Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Mysteries of Easter Island About this episode In the heart of the Pacific Ocean, over 2,000 miles from the nearest continent, lies one of the world’s most iconic archaeological treasure troves - Rapa Nui, known to the outside world as Easter Island. Famed for the towering stone faces of the moai, the island has undergone extraordinary transformations since it was first settled.
Joining us to explain the island's fascinating history is James Grant-Peterkin, a cultural historian and someone who has lived and worked on the island for over 20 years.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Tim Arstall.
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2:17 Dan Snow? In the heart of the Pacific Ocean, over 2,000 miles from the nearest continental landmass, lies one of the world's most iconic archaeological treasure troves. They're on Rapa Nui, known to the outside world as Easter Island. Now, most of us are familiar with the towering stone faces of the Mauai that gaze inland across that windswept volcanic landscape. These giant monolithic figures are the last sentinels of a once thriving society.
2:56 Dan Snow? Rapa Nui was first settled by Polynesians about 1,000 years ago, after one of the greatest voyages of discovery in history. But then became isolated from the rest of the world, and in isolation, those settlers built a rich and complex culture. It was rooted in ancestor worship, astronomy, and ritual. But then something happened. The forests vanished. The Mauai were toppled. And for centuries, the collapse of the society has been the subject of really fierce debate. Was it an ecological catastrophe brought on by the people, by deforestation, by overpopulation? Or is there a more nuanced story of resilience and adaptation in the face of outside interference,
3:40 Dan Snow? contact with the rest of the world?
3:44 Dan Snow? Joining me today on Dan Snow's History, to explore the island's extraordinary past, we've got James Grant Peterkin. He's a cultural historian, someone who's lived and worked on the island for over 20 years. You can watch this episode on our YouTube channel. Every Friday, we release a new filmed episode. You can find the link in our show notes. But for those of you sticking with audio only, this is a story of discovery and human ingenuity and survival adaptation in one of the most remote places on Earth. Enjoy.
4:18 Speaker 05 There is first from blank unit. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
4:30 Dan Snow? James, thanks so much for coming on.
4:31 Speaker 02 Thank you for having me.
4:32 Dan Snow? Shockingly, given this is a history podcast, we're going to start with some geography. Give us a sense of just how remote this island is.
4:39 Speaker 02 So Easter Island, or Rapanui, to give it its Polynesian name. It's one of the most isolated inhabited islands anywhere on the planet. Two and a half thousand miles off the west coast of South America. Halfway between Chile and French Polynesia. But perhaps put it in real terms, it takes five and a half hours to fly there from the nearest international airport.
4:59 Dan Snow? No. Okay, and is it significant apart from the statues? But is it significant because it's sort of at the end? People might think about the Pacific as this long spray of islands going right across. But Easter Island is right at the end of that, is it?
5:12 Speaker 02 It is, so it's the easternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle.
5:15 Dan Snow? Okay.
5:15 Speaker 02 So Easter Island is really the culmination of this incredible human settlement that took place over at least 5,000 years. That meant that humans ultimately settled pretty much every habitable island in the Pacific.
5:29 Dan Snow? And okay, we're going to come into that voyaging, but does that mean they inhabited it sort of last? Did it take the longest time to get there?
5:34 Speaker 02 Yes, so the generally accepted theory is that New Zealand was the very last one, Aotearoa, when the Maori eventually arrived in about 1200. But it seems that prior to that and just shortly before then, humans also reached Easter Island as well.
5:47 Dan Snow? Okay, so you spent a long time there.
5:51 Speaker 02 I spent more than 20 years living there.
5:53 Dan Snow? I love it. I love, just tell us a story of how you arrived there in the first place.
5:55 Speaker 02 So I was on a year between school and university. I needed to learn Spanish, so I went to Chile. People took one look at me and spoke to me in English. I couldn't get any Spanish.
6:06 Dan Snow? Can't imagine why, I thought you just looked like a local.
6:08 Speaker 02 I know. And then suddenly this opportunity came to go to Easter Island to work. And I thought, this is it. It was a place I'd been fascinated by as a child. And I suddenly thought, this is the opportunity to actually go and not just visit, but to live there. And so I spent four months there, I think, and I was absolutely captivated.
6:25 Dan Snow? And when you were there, I'm not suggesting you're very old, but was it perhaps not super developed for tourism and visiting?
6:30 Speaker 02 It wasn't, I mean, this was 1996, so it was a while back. And no, I couldn't believe it. The island was surprisingly underdeveloped for tourism. And it just seemed there was this absolute goldmine in terms of archaeology, history, culture, and no one was coming to see it. I couldn't believe it.
6:47 Dan Snow? Okay, we're going to get on to the island itself and say, one of my favourite topics in world history is the maritime expansion of the Polynesian people.
6:53 Speaker 02 Really?
6:54 Dan Snow? Yeah. Their navigation, their technology. These people spread across, these islands are uninhabited until fairly recently. Where did the Polynesians come from?
7:03 Speaker 02 So the general consensus is that they came from Taiwan.
7:06 Dan Snow? Oh, interesting, isn't it?
