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Palynological Analyses of Easter Island Biota,
South Pacific, Territory of Chile
Submitted to the International Conservation Society
November 1973
Greer Farraday, Ph.D.
One cannot fully examine the extinction patterns and shifts in the biota of Easter Island without taking into account the island’s strange history of monument building. The massive stone statues, which for so long have stood silent before archaeologists, offer an important suggestion as to the fate of the indigenous population that constructed them. Though the specific details of how themoai were carved and transported remain unresolved, I propose, at least, the possibility that some aspect of their construction and transport detrimentally affected the island’s environment.
More than 200 statues once stood along the island’s coast, transported from the crater at Rano Raraku, where the statues were quarried from the volcanic tuff. Despite heights as great as thirty-three feet and weights of up to eighty-two tons, these statues were transported as far as six miles from the quarry to their positions on the coast. Over six hundred statues never even left the quarry, lying in all stages of completion. The tallest of these was sixty-five feet, the heaviest two hundred seventy tons.
ThePaschalococos disperta palm and theSophora toromiro were once the island’s most bountiful trees (the only current living sample oftoromiro is at the RBG Kew) and sediment samples dating from theA .D. 200s indicate an abundance of pollen from both these trees in the island biota at that time. The earliest radiocarbon dates associated with human habitation areA .D. 318,A .D. 380, andA .D. 690. Therefore, at the time of settlement, it seems likely the island was forested with at least two tree species.
ThePaschalococos disperta pollen and nuts (a fossilized nut was obtained) bear a striking resemblance to the still-survivingJubaea chilensis, the Chilean wine palm, which grows up to eighty feet tall and six feet in diameter. From the tall thick trunks of the endemic Easter Island palm, the early Rapa Nui would have made large canoes, shelters, and even fires with which to keep warm—necessities for the inhabitants. The Chilean palm also yields edible nuts, suggesting the Easter Island palm would also have provided food.
These endemic palms are also good candidates for the solution to the transportation and construction of themoai . TheSophora toromiro trunks and branches would not have been sufficiently strong to manipulate large weight, butJubaea chilensis wood is notably durable. Several archaeologists have proposed themoai were placed on wooden sleds, dragged over lubricated (with the sweet potato) wooden tracks or rollers, and then levered to their final standing positions with logs and ropes—this has not been conclusively tested to date. We do know that themoai cannot be moved with ropes alone, and we know that the expedition of 1872, described by Pierre Loti, was able to transport amoai to their ship by use of “enormous beams [which] have been put together in a sort of improvised chariot.” If the sailors were able within a day to transportmoai with wooden beams lashed together, we can assume this would have worked as well for the islanders.
It has been proposed, though solid figures are difficult to ascertain, thatmoai construction might have been under way as early asA .D. 500, and that production peaked circa 1400. We know for certain from the record of European visitors that themoai stood erect as late as 1722, when Roggeveen visited, but that no construction was under way after 1774, when Captain Cook noted they had mostly been toppled. One fact, however, has been agreed upon: At the time themoai were abandoned, when the tools were thrown down beside the statues in the quarry, scores ofmoai, larger than any of those that had been standing, were in the process of being carved. Experts have taken this to mean that there was a flurry of carving activity at the very end. Sometime between 1722 and 1774 most, if not all, of the 200 standingmoai were toppled.
There is no evidence of natural disaster—in the form of tidal waves or volcanic eruption—to account for the sudden disappearance of the indigenous plants. The palynological data suggest a gradual decrease in pollen content with each subsequent sediment layer. And so we must consider the biota shift as, primarily, the result of human habitat destruction.
It is thetoromiro anddisperta palm whose disappearance would have had the greatest immediate impact on the native peoples. As indicated by the use of caves for habitation, the islanders could find shelter in the absence of a strong building material. However, as an island dependent upon the sea for its life, and on boats, specifically the typical Polynesian outrigger canoe, scarcity of wood, therefore scarcity of boats, would impact fishing and water transportation activities. (Roggeveen, Cook, La Pérouse, and Loti all noted the poor quality and small number of native canoes. And many of these visitors were greeted by islanders swimming to them from the shore.)
