Easter Island
Easter Island holds nearly 1,000 surviving monumental statues, and nobody can say for certain why they were raised. Most scholars suspect the figures honor ancestors, chiefs, or other important people. But with so little written or spoken history to go on, certainty is out of reach.
Questions pile up around those figures. Who first crossed open ocean to reach this volcanic island in the southeastern Pacific, and how did they ever find it? How did people working with stone tools carve giants and then move them across rough ground? Did the islanders wreck their own world, as one celebrated book claimed, or has that story been badly misread? And what became of the people themselves, whose culture came close to disappearing?
The place to start is the island's name, or rather its many names.
On Easter Sunday, the 5th of April 1722, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen sighted an island while searching for a place called Davis Land. He named it Paasch-Eyland, which was 18th-century Dutch for Easter Island. His visit left about a dozen islanders dead, among them the tumu ivi 'atua, the keepers of the island's history and genealogy. The official Spanish name, Isla de Pascua, carries the same meaning.
The Polynesian name Rapa Nui, meaning Big Rapa, is younger than many people assume. It was coined after the slave raids of the early 1860s. It points to a resemblance between the island's landscape and the island of Rapa in the Bass Islands of the Austral Islands group. The Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl argued the opposite. He believed Rapa was the original name, and that refugees from Easter Island later gave it to Rapa Iti.
A more poetic name, Te pito o te henua, has often been translated as The Navel of the World. The French ethnologist Alphonse Pinart gave it that romantic rendering in his 1877 book Voyage à l'Île de Pâques. When William Churchill asked about the phrase in 1912, islanders told him there were three te pito o te henua. These were the island's three capes. Churchill read the phrase the way English speakers read Land's End at the tip of Cornwall. He could not find a Polynesian name for the island at all, and he suspected there never was one.
The Rapa Nui language has two words pronounced pito, one meaning end and one meaning navel, so both readings survive. A tradition recorded by Barthel in 1974 offers another name, Te pito o te kainga a Hau Maka, the little piece of land of Hau Maka. Yet another, Mata ki te rangi, means Eyes looking to the sky. In 1770 Felipe González de Ahedo tried yet another, calling it Isla de San Carlos after the patron saint of Charles III of Spain. He also used Isla de David, probably a nod to the phantom Davis Land.
It is Hau Maka, according to oral tradition, who stands at the beginning of the story of how people came to the island.
Oral tradition says the island was settled by two canoes led by a chief named Hotu Matu'a, with his captain Tu'u ko Iho. They set out from a place the tradition calls Marae Renga, or Marae Toe Hau, linked to the Cook Islands. Hau Maka dreamed of a far-off country, and scouts went to look for it. Hotu thought it worth the journey because he had already lost three battles to a neighboring chief and wanted to flee.
The settlers found one lone resident already there, Nga Tavake 'a Te Rona. After a brief stay at Anakena, the colonists spread out across the island. Hotu's heir, Tu'u ma Heke, was born there.
Archaeologists argue about when all this happened. Estimates of the first settlement have ranged from 400 to 1300 CE. For years many researchers cited evidence for around the year 800, but a 2007 study gave compelling evidence for something closer to 1200. Corrections to radiocarbon dating have shifted almost every early Polynesian date, and the current best view is a late arrival, around the time settlers reached Hawaii. Tradition names Anakena as the first landing place, and its sandy beach and shelter from swells make that plausible. Yet radiocarbon work suggests other sites came first, with Tahai preceding Anakena by several centuries.
The voyagers most likely sailed in canoes or catamarans from the Gambier Islands, where Mangareva lies 2,600 km away, or from the Marquesas Islands, 3,200 km away. Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, about halfway along, probably served as stepping stones. The Rapa Nui language closely resembles early Mangarevan. A statue found on Pitcairn resembles some on Easter Island, tool styles match, and skulls from Easter Island correspond to two found on Henderson. In 1999 a voyage in reconstructed Polynesian boats reached Easter Island from Mangareva in seventeen and a half days.
