect huge monoliths to help or protect us? Will we use up the last of our resources in an attempt to delay the inevitable?
How could a people smart enough to navigate to tiny landfalls on thousands of miles of Pacific ocean and capable of vast engineering projects like the Moai statues be so unable to deal with the coming of a doom which must have been obvious on such a tiny island?
It may have been easier then we imagine. A few years ago, locals on Easter Island discovered they could catch and sell lobsters from around the island. They then caught and sold those lobsters until there were no more.
Though much is known about the Moais, there’s lots more archaeology to do on Easter Island than digging up stone sculptures. Researchers are just starting on the villages — and their story is one of the most compelling on Earth: Humans can make their own bad luck. In the case of Easter Island, ever larger and larger statues were not the right defense.
Of course nothing is ever easy or as simple. *
When you read the Wikipedia article linked at the beginning of this post, you get a much richer and more traumatic history of the island.
Slave raids, Catholic missionaries, intentional germ warfare (smallpox), and any number of horrible, monstrous things. So it isn’t as clean and easy as the shorter article makes it out to be. Few things are.
It did get me thinking, though, that perhaps if the island were closer to the rest of the colonial possessions it could have ended up more like Haiti – perhaps the reason that Haiti is still what it is is because it has proximity to both help and information?
Just thinking about stuff.
*In all fairness, to Atlas Obscura, they are an amazing website that isn’t meant to be comprehensive. Their goal is to bring neat places to the attention of people who are interested in… neat places. I am in no way criticizing their narrative, just adding to it and making some commentary that is outside of their scope.