From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui

exceptional civilisation crumble? What drove its population to extinction? These
environmental devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into
the victims of cultural and physical extermination into the perpetrators of their
It describes the foundation of Diamond’s environmental revisionism and explains
why it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.

of Neolithic societies anywhere in the world. Easter Island’s stone-working skills and
system. This most extraordinary society developed, flourished and persisted for
perhaps more than one thousand years – before it collapsed and became all but extinct.

Why did this exceptional civilisation crumble? What drove its population to
in a chapter which focuses on Easter Island.

Diamond’s saga of the decline and fall of Easter Island is straightforward and can
subsisted among the ruins of a once vibrant civilisation.

Diamond’s key line of reasoning is not difficult to grasp: Easter Island’s
out in no uncertain terms that the island’s downfall was entirely self-inflicted:
“It was the islanders themselves who had destroyed their own ancestor’s work”
(Diamond, 2005).

Lord May, the President of Britain’s Royal Society, recently condensed Diamond’s
theory of environmental suicide in this way: “In a lecture at the Royal Society last
eventually wiped out, a phenomenon he called ‘ecocide’”
(May, 2005).
Diamond’s theory has been around since the early 1980s. Since then, it has reached
a mass audience due to a number of popular books and Diamond’s own publications.

As a result, the notion of ecological suicide has become the “orthodox model” of Easter
Island’s demise. “This story of self-induced eco-disaster and consequent selfdestruction
of a Polynesian island society continues to provide the easy and
(Rainbird, 2002).

goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Clive Ponting’s
The Green History of the World – for many years the main manifest of British
eco-pessimism – begins his saga of ecological destruction and social degeneration with
“The Lessons of Easter Island” (Ponting, 1992:1ff.). Others view Easter Island
as a microcosm of planet Earth and consider the former’s bleak fate as symptomatic
for what awaits the whole of humanity. Thus, the story of Easter Island’s environmental
suicide has become the prime case for the gloomiest of grim eco-pessimism. After
leading experts comes to an extremely gloomy conclusion: “It seems […] that
ecological sustainability may be an impossible dream. The revised Club of
2100. Easter Island still seems to be a plausible model for Earth Island.”

employs Rapa Nui’s tragic end as a dire warning and a moral lesson for humanity
today: “Easter [Island’s] isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that
may lie ahead of us in our own future”
(Diamond, 2005).

While the theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental
circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island’s selfdestruction:
an actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui’s indigenous populace and its
culture. Diamond ignores, or neglects to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui’s
whalers and colonists – and not by themselves! After all, the cruelty and systematic
kidnapping by European slave-merchants, the near-extermination of the Island’s
indigenous population and the deliberate destruction of the island’s environment has
been regarded as “one of the most hideous atrocities committed by white men in the
South Seas”
(Métraux, 1957:38), “perhaps the most dreadful piece of genocide in
Polynesian history”
(Bellwood, 1978:363).

So why does Diamond maintain that Easter Island’s celebrated culture, famous for
its sophisticated architecture and giant stone statues, committed its own environmental
suicide? How did the once well-known accounts about the “fatal impact” (Moorehead,
1966) of European disease, slavery and genocide – “the catastrophe that wiped out
Easter Island’s civilisation”
(Métraux, ibid.) – turn into a contemporary parable of selfinflicted
ecocide? In short, why have the victims of cultural and physical extermination
been turned into the perpetrators of their own demise?

foundation of Diamond’s environmental revisionism and explains why it does not hold
up to scientific scrutiny.

Easter Island has probably been the subject of more hyperbole and speculation in
proportion to its size than any other prehistoric place on Earth. Conjecture and bunkum
might have been less significant but for the catastrophic end to the life of its people and
the deliberate destruction of their culture which almost completely eradicated the
memory of their own past.