Some theories bring South America into the picture. The sweet potato, a favored Polynesian crop, originated there, and the Rapa Nui word kumara echoes the Quechua and Aymara words cumar and k'umara. Genetic evidence shows that Pacific and Native American peoples interbred about 800 years ago, which was before anyone settled Easter Island. Other research suggests the sweet potato may have spread across the ocean naturally, though critics point to flaws in that study.
The late settlement date carries a consequence. Significant ecological change and heavy investment in monumental architecture both began soon after the first arrivals.
The island measures about 24.6 km long and 12.3 km across at its widest, with a total area of 163.6 square kilometres. Its shape is roughly triangular, and the highest point reaches 507 m above sea level. Mainland Chile lies roughly 3,500 km away, which makes Easter Island one of the most isolated inhabited places on Earth. The uninhabited Isla Salas y Gómez, 415 km to the east, is closer than any other land. Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic competes for the title of most remote island.
Three extinct volcanoes merged to form the island. Terevaka forms the bulk of it, while Poike and Rano Kau form the eastern and southern headlands. Poike was once a separate island until volcanic material from Terevaka joined it to the rest. The whole island and its islets, including Motu Nui and Motu Iti, are the summit of a mountain rising more than 2,000 m from the seabed. It sits on the Salas y Gómez Ridge, a mostly underwater chain formed as the Nazca Plate moved over a volcanic hotspot.
Water is scarce. Three freshwater crater lakes sit at Rano Kau, Rano Raraku and Rano Aroi, but there are no permanent streams or rivers. The ancient residents captured fresh groundwater where it seeped into the sea. In the first half of the 20th century, steam reportedly rose from the wall of the Rano Kau crater, and the island's manager, Mr. Edmunds, photographed it. Rain falls year-round, averaging 1118 mm. February is the warmest month at about 28 degrees Celsius, and July and August the coolest at about 15. Cyclones do not strike here.
The soil of this island has contributed to medicine. The immunosuppressant drug sirolimus was first found in a bacterium in a soil sample from Easter Island. It is also called rapamycin, after Rapa Nui, and it is now being studied for extending longevity in mice.
The volcanoes also supplied the raw material for the statues. Rano Raraku is a tuff cone of light, porous stone, and a carving was abandoned whenever the carvers hit a dense, hard fragment. Those very fragments were shaped into the hammers and chisels used to carve the rest.
According to traditions recorded by missionaries in the 1860s, the island once had a strict class system. An ariki, or high chief, held great power over nine other clans and their chiefs. The ariki was the eldest descendant through first-born lines of Hotu Matu'a. By the 15th century two confederations existed, the Tu'u in the west and north and the 'Otu 'Itu in the east. The living believed they had a symbiotic bond with the dead, who supplied health, fertile land and good fortune in return for offerings.
A total of 887 monolithic statues, called moai, have been inventoried on the island and in museum collections. Corrected radiocarbon dates place their carving between 1100 and 1680 CE. They are often called Easter Island heads, but they have torsos, most ending at the top of the thighs. A small number are complete figures kneeling with hands over their stomachs. Shifting soil has buried some upright moai up to their necks.
About 95 percent were carved from tuff at a single site on Rano Raraku. The carvers used stone hand chisels, mainly basalt toki, which still lie scattered around the quarry. They sharpened a dulled chisel by chipping off a new edge, and they splashed water on the rock to soften it. A team of five or six men needed about a year to finish one moai. Each statue represented the deceased head of a lineage. Only a quarter were ever installed, nearly half stayed in the quarry, and the rest lie elsewhere, apparently on their way.
The largest moai ever raised on a platform is called Paro. It weighs 82 tonnes and is 9.89 m long. The platforms are called ahu, and 313 are known. Only 125 carried moai, usually a single one. Ahu Tongariki, 1 km from Rano Raraku, held the most and the tallest, with 15 statues. A tsunami swept it inland. Other ahu became ossuaries, and one was dynamited open. When a ceremony took place, eyes were set into the statues, with white coral for the whites and obsidian or red scoria for the irises. Most settlements stood on the coast, and most moai watched over them from the shore, backs turned to the spirit world in the sea.