A major clue to this dearth of functioning watercraft is evident in the travelogues of the European explorers. Roggeveen described the first moment of contact between an islander and his ship:This hapless creature seemed to be very glad to behold us, and showed the greatest wonder at the build of our ship. He took special notice of the tautness of our spars, the stoutness of our rigging and running gear, the sails, the guns—which he felt all over with minute attention. On Cook’s expedition, the same event occurs:As the master drew near the shore with the boat, one of the natives swam off her, and insisted on coming aboard the ship, where he remained two nights and a day. The first thing he did after coming aboard was to measure the length of the ship, by fathoming her from taffrail to the stern. La Pérouse witnesses a whole party of islanders examining his ship:They examined our cables, anchors, compass, and wheel, and they returned the next day with a cord to take the measure over again, which made me think that they had had some discussion on shore upon the subject . By looking at the objects that held the greatest fascination for the early Rapa Nui, we can begin to understand what they lacked.
We then must imagine the secondaryhuman trauma caused by deforestation—soil erosion would have stunted the crop growth, and a general depletion of timber resources would result in an inability to catch fish. The population, within a matter of years, would have begun to starve.
Other researchers have determined that there was a large population concurrent with the period ofmoai construction; estimates place between seven thousand and twenty thousand on the island (the current island population is approximately three thousand). The natural demand of such a population on the environment—food resources—would have been a stress on the natural biota. Coupled with the rampant deforestation of the palm andtoromiro for the purpose of transporting themoai, this would have created, quite rapidly, an uninhabitable environment. It is likely that the population at first suffered a gradual and natural decline, without any specific understanding of the changes occurring in the environment.
One must then look at themoai, the monuments themselves, thrown facedown, for the silent story of the island’s population disaster. The earliest known inquiries (Roggeveen, 1722) into the purpose of the monuments indicate the statues were meant as memorials, representations of the islanders’ dead ancestors. Though they were not described as religious, or in our sense, protective, statues, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the carvers associated these monoliths with protective qualities—which is to say they believed their task of monument building to be beneficial. At whatever point the flurry of monument building began, we must imagine the arduous labor of building ever larger, ever more difficult-to-transport memorials, coupled with a progressively rapid deterioration of the island. Trees and bushes would have been disappearing, crops would have been failing. The population would have started to decline and, for perhaps the first time, this isolated people would have experienced starvation.
What we can reasonably assert from the evidence is a likely correlation between the increase in monument building and a devastation of the terrestrial landscape. Which is noteworthy as perhaps the only known instance in the history of mankind in which a people destroyed themselves by building monuments to their dead.
But there was something Greer didn’t write.
It involved the position of themoai . The statues didn’t look out to the sea as one would imagine; they faced inward, staring at the island, their backs to the ocean, as if these people, thousands of miles from other humans, had, over generations, lost knowledge of the outside world. As if in building these monuments, megaliths of the past with which to encircle themselves, they had forgotten, or tried to forget, that anything lay beyond their shores.
What, then, would they have thought the day Roggeveen anchored off the coast, the deck of his massive ship topped with goods they had never before seen, the men in a rainbow of brightly colored hats and jackets and epaulets? What would they have thought as they paddled alongside in their corroding canoes, climbing aboard to stroke the sleek sails and trim and ropes? What would they have thought when Roggeveen’s men rowed ashore, climbing the rocks with polished pistols and muskets by their sides, which, when raised, seized life in an instant? What would they think, three days later, as they looked at the bodies of their fallen friends while the ship sailed off beyond the edges of the world they had thought their own? Would the islanders have looked around at the barren landscape? The rocks and the reeds and the yellowed grass? Would they remember the trees? Or stories of trees—didn’t their mother once tell them of a girl who was told to plant her lover’s head in the earth? Would they look at the few canoes rotting in the surf? Boats that could hold no more than four people each, too leaky to make it more than a few miles? Would they know they were sharing the tragic fate of so many creatures, like the intrepid birds that had found their way to such distant shores and awoke one day to find they could no longer fly? Would they then look up at the massive stone giants they and their ancestors spent centuries building? At their own history, now no longer enough to protect them, to keep out their knowledge of another world?
Was this the moment when one furious man gave the command—Enough! Never again!—when they knew the dead had betrayed them, when they swarmed the nearest statue, their bodies heaving, angry, frightened by the weight of this massive relic, bleeding themselves for the sake of a new beginning?