F
or sheer remoteness,hardly any place on earth comes close to Easter Island.South America is forty-three hundred miles to the east, Tahiti twenty-three hundred to the west. Yet somehow, though seemingly isolated from more technologically ad-vanced civilizations, the inhabitants of the island carved hundreds of huge monolithic statues in the shape of men, many of them higher than a three-story building. Somehow these same islanders then transported these moai throughout the land, erected many of them on stone platforms, and topped them off with giant blocks of red stone.
The statues were still standing in 1722 when the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen spotted the island on Easter Sunday (thus the name). Wrote Roggeveen: “These stone im-ages at first caused us to be struck with astonishment, because we could not comprehend how it was possible that these people . . . had been able to erect such images, which were fully thirty feet high and thick in proportion.”
Just over fifty-two years later, Captain James Cook stopped briefly at Easter Island while searching for a long-suspected (but nonexistent) continent in the southern Pacific.
Cook, too, was amazed: “We could hardly conceive how these islanders, wholly unac-quainted with any mechanical power, could raise such stupendous figures, and after-wards place the large cylindric stones upon their heads.”
Who built the Easter Island moai, and why?
Most scientists assumed it must have been Polynesian immigrants, who reached shore after a long but not impossible trip from some island to the west, perhaps in the Marquesas. Few took seriously Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian scientist who, in the late 1940s, formulated a theory that South American Indians had settled on Easter Island and built the moai.
To prove he was right, Heyerdahl decided to build a primitive raft and cross the Pa-cific himself.
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Heyerdahl first came to his theory after noting similarities between the legends of the Easter Islanders and the ancient Incas of Peru. The islanders hailed a white chief-god Tiki as the founder of their race, while the Incas told of a white chief-god Kon-Tiki, whom their forefathers had driven out of Peru onto the Pacific.
Heyerdahl recalled that the first Europeans who visited the island in the eighteenth century were struck by the mysterious presence there of some white-skinned
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tants who stood out from the normally brown-skinned Polynesians. Tiki and Kon-Tiki had to be one and the same, and the white natives of Easter Island must have been his descendants.
Other oral traditions on the island seemed to buttress Heyerdahl’s theory. The is-landers spoke of a race of “long-ears” who pierced their ears and put heavy weights into the lobes until they were artificially lengthened. The long-ears ruled the island until, the story went, the short-ears got fed up with them and overthrew them. Since the moai had ears hanging down almost to their shoulders, Heyerdahl naturally assumed that they were built by the long-ears. And where did the long-ears come from? The islanders’ sto-ries left no doubt: from the east, toward which there was only ocean . . . and South America.
If the long-ears, and Tiki or Kon-Tiki, could cross the Pacific in a balsawood raft, Heyerdahl thought, so could he.
So he headed to the Ecuadoran jungle, where he and his crew felled the biggest trees they could find. Then they peeled off the bark, Indian-style, and lashed nine big logs to-gether with ordinary hemp ropes, using neither nails nor metal in any form. Atop the raft they added an open bamboo cabin, two masts, and a square sail.
The party smashed a coconut against the bow and christened the boat Kon-Tiki. In April 1947, joined by five men and a parrot, Heyerdahl set sail from the coast of Peru.
Easter Island moai, their backs (as always) to the Pacific. (Wolfgang Kaehler/Corbis)
Heyerdahl’s was a sea adventure to rival Moby Dick. With just harpoons, his crew fought off a whale shark so huge that when it swam under the raft, its head was visible on one side while the whole of its tail stuck out on the other side. The drinking water be-came brackish after two months, but rains replenished the supplies. Breakfast often con-sisted of the bonitos and flying fish that had landed on deck during the night.
The ocean currents and trade winds pushed the raft farther and farther to the west, well beyond Easter Island, in fact. After 101 days at sea, the raft crashed into an uninhab-ited South Sea island east of Tahiti. All six men had survived the trip, though a large wave had washed away the parrot.
Heyerdahl was exultant: the Kon-Tiki expedition proved it was possible for a simple raft to cross the Pacific. But just because it could have happened didn’t mean it did hap-pen. To prove that South Americans settled on Easter Island, Heyerdahl needed more evidence.