In 1774 the British explorer James Cook visited with a crew member from Bora Bora named Hitihiti. Hitihiti could communicate with the islanders. Through him, Cook learned that the statues commemorated former high chiefs, with their names and ranks. Cook's party also rested in the shade of a standing statue beside one of the old roads.
How the moai traveled is one of the island's best-known riddles. Experiments suggest a Y-shaped sledge called a miro manga erua, pulled with ropes of hau bark tied around the neck, needing 180 to 250 men. Another idea is that as few as 15 people rocked the statue forward by ropes, which would fit the tradition that moai walked. Supporting evidence includes quarry statues with heads sloped forward, while moved ones lack that slope. Statues along the roads have wider bases than those on platforms, and the bases show fractures consistent with rocking. Tradition credits Tu'u ko Iho with making them walk, and recent experiments proved that walking them with ropes is entirely possible. That finding casts doubt on the idea that moving the statues destroyed the island's forests.
Some 50 statues have been re-erected in modern times. One of the first, at Ahu Ature Huke on Anakena beach in 1956, was raised by traditional methods during a Heyerdahl expedition.
In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond proposed that Easter Island's story is an environmental warning. At the time of settlement the island held many tree species, including at least three that grew 15 m or taller. One of these, Paschalococos, may have been the largest palm in the world at that time. At least six species of land birds lived there too. The Polynesian rat arrived with the settlers, and recovered seed shells show gnawing, though another count found fewer than 10 percent of palm nuts bore tooth marks, and many stumps looked cut.
Barbara West described the supposed fall in numbers, from about 15,000 a century earlier to 2,000-3,000 by 1722. In this account, 21 tree species and all land birds were gone by then. No tree stood taller than 3 m. Without big trees the islanders could not build seaworthy vessels, and the supposed rollers for statues were gone. Erosion cut harvests, and chickens became the main source of protein. Diamond added cannibalism, pointing to an insult recorded in oral tradition: "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth."
As resources shrank, the account continues, warriors called matatoa gained power and the ancestor cult yielded to the Bird Man cult. The god Makemake took part in a competition through which a chosen human became the link to the dead. Katherine Routledge, who gathered the island's traditions in her 1914-15 expedition, showed the Bird Man competitions began around 1760 and ended in 1878 when Catholic missionaries built the first church. Bird Man petroglyphs resemble some in Hawaii, so only the competition itself was unique to Easter Island.
The statue toppling, called huri mo'ai, fits this story. Two Spanish ships on the 15th of November 1770 found every statue standing, but by Cook's visit some had fallen. Rival groups tried to destroy the mana in the figures, breaking them as they fell so that they would be dead. By 1838 the only standing moai were on the slopes of Rano Raraku, plus Hoa Hakananai'a at Orongo and Ariki Paro at Ahu Te Pito Kura.
This version of history is highly controversial. A 1994 study led by Douglas Owsley found little evidence of any pre-European collapse, and few deaths could be blamed on violence. In 2021 Robert DiNapoli and Carl Lipo reported steady population growth from first settlement until 1722. The island never held more than a few thousand people before contact, and their numbers were rising, not falling.
Hunt and Lipo answer Diamond claim by claim. Deforestation began immediately, they argue, but the population grew as cleared land became productive farmland. The only clear decline came between 1750 and 1800. On other islands, Polynesian settlement without rats caused minimal forest loss, while rats without people were devastating. Only species rats favored were lost, and the native toromiro survived. The population declines they attribute to introduced disease, raids, slavery and exploitation.
The physical record of war is thin. Hunt and Lipo note no fortifications, and the obsidian mata'a once labeled weapons show signs of agricultural use. Only 2.5 percent of pre-European crania show healed fractures. Clear evidence of cannibalism is entirely lacking, and in 1914 islanders firmly rejected the claim that their ancestors had been cannibals. The wars of the throwing down of the statues began only after Western contact. Early visitors called the people peaceful and docile.
