The Easter Island enigma

Flenley and Bahn have created an incredibly comprehensive reconstruction of Easter Island's history. They cover the origins, flora, fauna, tides, culture, language, stone carving, etc. In fact, for a layman such as myself, the sheer volume of details is a bit overwhelming, and I frequently found myself skimming. (I really didn't want to know that much about Chilean palm tree nuts or pollen samples.) The authors make their very plausible (and exhaustive) case that the Easter Islanders doomed themselves by invoking an ecological disaster, possibly compounded by drought, which led to starvation and internecine warfare. The stone giants are the embodiment of some sort of archetypal figure from the human subconscious and have fascinated generations. I came away from the reading most impressed by the fact that every scientist, archaeologist, doctor, engineer, or assorted wing-nut who had seen the stones was compelled to try and figure out how they were carved or moved. The megaliths seem to cast a spell over the most sane and rational people. (I found myself telling my husband we should go there for our next vacation)

This is likely the most comprehensive and authoritative work available on the mysteries of Easter Island, concerning its unique culture and its famous statues. The writing here is rather dry, with only occasional glimmers of personality, though the knowledge presented is robust and is usually entirely readable for the interested layperson. The book gets off to a pretty slow start as Flenley and Bahn unnecessarily debunk the discredited theories of Thor Heyerdahl, while they seem to have a colonialist-style disdain for the memories of the present Easter Islanders. The book eventually improves, presenting a general history of the island and an overview of its isolated brand of Polynesian culture. Utilizing archeology, linguistics, botany, anthropology and other disciplines, we learn here that the Easter Island culture evolved out of a likely total isolation from their Polynesian kin (it's one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth), adapted to specific environmental challenges, and developed a highly unique society focused on building giant statues and monuments. But at some point the closed cultural and environmental system collapsed, probably with deforestation and soil erosion as the root causes, and the rich island culture broke down into mayhem and anarchy. This is a chilling lesson for humankind, though Flenley and Bahn wrap up the book with a pretty weak and predictable environmental message for the world. [~doomsdayer520~]

This is an excellent, up-to date (2003), fairly easy read of an astounding place, Rapa Nui, the island in the South Pacific better known as Easter Island. This is in fact an updated edition of an earlier 1992 edition, that has been revised to incorporate new ideas and developments in research into a place which has seen quite a deal of academic interest and debate over the last few decades. It is, as the title suggests, mostly a discussion of some of the more enigmatic and mysterious aspects of this small island at the 'edge of the world', so to speak. Discussions include how the Polynesians got there in the first place (several thousand kilometres from just about anywhere), what happened to the island's original flora and fauna, why there are now virtually no trees on the island, why and how they built and transported the enormous statues, why their culture seemingly underwent several periods of cultural implosion, and how they came to have their own system of rudimentary symbolic writing-no small thing incidentally- since it is only one of a handful of societies where a form of writing is thought to have arisen independently (although this is debated for Easter Island). Rest assured, once one delves into the detail and human richness of the history and culture on Easter Island, (past what one hears via the grapevine or via populist travel articles), one begins to find things one did not quite expect. Put simply, it becomes a kind of mirror of the human psyche, of humans in close interaction with their primeval environment, with all its ghastliness and beauty, and their myriad inclinations towards both the tragic and the beautiful. Take for example, the extreme feeling of isolation that a seafaring culture must have felt, of being stranded, once all the original tree species had been cut down and driven to extinction, and they couldn't make any more sea craft (something a number of environmentalists have pointed out). Imagine the keen loss of traditional values that must have been felt, once the statues were thrown down (in a probable revolution of some sort), or the desperate alternative worship of man-like birds, who could fly away into the sea and escape their lonely, now barren, isle. And what about the island's trees in the first place-there was a highly prized native palm on the island, that could be sourced to transport statues, make ropes, make sea craft, and provide an alcoholic sap amongst other things, which was driven to extinction by the islanders-whether by over-exploitation, neglect, or through an inability to adapt and change, or all of them. And there are even suggestions that is was in the making and transporting of the statues themselves which at least partially caused the islander's ultimate cultural downfall-the transport of the statues required the felling of timber, and if one of these two practices had to cease or change, it probably wasn't the felling of timber. It is difficult to know for certain what variety of factors