Rapa Nui is the most isolated place of inhabited land in the world, located in the
South Pacific. Separated by some 3,200 km from the nearest continent of South
America, it was re-discovered in 1722 on Easter Day (hence its name) by the
Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen. At the time, the island was inhabited by a population
of Polynesian origin who had arrived on Easter Island many centuries earlier. Due to
the island’s extreme remoteness (2,000 km separate it from the nearest inhabited
island), the inhabitants depended on the island’s endowment of natural and marine

Diamond’s historical reconstruction is based largely on fallacious mythologies
and legends. He claims that Easter Island’s civilisation had collapsed and the building
of its famous statues ceased long before 1722, and that a catastrophic civil war
and population crash toppled its culture shortly before Europeans discovered Easter

It is generally agreed that Rapa Nui’s oral traditions are untrustworthy and of
relatively late origin; they are extremely contradictory and historically unreliable. As
Bellwood (1978) emphasises: “By the time detailed observations were made in the
1880s, the old culture was virtually dead […] It is my own suspicion that none [of the
traditions] are valid.”
Most of the information was “gleaned from a few surviving
natives from the late nineteenth century onwards, by then decimated, demoralised and
culturally impoverished population which had lost most of the collective culturalhistorical
memory” (Flenley and Bahn, 2003).

In spite of this widely-held consensus among researchers, Diamond insists that
these highly questionable records are reliable. In his view, “those traditions contain
much evidently reliable information about life on Easter in the century or so before
European arrival”
(Diamond, 2005:88). Without his confidence in the reliance on
mythology and concocted folklore, Diamond would lack any evidence for pre-European
civil wars, cannibalism and societal collapse. After all, there is no compelling
before the 18th century (Rainbird, 2002). Only by relying on incongruous myths and
contradictory tales can Diamond weave a superficially coherent reconstruction of Rapa
Nui’s prehistory.

To understand how Diamond arrived at the premise of Easter Island’s environmental
self-destruction, we need to examine the foundations of his theory and that of his
precursors. Diamond is not the first to suggest that environmental degradation rather
than European complicity destroyed Easter Island’s civilisation. The scientific
hypothesis of ecological breakdown goes back to the beginnings of the environmental
movement and was originally developed in the 1970s and ‘80s. The historical roots of
the problems that underline this idea, however, go back to the 18th century.
Some of the island’s most conspicuous “riddles” and “mysteries” were noticed
by the first European visitors. How could ‘naked savages’ living on an ostensibly
treeless island ever build, transport and erect giant stone sculptures? Who
destroyed them and why? These and other questions have obsessed generations of

The biggest problem faced by researchers who have attempted to answer these
questions is the fact that the information written down by European discoverers and
early visitors is extremely limited in content and reliability. Most of the early visitors
only stayed for a few days. They never inspected the entire island, let alone study in
detail the social infrastructure or the cultural and religious behaviour of its indigenous
population. The accounts and reports that cover the period between Easter’s discovery
in 1722 and the extermination of its culture 150 years later are fundamentally
inconsistent and contradictory. When, at the start of the 20th century, the first
archaeological expeditions tried to reconstruct the island’s history, they stumbled upon
an exhausted terrain: the indigenous population had been almost completely
annihilated, its culture and natural habitat destroyed as a result of physical, cultural and
environmental obliteration.

Easter Island’s treeless landscape is perhaps the most crucial piece of physical
evidence on which Diamond has based his theory of ecocide. Diamond’s whole edifice
of ecological self-destruction basically rests on Easter Island’s deforestation.
According to this premise, the extinction of the native palm tree triggered a series of
environmental and social catastrophes that culminated in Easter Island’s culture crash.
As palms were cut down to clear land for agriculture, to plant gardens, to construct big
canoes, to obtain firewood for cooking and to transport and erect the giant cult statues,
a cascade of environmental and societal knock-on disasters ensued.

Unquestionably, Rapa Nui has been devoid of large trees for quite some time. Pollen
analysis has shown that palm trees once existed on the island and made up part of its
flora. Despite this general agreement, research into both the causes and timing of
deforestation remains contentious. Nunn (1999) has pointed out that there are
numerous methodological problems involved in any attempt to reconstruct prehistoric
human impact on the environment. Above all, natural events frequently generate
changes that are sometimes similar if not identical to those produced by human impact.
Numerous researchers (Finney, 1994; Hunter Anderson, 1998; Nunn, 1999; 2003;
Orliac and Orliac, 1998) suggest that the climatic downturn caused by the Little Ice
Age may have exacerbated the problem of resource stress and could have contributed
to the disappearance of the palm tree from Easter Island. There is little agreement on
when exactly the island’s palms became extinct.