7:07 Speaker 02 And that about 6,000 years ago, a seafaring people embarked from Taiwan on their canoes and slowly, gradually began exploring the islands to the east of there.
7:18 Dan Snow? So 6,000 years, that's when passage tombs were being built around Britain, for example. Stonehenge is not far off. And yet, until that point, there's no human settlement on these islands at all.
7:28 Speaker 02 No, the entire Pacific, as far as we know, is uninhabited. And therefore, they had an absolutely blank canvas to go out there and explore and settle.
7:36 Dan Snow? And what were the technological hacks that they had? What, the boat building, the astronomy? How did they do that?
7:41 Speaker 02 So it seems to be obviously a mix of an enormous number of factors. They introduced the outrigger, this idea of stabilising these large canoes.
7:50 Dan Snow? So canoe with outriggers, like a bit that sort of sticks off the side.
7:53 Speaker 02 On one side or sometimes on both sides. And so that gives you greater stability.
7:56 Dan Snow? With a sort of, almost like a mini canoe at either side.
7:58 Speaker 02 Exactly. So if you think of a trimaran today, but it's actually much smaller on either side.
8:02 Dan Snow? It's where you stick your young kids when you're on holiday and they sort of cling on.
8:05 Speaker 02 Exactly. But it was more than that. It was the understanding of the constellations, of the environment around them, that enabled them to really carve these almost sort of highways down the ocean that meant that by using the stars, by using certain particular constellations, or the sun and the moon, they were able to actually mark routes down which they could navigate down, but also come home as well.
8:27 Dan Snow? And they had these techniques, they could tell when a wave had hit a seashore and then was reflecting back. So even if you couldn't see the shore, you sort of went, hang on a second, I think we're near an island. All these little things that they were able to notice.
8:39 Speaker 02 So it's the ability to sense changes in swell and in current and things like that. So if you think if you've got an obstacle in the water far ahead of you, but long before you can see it, that obstacle will actually create the way in which the water moves around it. And to an experienced Polynesian navigator, he or she will be able to actually sense that. They couldn't see it, but they could apparently feel it. So that they would lie in the middle of the canoe and actually with their body feel the motion of the ocean.
9:05 Dan Snow? See, that is just...
9:06 Speaker 02 And by that, they would know that there was something, or possibly something up ahead, that was changing the shape of that swell. And that's just one example of the dozens of techniques that they had that helped them to therefore find these islands.
9:19 Dan Snow? And what I love about it is because of the relative lateness of European exploitation into that world, we've actually been able to save some of those oral traditions and those stories. We've sort of, modern scholarship has been able to write them down. So we do have that connection with the past. We actually know, which isn't, say, true of the Vikings. We actually really do know how they were able to use the stars.
9:40 Speaker 02 Well, exactly. So having had this prolonged period of isolation from the rest of the world, you ended up with this incredibly robust oral history. It meant that when the Europeans did arrive, sort of 17th, 18th century onwards, that they'd already found very established societies, established communities who had these traditions, very much inherent in their, in their practice, in their upbringing.
10:02 Dan Snow? Okay. Talk to me about some of these distances. Once they'd gone to these places, did they then become sort of isolated? Or were they cruising about between Hawaii and Papua New Guinea? Is this a real trading and exchange system in this Pacific?
10:16 Speaker 02 I think to a certain degree, yes. I mean, unlikely to have been from one corner of the Polynesian triangle to the other. But if you think of, for example, the Hawaiian islands, of which you've got at least half a dozen sizable islands, they of course would all be trading with each other. And so if you were missing, say, obsidian or wood or gene pool or something you needed to acquire, then of course you could do it from a neighboring island. And that's why when you look at the map of the Pacific, you can actually almost kind of group it together into these clusters of islands. The big exception to all of this is Easter Island, where there is nothing else around it, and that's why it becomes this exception, even in Polynesia.
10:55 Dan Snow? So it takes five hours to fly there even today, if there are human beings there. So someone got on a boat and just took off into the horizon and arrived at Easter Island. I mean extraordinarily, does that imply that lots of people went off in all sorts of different directions and never came back?
11:11 Speaker 02 I think we have to assume that this was needle in a haystack stuff, and of course, you never hear about the ones that failed. Yes, they had a system where they would sail up to the halfway point, it's believed, of their food and water and things like that. If they hadn't then found land by then, they could turn around and by having gone against the prevailing winds and currents, generally in this easterly direction, they could turn around and then get home, as long as their map reading was fine, they could get home in a faster time.
11:37 Dan Snow? So they're sending out these scouting parties?
11:39 Speaker 02 Exactly.
11:39 Dan Snow? Over hundreds of miles of ocean?
11:42 Speaker 02 Because I think common sense says you wouldn't load up an enormous great canoe with women and children and plants and animals and everything you need to begin a new society if you don't already know that there is definitely an island that you're going to that you've pinpointed and marked. And so these scouts, and these are the unsung heroes of Polynesia, if you like, because these were the people that were going out and having to try and find these remote islands.
12:06 Dan Snow? How did their culture, how does their religion, music, culture sort of underpin the sort of bravery and professionalism needed to sustain those expeditions?
