The Lost Easter Island Culture What Happened to Them

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, located at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle, is a rather unique place. Officially belonging to the nation of Chile, the island only measures 163 square kilometers across, with much of that belonging to the Rapa Nui National Park, receiving protected status as a World Heritage Site. Despite its size, it is home to diverse biological habitats, ranging from tropical broadleaf forests and grasslands to volcanoes and beaches. It supports a variety of animal life, ranging from selected species of reptile to vast numbers of seabirds, as well as tropical ocean life that flourishes around its coastlines. If that wasn't enough, this picturesque tropical island holds its fair share of ancient mysteries too. Synonymous with Easter Island are its unique Moai statues, over 1,000 in number, standing watch across the island like immovable stone sentinels. These monuments have long been a source of historical intrigue and mystery, with many questions about these huge stone figures remaining unanswered to this day. The Moai, however, are not the only secrets this island hides, and today we aim to introduce you to both of them. From ancient artifacts to long-lost pantheons, these are the mysteries and secrets of the most remote inhabited place on Earth, Easter Island. In order for us to be able to examine the secrets our remote destination has to offer, we first need to take a look at the story behind it. The first people to have reached the island were thought to have been the Polynesians, who originated from the islands of Oceania after migrating via boat from the coastlines of Southeast Asia long before. Our first mystery can even be found here. Scientists are undecided as to when exactly humans first arrived at Easter Island, with theories ranging from around 800 AD to slightly more recently in 1200 AD. Europeans did not reach the island until 1722, where they encountered a land of flourishing culture. The tiny island supporting an estimated 3,000 individuals, who had distinguished themselves as the Rapa Nui people. The first settlers arrived on Easter Island from what are now known as the Cook Islands. They're thought to have been seeking out new land to flee from a rival tribe, to which they had lost three battles already, and Easter Island was the perfect location. Isolated, bountiful, and just large enough to sustain them. Their first settlement was thought to be on Akena, which today consists of little more than a deteriorating set of Moai statues along the coastline. The people here built canoes and sailed through the South Pacific, fishing the coral reefs around the island and supplementing their diets with sweet potato crops inland. They operated on a class system led by a single high chief, but this was only observed by European missionaries when they reached the island long after its settlement. Due to the fact that these people had very limited written recorded history, and all of their past was tracked through oral storytelling, it is harder to discern facts and timelines, leading to many of the mysteries we associate with Rapa Nui today. Europeans would first set foot on the island on the 5th of April, 1722, receiving its name from this very day, Easter Sunday. Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen was the first European to chart the island, but for the native Rapa Nui people, this spelled disaster. What happened when Roggeveen made landfall is not well documented, but his arrival resulted in the death of roughly 12 native people, with many more being injured. One way or another, conflict broke out, Roggeveen fled, and no European would return to the island until November of 1770. The Spanish visited the island then, and were the first to officially document the standing Moai statues on Easter Island. Captain James Cook would arrive next in 1774, although he would find many Moai statues damaged or toppled entirely, possibly the work of Spanish explorers a few years prior. Cook was the first to try and interpret the statues, suggesting them to be depictions of former high chiefs who had passed through history. From here, the history of Rapa Nui gets darker. In December of 1862, slavers from Peru would target the islanders, abducting over 1,500 people from Easter Island, half of its entire population. Every single person who knew how to read and write in the native Rongo-Rongo script had been captured and lost to history, resulting in yet another mystery. Nobody can translate it to interpret the Rapa Nui people's history. Eventually, the slavers would be forced to repatriate their captives, but the damage was done. With their return, smallpox arrived on the island. The natives, who were not immune, suffered greatly, reducing the population to a mere sliver of what it used to be. Later, Catholic missionaries would bring tuberculosis to the island, causing further damage, whilst converting the remainder of the native people to Catholicism, abandoning native traditions and pantheons. Today, the island has begun to recover, with most of its population residing in the settlement of Hongoroa. This population, however, have faced their own struggles, coming into conflict with the Chilean government over living space and territory, and they still fight for indigenous rights to this day. Many of these huge stone statues were constructed between 1100 AD and 1680 AD, as radiocarbon dating on the material used has shown. Almost 1,000 of them stand today, characterized by their bold features and stoic expressions. Despite being referred to as Moai heads, they do indeed possess bodies, and sometimes even limbs, many of which are situated beneath the ground, with only the heads exposed today after movements of the soil over time. One of the largest mysteries surrounding their existence concerns exactly how they came to be, and how they got there after being constructed. Most of them are made from solidified volcanic ash, obtained from the slopes of the extinct Rano Raraku volcano. They appear to have been made from using only stone hand chisels, which may have taken several sculptors over a year just to finish one singular Moai. While many of them stand today, many, many more were made, but never established, lying in the volcano's quarry as they awaited their time to be set up. The mystery begins, however, when we consider how they got to where they are. It was a feat alone to even construct these statues with simple