Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island

Though popular, this has always been a controversial idea. In presenting an alternative, I incorporate recent research that has probed the popular history and found it wanting. In addition, I combine this new research with my own, as well as with my general insights as an archaeologist, to construct a quite different story. In the process, however, I reveal something I believe to be of equal importance. The collapse theory is unwittingly the latest instance in a long saga of imperial colonial thinking about a small island community. What began as slavery and brutal exploitation of people remote from Europe and North America lives on in judgmental theories of cultural failure and self-destruction—to say nothing of the patronizing silliness of lost civilizations, floods, and aliens. It is time to move on, and it's my hope that this book can become the start of a new discussion around the history of Rapa Nui. The big question should not be: Why did Islanders cut down all the trees? Not even: How did they survive? It should be: How did they do so well?

In Part I ("Prey"), the book begins with the arrival in 1722 of the first Europeans to see Rapa Nui. The Dutch expedition was among four, from different countries, to visit in the eighteenth century and return with detailed reports. By then the island had been home for over five centuries to the communities that built the statues. These reports tell us the Rapanui people were farming with practices only then being explored in Enlightenment Europe. This is a special insight, because a century later, over a few crucial months in the 1860s, those living on the island had their world turned upside down by slave traders. Murder and kidnapping initiated a precipitous population decline, accompanied by Islanders' culture being suppressed and their land taken from them. As a result, the first European and American scientific expeditions, which soon followed the slavers, saw great statues that, they imagined, could not have been created by the people who greeted them.

Part II ("Postmortem") opens with the Routledges preparing to set out in their private yacht on a three-year voyage to the Pacific, with a crew of English fishermen and a Royal Navy navigator. It became one of the great travel adventures of the time. Their stay on Rapa Nui was unexpectedly extended to sixteen months by a revolution and the arrival of Germany's Pacific war fleet. Katherine used the time to add, to their surveys and excavations, unrepeatable interviews with the rapidly shrinking older generation of Indigenous Islanders. She acquired a profound understanding of the island, but back in England, criticized by professional, male anthropologists, she adjusted her views. Seeking further evidence, she and Scoresby returned to the Pacific, obtaining more important material. By now she was starting to show signs of mental illness, and their marriage was failing. She died alone, unable to access her records or write her promised books. She provided in her will for full publication, however, and she hoped her priceless archives would go to the British Museum. That none of that happened is an untold scandal that deprived Pacific peoples of insights into their heritage. It has yet to be rectified.

Other expeditions went to the island bemoaning Katherine's lost records. The nineteenth-century narrative of cannibalism and Indigenous wars continued unchecked. It was later exacerbated by a dominant theory with racist undertones, in which Rapa Nui was discovered not by Polynesians but by people coming from South America, which itself gave way to a new concept of ecocide—the false notion that Islanders had destroyed their own home.

The only way to escape these long-held misunderstandings, I argue, is to ignore island legends (which have nothing to do with ancient Rapa Nui, despite their frequent use for building histories), to question everything (much of the academic and popular writing to date is misleading), and to build a new narrative from the ground up. This means drawing on the most up-to-date archaeological and scientific evidence, inspired by Katherine Routledge's vision, and using key information from her and Scoresby's records. That is what I do in Part III ("Life").

I begin in the vastness of the Pacific. Introducing the wider world of Polynesian archaeology and history, I ask, Who discovered Rapa Nui, how, and when? What did the sailors bring with them, and what did they find? With new estimates for the size of the island's population, I show how it was perfectly feasible for all the statues, and the many other stone monuments Islanders created, to have been carved and moved in only a few centuries, between discovery around AD 1200—later than many have proposed—and the Dutch expedition in 1722. I set out new ideas about the statues, about how and when they were carved and raised, and what they meant to people in their daily lives, and in their ideas about themselves and their world. I attempt to convey something of the sheer scale and beauty of the enterprise, an astonishing, unique sculptural and engineering achievement.

Only five or six generations separated the first European ship from the first slaver. Yet in that time, I argue, occurred some of the most remarkable things ever seen on this remarkable island. With written records and Katherine Routledge's interviews, we can see details of a kind out of reach in earlier centuries. Responding to unexpected visitors, Islanders reinvented their beliefs and rituals and created something powerful and entirely new.