12:14 Speaker 02 Well, certainly on Easter Island, I mean, they still have, certainly in the songs that they sing, vivid accounts of that first voyage, of the first king that set foot on the island. And so there is certainly a recognition that these voyages were absolutely pioneering in their nature. I think the scouts are the one group that perhaps don't get the recognition that they deserve, because, like a lot of things, you only remember the winners.
12:38 Dan Snow? And we talk about this drive to discover new islands. Is that because population grows, everything just gets a bit young, bored, men and women go, let's go and start our own thing somewhere else? And is there just a culture of expansion or are they being forced off by shortages of food and resource?
12:52 Speaker 02 I think it's a real mix. So I think in some cases, yes, you've got overpopulation on small islands, lack of resources, you need to move on to a new island. Intertribal warfare features a lot in Polynesian oral history. So if two factions are fighting, clearly the losing faction probably has to find a new home to live in. But what's amazing is that even on islands where seemingly they were living in relative harmony and lack of diseases, things like that, there is still this human drive, which is wonderful because we see it even today, this human drive to get out there and discover what's over the horizon and the fact that you can be living happily on your island. But many people have this inherent curiosity to get out there and see, whether it's to go and travel to another country, as we're fortunate enough to do today, or in the case
13:36 Speaker 02 of the Polynesians, to get out there and literally go and discover what was beyond what they could see.
13:42 Dan Snow? It's just wild. So on Rapanui, Easter Island, it's the furthest end of the chain. So what date do we think people arrived there?
13:48 Speaker 02 About 1000 AD, so about 1000 years ago.
13:50 Dan Snow? Okay. And are there traditions of names, people that arrived?
13:55 Speaker 02 They know the first king, Hotumatua, who was the first king to apparently lead this party of people to the island. But what's so interesting about Easter Island is you don't then hear about subsequent voyages. And so it seems to be almost this closing of the door behind them when this first group arrived.
14:10 Dan Snow? So they do get quite isolated after that?
14:13 Speaker 02 Yes, and that's why if we take it to the extreme, it's perhaps 700 years of isolation until the Europeans arrive and discover for Europe this particular island in the South Pacific.
14:23 Dan Snow? And so it must be so fascinating for you as a historian to look at how Easter Island culture, Rapanui culture differs from the Maori in New Zealand or other islands. Do they branch away quite rapidly?
14:34 Speaker 02 Well, it's one of these things where you've got this common ancestor and so you've got the culture has a centre to it in modern day, say, French Polynesia. And then as you go to the other islands in the region, you start to see bits that of course look identical and then you see bits that are completely different. And I was always interested in the language. I mean, my studies were in the linguistics of the island. And so it was fascinating to go to, say, New Zealand and work out that if you changed certain letters, the Rapanui that you speak on Easter Island was still remarkably similar to New Zealand Maori.
15:06 Dan Snow? And just how far away is that? We're talking?
15:08 Speaker 02 Six thousand miles away or something. So, I mean, it's distances that are just unfathomable in any other part of the world if it wasn't the Pacific Ocean, where the scale is just, you know, everything is off the scale.
15:20 Dan Snow? You mentioned earlier that they're taking women, children, that this is a community on the move. How about plants and are they stocking ponds with fish? I mean, is there a whole suite of tools and resources they need to sustain themselves?
15:32 Speaker 02 So it seems that much of the expertise of the scouts wasn't solely in finding these islands, it was working out what was there and what was missing. And so with this information, they would come back to the homeland, wherever that was, and then load up these large, double-hulled ocean voyaging canoes with not just a genetically viable human population, but also actually then plants that they felt they would need and also species of animals that they thought would be beneficial for their survival on this new virgin land because it's untouched.
16:02 Dan Snow? Speaking of genetics and things, have they done the DNA and worked out how many mating pairs of humans arrived on that island? Was it?
16:10 Speaker 02 The oral histories has two large ocean-going canoes and that's possibly maybe a maximum of 80 people on each one.
16:15 Dan Snow? It's enough to get us started.
16:17 Speaker 02 It's enough to start. But clearly, and this is where again, other islands had the benefit, that if your gene pool is starting to get a bit thin, you can then go on date nights to other islands. One of the many amazing success stories of Easter Island is the fact that they seemingly didn't have this contact with any other island and therefore just how strict they had to be in keeping families separate, first cousins from, you know.
16:41 Dan Snow? Oh, there were protocols.
16:42 Speaker 02 I'm sure there were because there are even to this day, where you have sometimes have young couples that will get together and then suddenly a grandparent will come along and say, actually, you can't go out with that person.
16:52 Dan Snow? Really?
16:53 Speaker 02 Because, yeah. So on a small island, you can control these things. In a larger community, it would be much more difficult.
16:57 Dan Snow? Grandparents always get a grandparent.
16:59 Speaker 02 Exactly.
17:00 Dan Snow? So what's the soil like on the island?
17:02 Speaker 02 It's surprisingly good because it's volcanic soil, but it's volcanic soil that, I mean, the island, parts of it are three million years old, so it's this great eruption from the seafloor. The island is therefore just the top of a volcano, really. And so, once that soil, as long as it's not overused, that soil is relatively good. The problem, of course, is if you use it too intensively in a short period of time, then of course then...