handheld chisels, but to plant them upright in the ground, as heavy as they were, was another challenge entirely. The statues were quarried and moved to their resting points without the use of wheels or metal tools. These have not been associated with the people of Rapa Nui's construction of Moai. It has been suggested that the people of the island transported the statues on rolling logs, crafted from chopped down trees, which as it stands is one of the more likely theories. Vast areas of woodland had been deforested by the time the European explorers arrived on Easter Island, which in turn deprived local wildlife of nesting areas. This had the knock-on effect of causing a resource shortage on the island, which in turn led to conflicts between groups of peoples on Rapa Nui. The chopped trees were used to build the settlements and may also have been used to roll the Moai heads to their intended destinations. It has also been theorized that many ropes were tied to the Moai heads and they were gradually walked from the volcano to their destination, which has been proven possible through reconstructions. This would have required a great deal of coordination between many people, as these solid stone statues were exceedingly heavy. To do this without machinery or metalworking would be difficult to say the least. Moreover, why were these statues built? Two main theories exist, both of which could be a combined reason for their existence. They could possibly be memorial statues of leaders or prominent figures in Rapa Nui society who passed away, as theorized by James Cook when he first visited the island. This may have been a way for these people to remember their lost leaders, record their history, or worship them in honor. An alternative suggestion is that they may have had religious significance, perhaps depicting mythological figures or deities. But without a widespread translated writing system, we cannot know for certain. What's more is that all of the Moai visible on Rapa Nui today are incomplete. At some point between their construction and now, they were edited, possibly by inhabitants of the island itself. Many of the statues were constructed with open eyes and broad, heavy hats. Today, no eyes can be found on any Moai statue on Easter Island, and almost all of the hats have been damaged or removed. This might have happened in the conflict over resources, and it is possible that European explorers damaged the statues. But it is unknown why it is just the eyes and hats that have been vandalized, and on every single statue systematically. To this day, there is very little explanation for this. When European Catholic missionaries converted the very small number of remaining Rapa Nui inhabitants to their religion, their old religion disappeared from the world, leaving it to only be passed down in legends and stories as a result of the untranslatable Rongorongo texts. The old Rapa Nui religion focused around the Tongata Manu, or Birdman cult. Their chief god, Maki Maki, was worshipped in a mysterious way that today cannot be reliably studied due to the missing information and texts surrounding it. Maki Maki and a small pantheon of gods were appeased by a ritual competition that would see Easter Island residents risk their lives in a death-defying journey to obtain an egg as an offering to him. On its own, this doesn't sound like a huge challenge, but consider that this journey included shark-infested waters, jagged rocks, and steep summits, and you can see how dangerous this journey really was. Priests each year would determine the contestants in this deadly race, who were typically men who had say in how the island was run. Sons of chiefs, political advisors, and celebrated warriors for example. These men would then in turn put forward individuals known as hobus, who would compete in the ritual on their behalf, both an honor and a major risk. As the citizens of Easter Island gathered to bear witness to the ritual, coinciding with the annual migration and breeding season of Suri Terns to the cliffs outside Rapa Nui, the challenge began. Each hobu would begin the swim across the water from Rapa Nui to Motu Nui, across a stretch of deep, choppy water teeming with sharks. Their goal was not in the water however, but on the tall, jagged cliffs on the coastlines of Motu Nui, the eggs of the Suri Terns. Hobus risked their lives to be the first to collect a tern egg at the top of the cliffs, and many lost their lives to waves, shark attacks, falling from cliffs, or the elements themselves. The winner would call out their success from the top of Motu Nui's cliffs, at which point the unsuccessful hobus would reverse their footsteps and return to Rapa Nui empty-handed. The egg collector would then remain alone on the clifftops, fasting in honor of the gods. He would then be expected to return the egg back to Rapa Nui intact, carrying it in a basket tied to his head. This again was an extreme test of skill, as this time they were scaling cliffs and tackling waters filled with sharks, only with precious, religiously significant cargo in tow. The man who sent the successful hobu would then be declared that year's Tongata Manu, or Birdman, and a procession would be led by him, painted in shades of white and red, back to the settlement of Anakena. This man would be adorned with gifts and food baskets, before going into isolation for a year in a ceremonial abode set up just for him. He would then neglect all aspects of life except eating and sleeping, while wearing a headdress made of human hair, all the while letting his body go unmanaged and ungroomed for the first five months. Catholic missionaries were quick to stamp out the practice when they converted the islanders to their religion, and it is no longer practiced on Rapa Nui. Very little is known about this practice and the wider religion as a whole, and it is not known where or how the religion arose. Could this practice be linked to the Moai in any way? And if so, how? All we've been able to obtain is the names of some of the Tongata Manu, obtained by archaeologist Catherine Routledge on her 1913 visit to the island. And with that, we have explored the two major mysteries of Easter Island, the mysterious Moai and the now extinct Birdman cult. These practices are both fascinating, and it is a true shame that we are unable to fully understand their origins. All we can hope is that translatable texts are discovered soon, giving archaeologists the power to find out more about this mysterious culture and how it arose.