Scientists disagree over which forces brought about deforestation and the degree of
importance that palm trees may have played in Rapa Nui’s culture compared to other
tree species that survived into the early 20th century (Liller, 1995). The wrangle about
the island’s former tree cover goes back to the discovery of the island in 1722. When
Jacob Roggeveen and his crew spotted Easter’s imposing sculptures, he wondered how
the natives could have created and erected them:

and broad in proportion.
(Roggeveen, 1903:15).

The impression of a nearly treeless patch of land appears to be corroborated by Cornelis
Bouman, Roggeveen’s captain. In his log book, he stated that “of yams, bananas and
small coconut palms we saw little and no other trees or crops”
(von Saher, 1994:99).
‘No thick timber, no strong ropes.’ In other words, no means to transport and erect
the giant statues. We see that Diamond’s bewilderment goes back quite a while. Yet
he often cites Roggeveen’s and Bouman’s impressions selectively. Most researchers
deduce from their descriptions that Easter Island was totally deforested by 1722. But
how could the discoverers have known that thick timber and strong ropes were wholly
absent from the island? Their visit lasted just a few days and neither Roggeveen nor
his crew inspected the whole of the island. And what about the small palm trees which
Bouman claims to have seen - albeit few in numbers? What about the toromiro trees
that existed on Easter Island until their modern extinction in the late 19th and early 20th

Diamond’s assertion that Easter’s discoverers encountered an island devoid of trees
is also contradicted by Carl Friedrich Behrens, Roggeveen’s officer. According to
Behrens’ description of the island and its inhabitants, the natives presented “palm
branches as peace offerings.”
Their houses were “set up on wooden stakes, daubed
over with luting and covered with palm leaves”
(Behrens, 1903:134/135; his account
was originally published in 1737).
Behrens concluded his remarkably cheerful description of Easter Island and its
natural environment on a high note: “This island is a suitable and convenient place at
which to obtain refreshment, as all the country is under cultivation and we saw in the
distance whole tracts of woodland [ganze Wälder]”
(Behrens, 1903:137).

Be that as it may, we should not place too much confidence in the contradictory
accounts of early visitors who had only limited access and a few days to inspect the
island, its people and its environment. Any selective reading of these accounts will
inevitably result in an incoherent picture of the island’s history.
Mulloy (1970) was one of the first to suggest that the fading and cessation of the
megalithic culture could have been caused by deforestation. This suggestion was not
out of the question. It was indirectly supported by pollen data analysed by the
Norwegian expedition in the 1950s which showed that palm trees had once grown on
the island (Heyerdahl and Ferdon, 1961).

In the 1980s, the first radio carbon analysis of peat and pollen samples attempted to
establish tentatively at what time in history the process of deforestation transpired.
Diamond and the researchers he cited face extreme uncertainty regarding one key
question: when exactly did deforestation begin and, most importantly, when was it
completed? Researchers who have analysed palm pollen suggest that the destruction of
tree cover occurred “especially between 1200 and 800 BP, with the forest finally
disappearing almost completely around 630 BP, say AD 1320”
(Flenley, 1994:206;
similar dates in Flenley, 1998; Flenley, 1984; King and Flenley, 1989).
“Therefore”, Flenley (1998) argues, “the arrival of people could be causally related
to the decline of trees, and the decline of trees could be causally related to the cultural
” However, confirming the existence of palm trees and palm fruits is one
thing; linking their disappearance with an alleged societal collapse of the island’s
civilisation is an altogether different and much less convincing charge.

To begin with, Flenley’s conspicuously early dating of Easter Island’s deforestation
created a major problem. Orliac and Orliac (1998) have called attention to this
inconsistency: “If the trees had ‘almost’ completely disappeared by the 14th century,
how could the statues be transported until the end of the 17th century?”
In other words,
if the destruction of palm trees triggered societal breakdown, why was the collapse of
Easter Island’s civilisation delayed by more than three centuries?
It was perhaps this palpable conundrum which forced Diamond to widen Flenley’s
early dates significantly. In a 1995 article, Diamond had claimed that “the fifteenth
century marked the end not only for Easter’s palm but for the forest itself […] Not long
could no longer germinate.”
(Diamond, 1995).