17:23 Dan Snow? And they had the fishing, they could sustain themselves with the sea as well.
17:26 Speaker 02 Yes. So, I mean, that's really why it's believed that the first Polynesians that arrived there would have seen this island as almost a kind of Polynesian Garden of Eden. And for that reason, perhaps, raised the drawbridge behind them, because they thought, you know, we've got everything we need here, and in a way, we almost don't therefore either need to go home again, or we don't want others arriving here. So it was this almost well-kept secret in the corner of the Pacific.
17:50 Dan Snow? And did it remain homogeneous? I mean, was there a king? Was there succession? Was there... Do you see different tribes and groups? Does it become fractured?
17:58 Speaker 02 So it fractures off into family groups, which I think is normal. So they divide the island up into ten, the equivalent of pieces of cake, so that everyone gets a bit of coastline. Everyone has perhaps the agricultural land in the centre of the island. And by that system, over generations and over centuries, they maintain this idea of different tribes. But of course, it's highly cooperative, they're all working with each other, they share the one quarry where the iconic statues were carved. So it's not, certainly at that point in the history, this idea of sort of tribes, it sometimes sounds a bit... It was really distinct family groups.
18:32 Dan Snow? Is this a good time to come onto the statues?
18:34 Speaker 02 There's never a better time to come onto the statues.
18:36 Dan Snow? So these, the Rapanui statues, Easterland statues that are so iconic, first of all, I've never seen them. What are they like in the flesh?
18:43 Speaker 02 They're amazing. I mean, it sounds a bit cliched, but there's an incredible energy when you wander around, particularly the quarry where they were all carved. Because the treat on Easter Island, it's not just the end product that you get to see, so you don't just get to see the sort of end of production. You can still, to this day, go to the quarry... And see literally etchings onto the rock, half finished carvings, some Moai is the name of the statues, some Moai that have been completed but haven't yet been transported. And so you can really follow the whole process from start to finish.
19:14 Dan Snow? It's like they just put their tools down and walked away.
19:16 Speaker 02 It's literally as if someone pulled the plug out of the factory floor and everything stopped at that point.
19:20 Dan Snow? Okay, so you've got the quarry with all these Moai and different levels of completeness. How many other of these giant statues are there around the island?
19:28 Speaker 02 So there's about a thousand.
19:30 Dan Snow? A thousand?
19:30 Speaker 02 So people often underestimate the scale that the Moai production took on Easter Island because it's easy to think that it might have just been a few slightly crazed carvers who wanted to do something different. But in fact, you realise that this was an island-wide obsession and the entire community would have been involved either directly in the carving or in being the backup to actually making sure that the carvers had stone and food and everything else.
19:55 Dan Snow? And you've got to move them around.
19:56 Speaker 02 And the transportation becomes an enormous undertaking as well.
20:00 Dan Snow? And how far do they move? What a distance to be talking.
20:02 Speaker 02 So I mean, the island isn't particularly large. It takes about one hour to drive around the island today. But to transport a Moai, you're probably looking at a maximum of 20 miles, which is not insignificant.
20:13 Dan Snow? Because they weigh...
20:14 Speaker 02 Up to 100 tonnes.
20:16 Dan Snow? What are you talking about?
20:17 Speaker 02 The ones that have been moved, yeah.
20:18 Dan Snow? 100 tonnes?
20:19 Speaker 02 Yeah. And no horses or elephants. I mean, this was all done by...
20:23 Dan Snow? Human power?
20:24 Speaker 02 Human power. And this is why you get the UFO stuff coming in because people can't bear the fact that humans might at one day have been capable of doing this.
20:31 Dan Snow? And did they roll them on logs? Did they know about wheels and logs and things?
20:34 Speaker 02 So there's really, there's two schools of thought. One is basically the rolling, which is the idea of placing it onto some kind of sled and then dragging it over rollers to therefore reduce the friction. Or that they might have been rocked in a way that, if you think of, you know, at home, if you're moving a heavy piece of furniture, you might get it onto its corners and kind of waddle it from side to side. And it probably was a combination of both techniques, if not others as well, that archaeologists still haven't quite worked out. But this is one of the many mysteries on Easter Island that's still very much being argued about by archaeologists.
21:08 Dan Snow? And why?
21:10 Speaker 02 Well, because this was the deep-rooted belief in Polynesia, and it's not just in Easter Island, but it's across the entire Polynesian triangle, that important people possessed mana. So this was a spiritual power that was bestowed on them by the gods and that therefore when an important person like that died... What you wanted was a physical representation of them in order that this manor would still exist after their death. So it's actually a fairly human idea. But the idea was that because on Easter Island, there was this incredible stone quarry, they had all of the raw materials needed. This culture of carving representations or idols to represent these important ancestors, it developed in a way that it couldn't possibly have developed anywhere else in the Pacific.
21:54 Dan Snow? So do you think they are all of actual individuals? Or are they all a reflection of those mythical founders?
