Rapa Nui

Rapa Nui is a small (160 km) remote subtropical island in the South Pacific Ocean, 3600 km west of Chile, the nation of which it forms a part, and 1900 km east-southeast of Pitcairn Island, the nearest inhabited island. It is known to outsiders as Easter Island (Isla de Pascua in Spanish), so named by Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen after his visit to the island on Easter in 1722. Rapa Nui is the locally preferred name, used since the 19th century, which also refers to the people and their language. Although its large monolithic moai stone statues are widely recognized, substantial mystery still surrounds the origins and development of the people who erected these monuments. Reconstructing the history of migration, adaptation, innovation, contact, and survival has been the focus of studies to which archaeology, linguistics, biological anthropology, ethnology, ecology, and related disciplines have all contributed.

Oral histories tell of an original settlement of people arriving from the west from a land called Marae Rega or Marae Toe Hau, led by Hotu Matu'a—Great Parent—the first ariki (chief) of the island. The Rapa Nui have been considered culturally and linguistically Polynesian since their first contacts with European visitors. In the 1940s, however, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl hypothesized that the island was first settled from South America, before Polynesians arrived. As evidence, he pointed to the sophisticated and large-scale stone work of the ahu (ceremonial platforms), the presence of sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and other native South American plants, the path of ocean currents, and other ethnological and linguistic evidence. His much publicized Kon-Tiki raft expedition of1947 attempted to demonstrate the plausibility of this theory. Most experts today tend to discount the South American origins of the stonework, but many acknowledge the possibility of contact.

Early studies relying primarily on linguistic and archaeological data estimated that the island was likely settled from Eastern Polynesia before AD 600 or as early as AD 400. More recent research based on further analyses in archaeology, linguistics, biological anthropology, and experimental voyaging has, however, led researchers to propose later settlement dates around AD 600–1000. Earlier hypotheses regarding a direct settlement originating from the Marquesas have also been revised to favor settlement(s) from the Mangareva-Pitcairn-Henderson area. Yet another hypothesis postulates that settlers may have arrived from the Marquesas via South America, and may have brought back the sweet potato.

The Rapa Nui are a testament to the remarkable achievements and migrations of the descendants of protōAustronesian speakers originating from southern China, who over the last 5,000 years—including 3,000 years in Oceania—migrated and settled an area spanning 28,000 km on an east-west axis, with Madagascar off the east coast of Africa at its western end and Rapa Nui at the eastern end. The successful colonization of new Pacific islands and the subsequent development of complex societies depended not only on their skills as navigators but also on subsistence strategies, especially regarding food production in the sometimes limited physical environment of their new homes. Hotu Matu'a is said to have brought food crops and introduced them to the island, including pigs, chicken, bananas, taro, yams, sugar cane, ti, and even sweet potatoes. While most researchers disagree with Heyerdahl, contact with South America is considered a possible factor in the cultural development of this island society. For example, the introduction of the sweet potato is considered a major factor in agricultural intensification, which the archaeological evidence shows to have been widely adopted on the island after AD 1200.[Page 1986]

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