A Birkenstock shop caters to footsore ramblers. Wealthy tourists drop a thousand dollars a night at the poshest of scores of hotels. Just three decades ago, cars, electricity, and phone service were scarce now Hanga Roa, the only town, buzzes with Internet cafés, bars, and dance clubs, and cars and pickup trucks clog the streets on Saturday nights. Nowadays 12 flights arrive every week from Chile, Peru, and Tahiti, and in 2011 those planes delivered 50,000 tourists, ten times the island’s population. There were probably only a few dozen of them.
When the Polynesian settlers arrived at Rapa Nui, they had been at sea for weeks in open canoes. Can the whole planet, Diamond asks, avoid the same fate? In the other view, the ancient Rapanui are uplifting emblems of human resilience and ingenuity-one example being their ability to walk giant statues upright across miles of uneven terrain. The first, eloquently expounded by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, presents the island as a cautionary parable: the most extreme case of a society wantonly destroying itself by wrecking its environment. Tuki’s question-how did they do it?-has vexed legions of visitors in the past half century.īut lately the moai have been drawn into a larger debate, one that opposes two distinct visions of Easter Island’s past-and of humanity in general.
The moai were carved with stone tools, mostly in a single quarry, then transported without draft animals or wheels to massive stone platforms, or ahu, up to 11 miles away. Yet when Dutch explorers landed on Easter Sunday in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture. All the energy and resources that went into the moai-which range in height from four to 33 feet and in weight to more than 80 tons-came from the island itself. After it was settled, it remained isolated for centuries. It lies 2,150 miles west of South America and 1,300 miles east of Pitcairn, its nearest inhabited neighbor. “How did they do it?”Įaster Island covers just 63 square miles. “This is something produced from my culture. “It’s something strange and energetic,” he says. They watch over this remote island from a remote age, but when Tuki stares at their faces, he feels a surge of connection. At Anakena seven potbellied moai stand at attention on a 52-foot-long stone platform-backs to the Pacific, arms at their sides, heads capped with tall pukao of red scoria, another volcanic rock. He’s a Rapanui, an indigenous Polynesian resident of Rapa Nui, as the locals call Easter Island his own ancestors probably helped carve some of the hundreds of statues that stud the island’s grassy hills and jagged coasts. A frigid wind gusted in from Antarctica, making Tuki shiver. Sleepless roosters crowed stray dogs barked.
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