22:00 Speaker 02 No, no, I think real people. Because when, for example, when Cook came in 1774, people actually told him the names of some of the statues that he was standing in front of, in the same way that you or I might in our homes or in our offices, have the portrait of an ancestor, the founding.
22:17 Dan Snow? I thought you'd been Statue of Nelson, which I do have in my home.
22:21 Speaker 02 Right, okay, so, you know, we'll have prominent figures, whether it's in our family or in our history. But there was this belief that these statues were more than just a representation. They actually were the spiritual embodiment of this person.
22:35 Dan Snow? Wow.
22:35 Speaker 02 And so that's why, this is really why, and this is going off on a bit of a tangent, but this is why the whole repatriation of Moai, that has been in the news recently, particularly with the British Museum and things like that. This is why for the Rapanui, the people of Easter Island today, this is much more than just a statue. This is much more than just part of their history. For them, this is a living ancestor. And so this is why it's always been quite difficult acting as kind of intermediary between sometimes the island and organisations such as the British Museum, to sometimes convey this idea, that what we might see as simply a piece of rock that is an important part of one island's history, that for the islanders, that might have a much more significant meaning to them.
23:21 Dan Snow? Listen to Dan Slane's history. Talk about Rapanui, Easter Island, all coming up.
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26:54 Dan Snow? Now, there's been a really interesting, quite exciting sort of historical debate, historographical debate about Rapanui, about whether it was sort of torn apart by civil wars, that it'll top all the statues, and whether that was when the Europeans arrived, or after, or before. Try and give me a timeline here. What do you think was going on in the culture of Rapanui in, say, 1700, before Europeans were even dreamed of?
27:15 Speaker 02 So I think we have probably in 700 years of complete isolation, which is why it's such an interesting experiment really in the way in which humans behave in such an unusual set of circumstances. So by 1700, it seems that you've had this enormous rise in production of statues. Population has grown, no threats or attacks from outside, no diseases brought in from any outsiders. So you've got a population that's thriving, if not getting almost too large for the island. But of course, when they've had the wood to build canoes, they've carried on searching for new islands around Easter Island. It's just that we know today from looking at a map that there aren't any. But they would have believed that that over the horizon,
27:59 Speaker 02 there would have been other islands for them to settle. So they wouldn't have therefore been perhaps overly concerned by this rising population, lack of resources. They clearly weren't stupid. They weren't ignorant of what was going on on their island. But they must have always thought there was going to be this escape route.
28:16 Dan Snow? You think scouts were going out and coming back?
28:18 Speaker 02 I'm sure they were because there's no reason for them to believe they'd reached the end of what today we call the Polynesian Triangle.
28:24 Dan Snow? And was there enough wood for those canoes? Do you start to get deforestation?
28:27 Speaker 02 Well, deforestation clearly happens, yes, at the beginning when they need to clear land to plant on and subsequently with the moving of statues that weigh upwards of 100 tonnes. You need some kind of wood, you need fibre for ropes. Carving a statue was incredibly resource heavy, if you like. And so this was not something that unless you had a very active management of the resources, this was clearly something that was going to put pressure on those finite resources.
28:54 Dan Snow? And so there is a school of thought that says the whole thing sort of collapses because of that overpopulation. Where are we now? Where's scholarship now on this?
29:00 Speaker 02 The jury is still very much out over this. But clearly at one time, the population was notably higher than then when the Europeans found it from 1722 onwards, which is the first contact with any outsiders seemingly that the Rapanui have in the best part of 700 years.
29:18 Dan Snow? So we think that even before the Europeans arrived, there had been some sort of population crash, but the population got smaller.
29:25 Speaker 02 I think so, because I mean, it depends who you read, but we have to therefore go by the accounts of the first Europeans who describe an impoverished island, a deforested island. And we know that that couldn't have been the case in a society that several hundred years prior had created up to a thousand statues of enormous proportions.
29:43 Dan Snow? So your impression is that that quarry, for example, that's abandoned, seemingly sort of overnight. That's probably not the European topsols appearing over the horizon. That was probably some event on the island.
29:53 Speaker 02 The dating suggests that the abandonment of the quarry took place at least fifty years before the Europeans arrived. This is an internal strife. This is an internal problem. And for some reason, someone's come along and said, we're not carving a single another Moai statue out of this quarry. Tools are downed. They walk out of there and never come back. And that's why it's this incredible vestige of, you know, human achievement.
30:16 Dan Snow? And when the Europeans arrived, they, I mean, are you sure that's not just Europeans as being dismissive of every culture they come across? But they're saying it's impoverished, that they specifically aren't seeing evidence of healthy, thriving sort of agricultural communities.
30:27 Speaker 02 I mean, Captain Cook, who was, I think we can generally accept, had understood the Pacific, he understood Polynesia. He wrote that it was the least attractive island and the least beneficial island to ships that he'd ever come across in that part of the world. Rogavine, who's the Dutch captain who arrives on Easter Sunday in seventeen twenty-two, hence the naming of the island. His cook laments the fact that there's no wood on the island for him to even light a fire with. So I mean, these are snippets of details that, as long as we trust the authorship of them, we have to accept that the island that they came across was not this thriving island that had been the case one, two hundred years prior to that.