This chronology, however, was not consistent with any causative link between
deforestation and societal failure. For that reason, Diamond has moved the date of
deforestation. While forest clearance “peaked around 1400”, he has lengthened the
island’s forest cover by almost 200 years, which now reaches well into the 1600s.
“After 1650 Easter’s inhabitants were reduced to burning herbs, grasses and sugarcane
scraps for fuel”
(Diamond, 2005:108).

Writing in 1984, Flenley and his colleagues had emphasised that the alleged
cessation of statue building “suddenly in AD 1680 […] may have been caused by the
extinction of the palm”
(Dransfield, et al., 1984). Diamond adheres to this line of
argumentation and links the loss of palm trees to the termination of the island’s statue
cult: “Lack of large timber and rope brought an end to the transport and erection of
statues, and also the construction of seagoing canoes”
(Diamond, 2005:107). What he
fails to mention is that the disappearance of palms resulted neither in a lack of timber
nor a lack of strong rope.

The disappearance of the palm, whenever it may have occurred, undoubtedly placed
a considerable limit on Easter Island’s ecology and culture, but what is highly
questionable is Diamond’s claim that the extinction of the palm tree automatically
triggered societal collapse.

For a start, it remains unclear when exactly the last palm trees became extinct.
Nobody questions that smaller trees existed on Easter Island up until the 20th century.
There are even reports by European visitors, such as the testimony by J.L. Palmer
(1870a) who claims to have spotted “boles of large palm trees” as late as the second
half of the 19th century – an observation confirmed by his co-visitor Lt Dundas who
also saw “a few stumps of cocoa-nut palm” (Dundas, 1871). Given these and many
other uncertainties, even Flenley himself wonders whether the palm may not have
vanished until much later than generally thought: “Why did the palm become extinct?
Possibly the coup de grace was administered by the sheep and goats introduced in the
19th and 20th centuries; but the species had clearly become rare before then, if Cook
and La Pérouse are correct”
(Flenley, 1993:35).

Needless to say, neither Cook nor La Pérouse are reliable witnesses given their
extremely limited visits and incomplete knowledge of the island’s natural setting.
Whatever the case, deforestation was by no means an all-inclusive process. The
smaller but important toromiro tree (Sophora toromiro) did not become extinct until
the 20th century. It was essentially the only source of wood left to the islanders. Such
trees provided the wood needed for housing, the building of small canoes, the carving
of wooden figurines and other wooden tools and weapons. Many researchers are
inclined to believe that wooden sledges or rollers produced from the toromiro tree also
served as the apparatus for the statues’ transportation. “The wood of the toromiro
would have been suitable for rollers of 50 cm (20 in.) diameter, and also for levers,
which were probably crucial to handling the statues”
(Flenley and Bahn, 2003:123).

Thus the disappearance of the palms, detrimental as it must have been, did not
necessarily bring about an end to the building, transportation or erection of carved
statues. Given that other timber was freely available as a replacement, there are no grounds to suggest that the disappearance of palms must have triggered civil war and
societal collapse either.

It is difficult to reconstruct with any degree of confidence the ecology of Easter Island
as it existed during the period between its discovery in 1722 and the start of the
genocide that ultimately wiped out its civilisation. There are conflicting reports by
early European visitors who landed on the island during the 18th century.

The Dutch discoverers encountered a well-nourished, well-organized and populous
people that resided among an environment which was well adapted to their needs.
Roggeveen maintained that Easter Island was exceptionally fertile. It produced large
quantities of bananas, potatoes, and sugar-cane of extraordinary thickness. He
concluded that, with careful cultivation, the island’s productive soil and benign climate
could be turned into an ‘earthly paradise’. Captain Cook, on the other hand, was less
impressed. When he visited the island 50 years later amidst high expectations (in all
probability as a result of reading Behrens’ upbeat report), he was disappointed by what
he perceived to be an impoverished island. Yet, regardless of what may have happened
in the aftermath of discovery and early visits, there are compelling reports from the late
18th century that Rapa Nui was far from being in a state of terminal decline. As Rollin,
a major of the French expedition to Easter Island in 1786, underlined:
“Instead of meeting with men exhausted by famine, […] I found, on the
afterwards met in any other island; and a soil, which, with very little labour,
consumption of the inhabitants”
(Heyerdahl & Ferdon, 1961:57).

