Easter Island, called Rapa Nui by its inhabitants, represents one of the most remarkable cases of ancient monument construction known in the world. Around the 13th century AD, Polynesian voyagers crossed thousands of kilometres of open ocean to colonise Rapa Nui, one of Earth’s most remote islands. Shortly after colonisation, people began constructing megalithic platforms, called ahu, on which they placed the island’s famous stone statues, known as moai. By the time Dutch captain Jacob Roggeveen arrived in 1722, the island’s inhabitants (called Rapanui) had constructed over 200 ahu and carved nearly 1,000 moai, hundreds of which were transported several kilometres over volcanic terrain to ahu sites across the island.
The fact that this tiny island boasted such magnificent monuments was baffling to European explorers, who were quick to note the apparent enigma presented by the disparity between the amount of labour invested in these megaliths and the small human population (estimated at only a few thousand) living on such a remote island with marginal ecology (few trees, no coral reefs, poor soils, limited freshwater). The perceived paradox between this scarcity of resources and the achievements of the Rapanui has become popularly known as ‘the mystery of Easter Island’, with the origins of the moai attracting some truly extraordinary speculations.
Today, scholars recognise that the ancient Rapanui created the moai and ahu. Debates persist, however, as to why they invested such energy into this activity when even survival on the island was challenging. Some scholars have suggested that monument construction was an activity that escalated to the point of self-imposed ecological disaster and demographic collapse (‘ecocide’). Such explanations, however, seem incompatible with a wealth of rigorous archaeological research conducted over the last 10-15 years.