31:08 Dan Snow? It's a reasonable assumption is that it had been denuded by just overfarming, overgrazing, trees being cut down, too many humans.
31:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
31:16 Dan Snow? Too much pressure.
31:16 Speaker 02 It becomes this classic case of what Jared Diamond would then call the collapse, this idea that societies will reach a breaking point, after which, if there hasn't been successful management of resources, if populations aren't controlled, then it's simply the entire society descends into ecocide, so this ecological suicide, where you basically destroy the one environment that you have to live in.
31:40 Dan Snow? And do you see any more evidence of this talk about the Moai being toppled over and things? Is there any other clues on the island about what might have happened around that time?
31:48 Speaker 02 Studies of skulls, in particular bone studies, have shown that people were suddenly dying from blunt instruments instead of natural causes. The obsidian, which is the volcanic glass that used to be a key component in carving the statues, suddenly becomes shaped in spearheads and arrowheads and things like that. So again, that would suggest a collapse of this very organised...
32:10 Dan Snow? Quite suggestive.
32:11 Speaker 02 Yes, things might have got... And mentioned in the oral history of cannibalism. So I mean, clearly there's been a shift, and no one denies that that shift took place on Easter Island. I think what's interesting to study today is the exact timescale and the causes. And that's really where archaeologists are arguing about.
32:29 Dan Snow? Is there suggestion that the first European ships, they might have brought disease, or there could be other...
32:34 Speaker 02 They would have done. I mean, they would have brought... Sailors will bring certain things with them, and that would have been the case on Easter Island. You wouldn't have had any defences against those kinds of diseases. I mean, even on Easter Island 50 years ago, there used to be such limited contact with the outside world, that when a ship would come to the island, people would say that everyone got a cold for the next week or so, because that was just germs from outside that they didn't have any exposure to and any defences against. And so the arrival of Rogaveen in 1722, but then there's 50 years until the next Europeans arrived. So it's incredibly spread out, and therefore I find it difficult to believe people who think, put the blame entirely on Europeans, who say that everything was perfect, the Europeans arrived, and then everything just collapsed.
33:18 Speaker 02 And I think that, in that you've got three visitors in the first 60 years there, that sounds slightly far-fetched.
33:25 Dan Snow? Although in the 18th century, it appears to be a slightly more impoverished island, people were still living there, even that wood. So how were they surviving?
33:33 Speaker 02 Well, so this is one of the great success stories that the human population on Easter Island never disappears, as sometimes the slightly lazier literature about the island will say. And so what they did was they made these dramatic changes in their lifestyle, really, to ensure, first of all, that humans survived. And the most notable of that is that they stopped carving the statues. And that's why they abandoned that quarry overnight and never came back to it. And so they replaced their religious beliefs with a competition that focuses on collecting birds' eggs. You can see that it would have taken a period of perhaps people not all being convinced by this, but on a small island, changes can happen quickly. And so suddenly, if the elders and the priests are all suddenly saying,
34:14 Speaker 02 no, manor now comes in the form of these migratory birds that arrive once a year and lay an egg, and therefore we'll have a competition between all the tribes, you'll each put your greatest Olympian forward, and he will compete against the other tribes to become the person to obtain that first egg by swimming across, you know, a mile and a half of open ocean, probably waiting in caves on that islet.
34:36 Dan Snow? What's a little off-lying islet.
34:38 Speaker 02 Yes. And then as soon as someone gets the first sooty turn egg, that person's chief becomes what we call the birdman, and he becomes the spiritual political leader of the island.
34:48 Dan Snow? Wow.
34:48 Speaker 02 For the next 12 months. And then we'll come back again next spring, and we'll do the whole thing again. And for about 150 years, this system, that is the dominant leadership election system. It's fascinating.
35:00 Dan Snow? That's amazing. So they start foraging, I guess there's still fish in the sea, thank goodness for them, but it's focused less on crops and more on what they can find on the seashore and in the ocean.
35:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, so you've got now a diminished population in terms of its number. You've got one perhaps much more conscious of the fact that they now need to survive entirely by themselves, that they can't rely on neighboring islands or the arrival of outsiders. Yes, when you get the arrival of Europeans, you're going to get some trading and things like that. So it's really why the island has always maintained this resilience, but also this ability to look after itself. And that's why even in something as recently as Covid, you know, where the island closed down for two and a half years, it was almost like the islanders went back to 100 years ago, where they suddenly had to be entirely self-sufficient.
35:48 Dan Snow? More on Easter Island, more on Rapa Nui, coming up after this.
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37:13 Dan Snow? Let's talk more about those European arrivals. Dutch expedition in the 1720s, you mentioned?
37:17 Speaker 02 Yep, so 1722, Jacob Rogovin, and they sighted the island on Easter Sunday.
37:22 Dan Snow? Right, hence the name Easter Island. Stay for a while or get going?
37:26 Speaker 02 No bad conditions in the seas. Stay for the best part of a day, really. So, and this is why these first contacts were so, they were so brief, that again, to believe that they might have had an inherent, they would of course affected the islanders in a profound way, but to say that they would have really-
37:42 Dan Snow? Totally collapsed civilization.
