Easter Island’s legendary societal collapse did not really occur

The widespread declare that the traditional folks of Easter Island skilled a societal collapse attributable to overexploitation of pure sources has been thrown into recent doubt. As a substitute, there was a small and secure inhabitants that lived sustainably for hundreds of years earlier than the arrival of Europeans, an evaluation of historic farming practices suggests.

Well-known for its towering stone statues, Easter Island – often known as Rapa Nui – within the Pacific Ocean is assumed to have been inhabited by Polynesians since round AD 1200. At the moment, its 164-square kilometres have been lined in palm forests, however these have been rapidly destroyed, most likely by a mixture of rats and over-harvesting.

In keeping with a story popularised by the historian Jared Diamond, the unsustainable use of sources led to runaway inhabitants progress and a subsequent collapse earlier than Europeans arrived in 1722.

The islanders primarily supported themselves by means of rock gardening, a type of agriculture that has been broadly practised in locations the place soils are poor or the local weather harsh. Stones are scattered round fields to create microhabitats and wind breaks, protect moisture and provide necessary minerals.

Earlier research have prompt that as a lot as 21 sq. kilometres of Rapa Nui was lined in rock gardens, supporting a inhabitants of as much as 16,000 folks.

To seek out out extra, Carl Lipo at Binghamton College in New York and his colleagues used satellite tv for pc imagery mixed with machine studying fashions skilled with floor surveys to generate an island-wide estimate of rock gardening websites.

This discovered that the utmost space of the stone gardens was solely 0.76 sq. kilometres. The researchers estimate that such a system wouldn’t have been capable of assist greater than 4000 folks – roughly the inhabitants estimated to reside there when Europeans arrived. In different phrases, the crew argues, the inhabitants remained remarkably secure.

Lipo says that those that proceed to make use of Easter Island as a case examine of degradation and collapse want to take a look at the empirical proof. “The results we produce continue to support our hypothesis that the island never… [had] a massive population that overconsumed its resources,” he says. “Overall, we do not see evidence in the archaeological record of a population collapse before European arrival.”

As a substitute, there’s rising weight behind the suggestion that islanders reworked their atmosphere in ways in which allowed them to reside sustainably for generations, says Lipo. “Small populations and low-density, dispersed settlement patterns enabled the communities to reliably produce sufficient food for more than 500 years until the arrival of Europeans.”

Dale F. Simpson on the College of Illinois says extra work is required to guage whether or not the precision and accuracy of the mannequin calculations used within the analysis match the archaeological file.

“Overall, this [study] highlights that although the Rapa Nui [people] are often portrayed as a collapsed culture bounded by socio-political competition, ecological overexploitation and megalithic overproduction, the discussion would be better served if it recognised the Rapa Nui as a Polynesian island culture of adaptation and survival that has thrived for almost a millennium,” says Simpson.