Lost Civilizations by Jim Willis

Author:Jim Willis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Visible Ink Press
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

One theory about how Easter Island became denuded of trees was that an infestation of Polynesian rats accidentally brought there by the islanders ate all the tree seedlings, destroying the future of the forests.

The upside, though, was this. (If you’ve got a tender stomach, you’d better skip this part.) What did the people eat when their supply of crops and natural food such as birds and plants died? Archaeologists, when studying ancient garbage heaps on Easter Island, discovered that 60 percent of the bones they unearthed were rat bones. It seems as though the people managed to find a new source of protein. What’s worse, when scientists studied the various rock gardens left on the island, they deduced that it had contained sufficient food to “sustain a population density similar to today’s Oklahoma, Colorado, Sweden, and New Zealand.” This, coupled with the fact that hungry people usually don’t spend time carving and transporting thirty-foot statues that can weigh up to seventy tons, seems to argue against starvation.

Therefore, Hunt and Lipo call Easter Island a “success story.” When faced with a destroyed ecosystem through no fault of their own, they found a way to get by even though they were marooned on an island in the middle of the Pacific.

This view has its detractors. If they had enough food, why did their population decline so rapidly?

Hunt and Lipo theorize the old problem of European disease that accompanies every first contact between native populations and European explorers. The disaster was compounded when whalers started to stop by the island in the early nineteenth century. They were looking for water, fresh vegetables, and women. They left behind epidemics of venereal disease. Is it any wonder that the natives grew to fear outside contact?

If these two competing theories about the demise of the Easter Island civilization comprised the whole story, it would be interesting enough, but more is to come—a lot more.

The Easter Island story encompasses a mysterious civil war. It delves into a labyrinth of underground caves where people were hiding out from something or someone unknown. It even involves cannibalism. At one dark point in its history, Easter Island fell victim to slave traders. In 1808, an American ship named the Nancy arrived. After a bloody battle, the sailors captured twelve men and ten women before setting sail to the Juan Fernandez Islands, where their captives were to be sold as slaves. Three days out, the captain allowed his captives on deck. They immediately jumped overboard and began hopelessly swimming for home. When attempts to apprehend them failed, the ship just sailed away, leaving them all to drown.

However, word must have gotten around that Easter Island was a good hunting ground for the slave trade because by the 1860s, Peruvian slavers had made it their primary source of captives. In December 1862, eight Peruvian ships arrived offshore. Between bribery and outright violence, they made off with one thousand Easter Islanders, including the king, his son, and the ritual priest. These were the very individuals who knew the old stories and were vested with the task of keeping traditions alive.

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