37:43 Speaker 02 Exactly, I think is far-fetched.
37:45 Dan Snow? Okay, then we get a Spanish expedition.
37:47 Speaker 02 In 1770.
37:48 Dan Snow? And then Captain Cook off the-
37:49 Speaker 02 In 1774.
37:51 Dan Snow? And does that, do things start to get more regular after that? Is it on the map?
37:55 Speaker 02 So it's now on the map because of course these drawings and paintings of these colossal statues find their way back to Europe.
38:01 Dan Snow? People are very struck with those straight away, are they, that this is something unusual?
38:04 Speaker 02 The equivalent of a viral photograph today, I think, you know, people are, what on earth is it, they first of all don't expect there to be an island there in the first place. When they find the island, they're amazed that it's inhabited. And of course, then when they get up close to the coastline and see these enormous statues dotted all around the coastline, then Europeans don't know what to make of Easter Island. And hence, therefore, a few more visitors come. But again, it's so isolated that unless you're in that part of the Pacific, it's not that you're going to make a side trip from New Zealand to go there.
38:32 Dan Snow? So after Captain Cook, do we have a clear sense of the ships that passed, how much contact they were having with Europeans?
38:39 Speaker 02 Well, so it seems to be a noteworthy stop for people that are crossing the Pacific if they do call in. And that's why we're able to, at least in terms of population numbers, have an idea. The number of inhabitants on Easter Island continues to decrease.
38:54 Dan Snow? Continues to fall.
38:55 Speaker 02 Yes.
38:56 Dan Snow? Well, now they've got a whole influx of European diseases to cope with as well.
38:58 Speaker 02 They've got diseases to deal with, the culture's changing rapidly as well, perhaps the very structured family tribal organisation is breaking down as well. Missionaries come along, move everyone into one place because that makes conversion much easier. So they break up this idea of tribal lands. So things are in flux and things are changing fast.
39:17 Dan Snow? So you've got quite radical reorganisation, you've got disease, you've got trade with the outside world. It must have been quite tumultuous decades, the early part of the 19th century.
39:25 Speaker 02 No, they were. And sadly, perhaps less scrupulous outsiders also see the island as an easy target, easy pickings. And so Peruvians in particular realise that the island is unprotected, it doesn't come under the colonial protection of anyone, and see that here's this Polynesian island relatively close to South America. Peruvians suddenly start needing slaves, or certainly workers, and so they start these incredibly damaging raids on islands in the Pacific, but particularly to Easter Island, where several thousand islanders get lured onto ships, taken away to go and work on guano mines and things like that in Peru, in the mainland. Many of them don't survive the journey there, but of course, very few of them ever make their
40:10 Speaker 02 way back to the island. And when eventually international outcry says you've got to repatriate these Rapanui back to their island, they return just fifteen, having taken thousands away.
40:20 Dan Snow? What?
40:20 Speaker 02 And these fifteen sadly bring smallpox with them. And so that smallpox then decimates much of the remaining population. So it's very easy to malign the work of missionaries in the Pacific at that time. But if it hadn't been perhaps for the Catholic missionaries on Easter Island, then the population might have disappeared altogether. So it's they that really raised the alarm and say, look, this island needs outside help.
40:43 Dan Snow? So by the mid 19th century, the numbers are really down to very...
40:47 Speaker 02 They say that it got as low as 110 people at once.
40:50 Dan Snow? And there had been thousands of people living there.
40:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, no one knows the exact high number, but possibly 12, 14,000 people would have been required to have the kind of society that was clearly living there at one point to create this culture that Easter Island has become so famous for today.
41:05 Dan Snow? Wait, it does eventually fall under some sort of European yoke, does it?
41:10 Speaker 02 Catholic missionaries arrive. And so when they come, they actually become the first people to almost raise the alarm about what's happening on Easter Island and how the population continues to decrease. And so it's they that actually request someone to take ownership of the island. And through geographical, I suppose, proximity, it becomes a Chilean possession in 1888.
41:31 Dan Snow? Really?
41:32 Speaker 02 Hmm.
41:32 Dan Snow? So before those missionaries, there weren't any really Europeans living on there?
41:36 Speaker 02 No, because there was nothing for them. If there had been resources, if there'd been precious metals, or if there had been something, then Cook and others, the message would have got back that this is somewhere we need to colonize. But no one was interested in Easter Island. They didn't offer anything, except at this stage, hundreds of fallen-over statues. There wasn't even a single statue standing up at this point.
41:56 Dan Snow? Okay, and why is that? Why are the statues all fallen over?
41:59 Speaker 02 So something has happened on the island that has caused a complete rejection of that former culture. And people aren't quite sure whether it's this intertribal warfare, that if you know that your neighboring tribe has their ancestors watching over them and protecting them, which is what those statues used to do, then perhaps the first thing you do is, when you take their land, because you want their land and their resources, perhaps at the same time, you also then throw over their statues to nullify the power of their ancestors. Or alternatively, it's an island-wide rejection of a religious belief that you and your ancestors have put hundreds of years of work into.
42:34 Dan Snow? It's like the Protestant Reformation.