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In 1955, Heyerdahl again set off for Easter Island, this time in a converted trawler and ac-companied by a crew of professional scientists. Ironically, the scientists who first came under Heyerdahl’s aegis, along with those who followed, ended up largely discrediting his theory.
For one thing, their radiocarbon dating placed people on the island by the fifth cen-tury A.D., with the earliest moai going up some time between 900 and 1000. Yet the Tiahuanaco culture in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia, where Heyerdahl believed the islanders originated, didn’t extend its influence to the South American coast until about
A.D. 1000. How could these South Americans cross the ocean before they even descended the mountains?
Moreover, the expedition found no trace on Easter Island of pottery or textiles, the two most characteristic products of Peruvian culture. In contrast, archaeologists on the Galapagos, a chain of Pacific islands far closer to South America, found numerous frag-ments of pots, at least some of which were clearly the same kind made by the pre–Inca South Americans.
Studies in other disciplines further undercut Heyerdahl. Botanists determined that the island’s totora reed was distinct from the kind found in Peru. Sweet potatoes on the island, which Heyerdahl made much of as a link to South America, could have come from elsewhere in Polynesia.
Linguistic analyses also pointed to the west. Many of the islanders’ words appeared to be similar to their Polynesian equivalents, and the discrepancies could easily be attrib-uted to the long years of isolation. The island’s “Rongorongo” script was also determined to have more in common with Polynesian writing than Peruvian.
Measurements of skeletons, too, showed the islanders had more in common with Southeast Asians than South Americans, and most scientists concluded the early Euro-pean visitors’ descriptions of fair-skinned people must have been exaggerated. After all, only some of the early accounts of Easter Islanders mentioned white skin; others, such as
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the famously observant Captain Cook, wrote that “in colour, features, and language, they bear such affinity to the people of the more western islands, that no one will doubt that they have had the same origin.”
As for the old tales of Tiki and Kon-Tiki, these were just stories, according to most sci-entists. All of them had to be taken, in the words of Paul Bahn, “with a large pinch of ma-rine salt.” Bahn criticized Heyerdahl for his selective use of oral traditions, which allowed him to emphasize those that supported his theory while ignoring other stories—for exam-ple, that Hotu Matua, the island’s first king, came from an island called Hiva. That’s a com-monplace name in the Marquesas, twenty-one hundred miles northwest of Easter Island.
Even the dramatic Kon-Tiki voyage wasn’t spared from the sober inquisitions of sci-ence. Pre-Inca Indians used paddles, not sails, some argued, and the desert coast of Peru had none of the light woods needed for rafts or canoes. Moreover, the Kon-Tiki had been towed fifty nautical miles from shore, thus avoiding the currents that would have carried Heyerdahl somewhere up the coast to Panama, rather than anywhere near Polynesia.
The onslaught of scientific analyses that began with Heyerdahl’s 1955–1956 expedition led to an even stronger consensus that Polynesians were Easter Island’s first settlers. Un-like the South American Indians, the Polynesians had extensive experience on the seas, colonizing other islands such as Hawaii and New Zealand. Some scientists went so far as to contend that any evidence of a mingling of South American and Polynesian cultures (such as some Easter Island–style spearheads found in Chile) could be attributed to Poly-nesian sailors who may have ventured to the New World and then returned home.
That was little consolation to Heyerdahl, who continued to maintain that the discov-erers were sailing west, not east. He continued to fight the historiographic tide, revisiting the island and defending his thesis even as fewer and fewer listened.
That should not diminish his achievements, however. It was Heyerdahl who arranged for the first scientific expedition to Easter Island and who allowed the scientists who ac-companied him to conduct their research free of bias. And it was Heyerdahl’s much publicized expeditions that inspired other scientists to go there themselves and to con-tinue the search for the moai’s sculptors.
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The consensus view that Polynesians first settled Easter Island provides at least a par-tial explanation for the giant statues. Ancestor worship was common throughout Polyne-sia, so the moai may have been some sort of monument set up by the island’s tribes or families to honor their dead. The red stone blocks that topped the largest of the moai could have evolved from the Marquesas tradition of placing a stone on the image of a dead man as a sign of mourning.
