Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. 2011. The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island. Free Press: New York. ISBN 978-1-4391-5031-3. 180 pages, two appendices, notes, bibliography and an index.
Easter Island and its History
Over the years, there have been numerous books and videos about Easter Island, a tiny island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 1500 miles from its nearest neighbor. The island, called Rapa Nui by its inhabitants, is best known for the 900+ enormous stone statues called moai which dot its landscapes. Many of the books and videos are filled with lurid descriptions of human-engineered failure and ecocide. The prevailing popular impression of Easter Island is that greedy and stupid Rapanui islanders squandered their resources, cutting down the trees and ruining their ecosystem in order to build the enormous, resource-wasting moai.
In the past decade or so, however, scientific research has been chipping away at this fallacious notion, bit by bit. Two scholars at the heart of this research are Terry Hunt of the University of Hawai'i and Carl Lipo at California State University in Long Beach. They've been publishing in the academic press for quite some time, but The Statues that Walked is their first foray into the popular science genre. And about time.
The Statues that Walked takes a different tack from previous books written about Easter Island. Rapa Nui is not an object lesson on what happens if you squander environmental resources, say Hunt and Lipo. Instead, the island's residents provide an object lesson in how cultures survive despite terrific odds. And The Statues that Walked provides the evidence to back that up.
Rapa Nui: A Stacked Deck
Moai with Shell Eyes on Coast, Easter Island
anoldent The Statues that Walked describes the initial and only colonization of Easter Island as occurring about 1200 AD. The colony included between 30 and 100 people, what amounted to a tiny segment of the vast Polynesian Pacific Ocean exploration force. In the first few decades of their lives on Easter Island, the colonists lost some of the staples they would have brought with them, because the climate on Easter Island wasn't conducive to their growth. The rats they brought with them (whether as a food source or as freeloading rodents) began decimating the large palm trees that forested the island. Those palms protected the soil, reduced the wind and provided shade; and all too quickly, the sheltering palms were gone, not as a result of human over-use, but rather because the rats dined wholesale on the palm nuts.
Moai construction, argue Hunt and Lipo, was a method of population control. While this is not a terribly convincing argument, the discussion does suggest that the efforts expended in constructing large statues and moving them across the landscape did not represent suicidal efforts, but may in fact have helped maintain social networks, networks that allowed what must have been a small, closely related population to stay alive and work cohesively.
Successes of Easter Island
What Hunt and Lipo also do here, is describe the types of cultivation invented by the Easter Island people to overcome the shortcomings of the climate and soil. Lithic mulching--adding stones to cultivated land--may sound bizarre to our notions of agriculture, but deliberately putting lots of fist-sized stones into a field protected the soil from the erosion and regulated temperature changes over the day and night. Further exposing freshly cracked surfaces on open ground added essential mineral nutrients to that ground.
Building small walled gardens, called manavai, protected the crops planted within them from wind, also regulated the temperature, and created a place for a compost heap, where nutrient values of the soil could be further enhanced.
The famous and disastrous visits from European sailors, which brought disease, violence, slavery and exotic goods to the Easter Islanders can certainly not be described as successful encounters: but Hunt and Lipo point out that Easter Islanders survived multiple population crashes, brought about by such visits and other disasters.
What Might Have Been Useful
In several places in the book, Hunt and Lipo describe circumstances as they were on different Polynesian islands. For example, on some other islands moai-like statues were built, but not as large as those on Rapa Nui. Other islands had better or worse climates; other islands had better or worse soils. Most importantly, some islands succeeded brilliantly; others were abandoned completely after a couple hundred years.
All of which makes me amazed at the colonizing abilities of the Lapita culture and their descendants, the colonizing force of Polynesia. I would love to read a book that comprehensively addresses what tool kits the colonizers brought with them, and what adaptations they made in different places. Obviously, that's a different book, and if, say, P.V. Kirch has already written one, somebody please let me know.
Bottom Line
The Statues that Walked is an astonishing book, particularly when you consider how many books have already been written on Easter Island. Hunt and Lipo sum up the purpose of this book this way: "In general, populations forced to confront challenging local conditions with the wisdom of local knowledge persist and even thrive.... We hope that the history of Rapa Nui can be an inspiring vision of human ingenuity... and human resilience."
The book has 10 chapters, two really terrific appendices detailing environmental conditions on the island and the agricultural methods used by the Rapanui, extensive footnotes, a bibliography, and an index. Dedicated to the late Robert Dunnell, The Statues that Walked would nonetheless (some of you know what I mean) be perfectly accessible to the general public.
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