42:35 Speaker 02 You're told that larger and larger statues, suddenly life will get better for you, and you're breaking your back building these things, and nothing's getting better, and life's getting worse on this island. And so it might be that there comes a point where everyone just goes, you know what? We're done with this.
42:49 Dan Snow? Birdman, birdman's what we need.
42:51 Speaker 02 Yep, birdman comes to the fore.
42:52 Dan Snow? And did the Catholic missionaries succeed in getting rid of the birdman theory and replacing it with Christianity?
42:58 Speaker 02 They did, so they obviously didn't like the idea of people who were worshipping birds' eggs, and so sadly, they came along and replaced it, and found actually the islanders fairly easy to convert to Christianity. And so whether by that point, the birdman competition wasn't quite so deep-rooted as it had once been, who knows? But there seems to have been a relatively smooth transition into Christianity.
43:21 Dan Snow? And as a result, the Chilean takeover, does Easter Island its people get focused more towards Spanish-speaking Latin America and away from their hereditary customary links, well, what would have been links with the rest of the Pacific world?
43:36 Speaker 02 So to a certain degree, yes, except that Chile was, fortunately today, but Chile was so useless as a colonizing power, that instead of imposing their culture heavily on it, they sent one cargo ship a year to the island, and that was really their commitment. So what you don't get, which you also you get in other parts of the Pacific, you don't get this dominance of an outside culture or language. So today, everyone, most people are bilingual. People speak Spanish on the island because it's the official language, but people also speak Rapanui. Whereas perhaps if another nation had come in and taken possession and control of Easter Island, you might have had that Rapanui ultimately being replaced entirely. So it's something that we're very grateful for today, the fact that Chile has been perhaps, I mean, but again, you're dealing with something that's two and a half thousand miles away.
44:21 Dan Snow? And has no economic value in the minds of politicians.
44:24 Speaker 02 No. What it does actually have is quite important strategic value to Chile today, because it gives them an enormous part of the Pacific that they wouldn't otherwise have. And so in terms of things like shipping routes, air routes, and particularly now with marine-protected areas and things like that, the island is suddenly becoming quite relevant. But this is all in the last 20 years or so.
44:43 Dan Snow? When you went there, did you fly?
44:45 Speaker 02 So I flew there. There were two flights a week, I remember, and it was really just a refuelling stop between flights from Chile to Tahiti in French Polynesia. But given the distances and the fact there's no other airstrip anywhere in that part of the Pacific, they used to refuel on Easter Island and then carry on. But I remember the time I first went, I think there were about thirty of us that got off the plane and were actually staying on the island. So, I mean, I couldn't believe it. Given what I thought was the attractions of Easter Island, I just couldn't believe that no one else was...
45:14 Dan Snow? And it's still just as remote. If you go there now, are there lots of tourists?
45:17 Speaker 02 Well, so, I mean, there's now a minimum of one flight a day. So, I mean, really, tourism is dictated by the amount of flights to the island, occasional cruise ships, but very few. So I think then the nice thing about the island today is it doesn't feel overrun, but I think it's something that the island does have to be careful of because, of course, as places grow in popularity and we've all been to places, say, twenty years apart where you go once and it feels very untouched, you go back and it feels completely overrun, because these places can change quickly. So hopefully, and I think they are very aware of it, it will be protected because you can give out a certain amount of passes to the island per year and things like that, and therefore keep a cap on tourism.
45:56 Dan Snow? And it sounds like a very exciting place to be a historian or archaeologist because there's so much at stake. There's still some really big questions that we're trying to answer.
46:02 Speaker 02 It is. The frustrating part is that the islanders themselves, there's a slight reluctance towards outside archaeologists, historians coming in and particularly digging around and things like that. So I think twenty, thirty years ago, speaking to archaeologists who were digging then, they say this was absolute nirvana for them. I mean, this was an untouched gold mine where they could come in and really make significant finds and come away from each expedition believing they'd understood more. Now, I gather, the paperwork and the bureaucracy is so difficult that sadly it's becoming less the case. But on the good side, more islanders themselves are now going to university to study archaeology and study history. And so you've got this sudden emergence of a younger generation
46:46 Speaker 02 of island-born experts who will hopefully take that forward. And so we won't therefore need to rely quite so much on sort of outside input.
46:54 Dan Snow? And how many Rapanuans are there today?
46:57 Speaker 02 So the island population is about, I think it's about nine thousand at the moment, of which just over fifty percent are considered Rapanui, so they're of Polynesian descent. The remainder are mainly mainland Chileans that have settled there. And then a few odd outsiders like myself.
47:12 Dan Snow? Like you, living in your tent.
47:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, yes, so it was incredible experience. And obviously I went there with no notion of that I was going to live there at all. But it became obviously a life changing decision when I did.
47:24 Dan Snow? James, it's a pleasure to have you with us.
47:26 Speaker 02 Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me here.
47:31 Dan Snow? Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. You know, you could have watched this episode and others on YouTube. That's right. You can peek behind the curtain of how we record this podcast on our YouTube channel. Very exciting new development here. Just click the link in the show notes and head over to subscribe. New YouTube releases every Friday, friends. Don't miss out.
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