Yet there was another mystery about these moai, which Cook had noticed during his brief visit. Many of the statues had been toppled from their platforms, and some had ap-parently been deliberately beheaded.
Why would a people who devoted such a colossal effort to their moai deliberately topple them? What happened between Roggeveen’s 1722 visit, when they were apparently still standing, and Cook’s arrival in 1784?
Heyerdahl blamed Polynesian immigrants, who he said arrived before the Europeans and went to war against the descendants of the original South American settlers. He turned again to the island’s traditions, which recounted a revolt of the “short-ears”
against the island’s eared rulers. Perhaps the short-ears overthrew both the long-ears and their statues, he speculated.
Again, though, the lack of archaeological evidence has undercut Heyerdahl’s theory.
There are no architectural or artifactual traces of a sudden influx of new cultural influ-ences at that point in Easter Island history, or at any other point, for that matter.
Archaeologists did find large quantities of spearheads and daggers dating from the period prior to the European discovery, leading many to conclude that warfare must have played a part in toppling the moai and the culture that worshiped them. The appearance in rock art of the period of “birdmen” seems also to indicate a new cult that may have re-placed ancestor worship.
Most scientists believe an ecological crisis led the islanders to fight for ever-scarcer re-sources. Overpopulation and deforestation were already serious problems by the six-teenth century, when some of the largest moai were erected. Some archaeologists have suggested that the building spree may have been spurred by an increasingly desperate de-sire for divine intervention. When their ancestors failed to help, the islanders may have lost faith in them and angrily toppled the statues.
Instead of the islanders’ ancestors or gods, it was, of course, the Europeans who soon intervened. By the nineteenth century, missionaries and slave traders had virtually eradi-cated what remained of the original Easter Island culture and religion. Yet Europeans (and Americans) also deserve credit for their efforts, albeit belated, to preserve the origi-nal Easter Island culture. In the 1960s, scientists, including some members of Heyerdahl’s expedition, restored several toppled moai to their stone platforms. There they still stand, looking over the islanders (and nowadays, plenty of tourists as well).
Right beyond them, as always, is the Pacific Ocean.
To Investigate Further
Dos Passos, John. Easter Island. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.
A useful anthology of excerpts from accounts of the early European visitors to the island, in-cluding Roggeveen and Cook. Dos Passos’s own visit, which concludes the book, is of much less interest.
Heyerdahl, Thor. Kon-Tiki. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1950.
When it comes to adventures on the sea, Melville has nothing on Heyerdahl.
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———. Aku-Aku. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1958.
A colorful narrative of the 1955–1956 expedition, no less enjoyable because of the author’s iconoclastic views, though slightly marred by his patronizing attitude toward the islanders.
Heyerdahl, Thor, and Edwin Ferdon Jr., eds. Archaeology of Easter Island. Chicago, Rand Mc-Nally, 1961.
Reports from Heyerdahl’s team, many of whom disagreed with their leader.
Heyerdahl, Thor. Easter Island. New York: Random House, 1989.
Heyerdahl’s final defense of his hypothesis did little to convince skeptics, but his account of how the islanders moved the statues is interesting and the volume is beautifully illustrated.
Bahn, Paul, and John Flenley. Earth Island. London: Thames & Hudson, 1992.
The most recent and best popular account of the pro-Polynesian, anti-Heyerdahl position.
The book’s only flaw is that the authors insist on treating Easter Island’s ecological crisis as a metaphor for the earth’s, an approach that makes for admirable environmentalism but poten-tially dubious history.
Fischer, Steven Roger, ed. Easter Island Studies. Oxford: Oxbow, 1993.
A useful if specialized collection of essays on the island’s natural history, settlement, archae-ology, traditions, language, script, and arts.
Van Tilburg, Jo Anne. Easter Island. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
A thorough but somewhat academic overview of the island’s archaeology, ecology, and culture.
Fischer, Steven Roger. Rongorongo. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
How Fischer (sort of) cracked the code of the island’s mysterious hieroglyphic-like script.