Easter Island, with its iconic stone-head statues, has long been the subject of a fierce debate among academics. For years, scientists have been baffled by the mystery of Easter Island and simply didn't have a clue about what happened to the Polynesians who once lived there. That is, until now.
Located more than 2,000 miles west of the Chilean coast, Polynesians traveling in canoes first settled on the 63 square mile island beginning around 1200 A.D. Some researchers believed that the Rapa Nui, as the islanders were known, died out after depleting the natural resources of the island. Others believed the population collapsed due to disease and pestilence brought by Europeans, who also took many of the survivors as slaves.
However a new study published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests there is another possibility. It is possible that the harsh environment on the island, including variations in rainfall and declining soil quality, led to a decline in the population but not to collapse before Europeans arrived in 1722. These results stunned researchers who believed the collapse definitively occurred as a result of the arrival of Europeans.
"The results of our research were really quite surprising to me," professor of anthropology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the co-author of the study, Dr. Thegn Ladefoged says. "In short, our research does not support the suggestion that societal collapse occurred prior to European contact due to physical erosion and productivity decline, but it does indicate that use of less optimal environmental regions changed prior to European contact."
The researchers analyzed and dated 428 obsidian tools and flakes of the obsidian rock found at various archaeological sites on the island. By dating these tools and the rockers, researchers were able to determine when and how the ancient island population used the land and the natural resources available on the island.
Researchers discovered that the land use and resources varied across the island, reflecting environmental constraints more so than an abuse of the environment. The Rapa Nui people moved from an area prone to droughts, to an area with low soil fertility before jumping to a plot of land that was both rainy and fertile.
"While we do not have direct population data" Ladefoged says, "it is clear that people were reacting to regional environmental variation on the island before they were devastated by the introduction of European diseases and other historic processes."