The French expedition of Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, anchored at Hanga Roa on the 10th of April 1786. His gardener declared that three days of work a year would feed the population. A major in the expedition named Rollin wrote that he found not men exhausted by famine but a considerable population with excellent provisions. The islanders also practiced lithic mulching, covering fields with gravel to trap moisture. A 2010 review by Mulrooney and colleagues concluded that "To date, there is no conclusive evidence for the proposed precontact collapse of Rapa Nui society." A 2024 study found no genetic evidence for ecocide.
A 2025 study of sediment cores from Rano Aroi and Rano Kao found a megadrought beginning around 1550. Rainfall fell by an estimated 600-800 mm annually for more than a century.
In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck the island. The violent abductions continued for several months and captured around 1,500 men and women, about half the population. Among them were the paramount chief, his heir, and those who could read the rongorongo script. It is the only Polynesian script found to date, though scholars debate whether it is proto-writing or true writing. Of those taken, 1,408 worked as indentured servants in Peru, and only about a dozen ever returned.
The survivors carried smallpox home. When the raiders were forced to repatriate their captives, disease came ashore with a few survivors on each island, from Easter Island to the Marquesas. So many died that some of the dead went unburied. The losses included the tumu ivi 'atua and the rongorongo experts, the bearers of the island's history, genealogy and culture.
The missionary Eugène Eyraud arrived in January 1864 and was the first to report the rongorongo tablets. Mass conversion came only after he returned in 1866 with Father Hippolyte Roussel. In 1867 an epidemic of tuberculosis killed a quarter of the 1,200 who remained, leaving 930. The dead included the last ariki mau, the 13-year-old Manu Rangi. Eyraud himself died of the disease.
Land then became the battleground. Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier bought up all of the island except the missionaries' area around Hanga Roa, and he moved a few hundred islanders to Tahiti to work for his backers. In 1871 the missionaries, having fallen out with him, evacuated all but 171 Rapa Nui to the Gambier Islands. Those who stayed were mostly older men.
By 1877 only 111 people lived on Easter Island, and just 36 of them had children. More than 97 percent of the population had died or left in under a decade, and much of the island's cultural knowledge went with them. In 1892 a census by the Chilean corvette Abtao counted only 101 Rapa Nui, of whom just 12 were adult men.
Alexander Salmon, Jr. was the son of an English Jewish merchant and a Pōmare Dynasty princess. He worked to bring workers back to his inherited copra plantation, bought all land except the mission's and became the island's sole employer. He promoted tourism, and he advised the British and German archaeological expeditions. Salmon effectively ruled from 1878 until he sold the Brander holdings to the Chilean government on the 2nd of January 1888.
Captain Policarpo Toro of the Chilean Navy had pushed for years for the island's incorporation, and in 1887 he acted. He bought land from the Salmon brothers, Dutrou-Bornier, John Brander and the Bishop of Valparaiso, using his own money alongside 6,000 pounds sterling from the government. Rapa Nui tradition held that land could not be sold, but outside parties believed they owned it, so they were bought out to stop their meddling. On the 9th of September 1888, the Agreement of Wills was signed. Atamu Tekena, head of the Council of Rapanui Chiefs, ceded sovereignty to Chile. In the account of the agreement, the elders kept their chiefly titles, their land and the validity of their culture.
Annexation ended the slave raids, but hardship continued. In 1895 the Compañía Explotadora de Isla de Pascua, run by Enrique Merlet, won a concession over the whole island. The company barred islanders from living or working outside Hanga Roa. In 1903 an English sheep-farming company, Williamson Balfour, bought the lease, and islanders worked on the ranches to buy their food. In 1914 the elderly catechist María Angata Veri Veri inspired an uprising led by Daniel Maria Teave. The Navy blamed the company for "brutal and savage acts".
Until the 1960s the Rapanui were confined to Hanga Roa. In 1953 President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo cancelled the company's contract and gave the Chilean Navy the whole administration. In 1966 the island reopened fully, and the Pascua Law, passed under President Eduardo Frei Montalva, granted citizenship. Only Spanish had been taught in schools until then. The law also created the commune of Isla de Pascua, a hospital and schools. Alfonso Rapu, who had written to Frei two years earlier, became the first mayor.
Mataveri International Airport opened in 1965, and LAN Chile flights began landing in April 1967. A NASA tracking station operated on the island until 1975. After the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power, martial law arrived and tourism slowed. Television reached the island on the 24th of January 1975. Since the term of Governor Sergio Rapu Haoa from 1984 to 1990, every governor has been Rapanui. A constitutional reform on the 30th of July 2007 made the island a special territory of Chile.
The struggle over land continued. In August 2010 members of the Hitorangi clan occupied the Hangaroa Eco Village and Spa, saying their ancestors had been cheated out of the land. On the 3rd of December 2010, at least 25 people were injured, according to the BBC, when police using pellet guns tried to evict them. In January 2011 the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous People, James Anaya, urged Chile to talk with the Rapa Nui in good faith. Up to 50 armed police removed the last five occupiers that February. In 2020 the conflict was settled, and the property rights passed to the Hitorangi clan.
In 2018 the government cut the permitted tourist stay from 90 days to 30. The island closed to visitors from the 17th of March 2020 until the 4th of August 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just two months after reopening, a fire burned nearly 148 acres in early October 2022 and caused irreparable damage to some moai. Arson is suspected. UNESCO had named Easter Island a World Heritage Site in 1995, with much of it protected within Rapa Nui National Park.
Updated
Common questions
Where is Easter Island located?
Easter Island lies in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, roughly 3,500 km from central Chile, and is a special territory of Chile. The uninhabited Isla Salas y Gómez, 415 km to the east, is the nearest land.
What are the moai statues of Easter Island?
The moai are monolithic stone statues carved between about 1100 and 1680 CE, and 887 have been inventoried on the island and in museum collections. About 95 percent were carved from tuff at Rano Raraku, and each represented the deceased head of a lineage.
How did the Rapa Nui move the Easter Island moai?
Experiments suggest a Y-shaped sledge called a miro manga erua, pulled by 180 to 250 men, or a rocking method that as few as 15 people could manage. Recent experiments showed that walking the statues with ropes is fully possible, which matches Rapa Nui tradition.
Why is Easter Island called Easter Island?
Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen reached the island on Easter Sunday, the 5th of April 1722, and named it Paasch-Eyland. The Spanish name Isla de Pascua means the same thing.
Did Easter Island's society collapse because of deforestation?
The ecocide theory, popularized by Jared Diamond's book Collapse, is highly controversial. Studies by Owsley in 1994, DiNapoli and Lipo in 2021, and Mulrooney and colleagues in 2010 found no conclusive evidence of a pre-European collapse.
What happened to the Rapa Nui people in the 1860s?
Peruvian slave raiders captured around 1,500 people in December 1862, and smallpox and tuberculosis followed. By 1877 only 111 people lived on Easter Island.
When did Easter Island become part of Chile?
Chile annexed Easter Island in 1888, when the Agreement of Wills was signed on the 9th of September 1888. The Rapa Nui received Chilean citizenship in 1966, and the island became a special territory on the 30th of July 2007.
All sources
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- 125Anakena beach at Easter IslandEaster Island Traveling
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- 129Easter Island Statue Project Field Season IVEisp.org
- 130Featured Articles Phase 2 Season 2Jo Anne Van Tilberg
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- 140The Ceremonial Village of Easter Island28 August 2013
- 141The Easter Island Caves: an underground world3 June 2020
- 143Easter Island musical stone went from priceless to worthless21 March 2018
- 146Pu o Hiro, the trumpet of Hiro29 October 2021
- 147Fischer, pages 31, 63.
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- 155Censo 2002Ine.cl
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