Yet Diamond does not provide a balanced account of these reports, depicting Easter
Island’s natural environment in the bleakest possible way: The island, when it was
discovered, “was not a paradise but a wasteland”; it was devoid of timber, a windy
place with few food sources and deficient “not just in coral-reef fish but in fish
generally.” Surely, he concludes, such an “impoverished landscape” could not have
supported a complex and populous society capable of producing the impressive
Neolithic architecture and giant statues.

This deliberately gloomy description is misleading in many respects. Neither is it an
original slant but a rhetorical technique with a long history. The same one-sided
arguments were raised for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Writers who refused to
accept that the native culture was capable of sophisticated skills and convoluted
accomplishments had expressed the same doubts – as Métraux (1957) stressed almost
half a century ago:
“Easter Island has often been pictured in the grimmest light. A barren island, a
field of volcanic stones, an unproductive tract of land incapable of supporting
a population of any density – such are the expressions most commonly used to
describe it. By what strange freak did a brilliant civilization manage to develop
on this supposedly barren rock? Is the transport of the greatest statues
conceivable without trees required for the construction of skids or rollers? On
what did the ‘armies of slaves’ live who hauled these statues over the fields of
lava and along volcanic crests. […] In reality, however, Easter Island’s arid
appearance is deceptive. Roggeveen considered it so fertile that he dubbed it an
‘earthly Paradise’. M. de La Pérouse’s gardener was delighted with the nature
of the soil and declared that three day’s work a year would be enough to support
the population.”

In sharp contrast to Diamond’s gloomy description of the island’s marine food
supplies, Rapa Nui’s coastal areas are rich in fish stocks. There are more than 100
species of which 95 per cent inhabit coastal areas. Also present are large numbers of
lobsters which are much appreciated for their size and taste. The coasts are seasonally
visited by marine reptiles such as the hawksbill turtle, the green turtle and the sea viper.
Thomson, a U.S. Navy officer and Easter Island’s first scientific researcher rightly
emphasised the importance of abundant fish supplies for the native’s prime diet:
“Fish has always been the principal means of support for the islanders, and the
bonito, albicore, ray, dolphin, and porpoise are the off-shore fish most highly
are caught in the cavities and crevices of the rock-bound coast … . Turtles are
constantly maintained on the sand beach. A species of crayfish is abundant.
form an important article of food. Shell-fish are plentiful”
(Thomson, 1891:458).

Fish hooks were made of stone and bone. Fishing nets were used, made from the paper
mulberry tree. On numerous places around the coast, the natives had set up round
towers built of stone that were said to be look-out towers from which watchers on land
communicated the whereabouts of turtles and fish to those at sea. While fish was
available in abundance, cultural practices restricted the periods during which fishing
was allowed, thus preventing over-exploitation. Indeed, before the arrival of the deepsea
fishing season “all fish living in twenty or thirty fathoms were considered
(Routledge, 1917:345).

is no archaeological evidence whatsoever for either starvation or cannibalism.

“Could these primitive cannibals have been the masters who wrought the classical
giant sculptures of aristocratic ruler type which dominated the countryside on this same
, asked Thor Heyerdahl (1958:73) in one of his popular books on Easter Island.
To be sure, one of the dominant themes and premises of past research on Easter Island’s
native population is the claim that the “primitive” inhabitants that were discovered in
the 18th century could not have been the designers and architects of their civilisation’s
giant statues and architectural accomplishments.

Even broad-minded Westerners such as Captain Cook underestimated the technical
prowess of the Polynesians in general. He could not believe, for example, that their seagoing
canoes had overtaken him on fast passages (Lewis, 1972). When Cook visited
Easter Island in 1774, he was equally suspicious about Rapa Nui’s inhabitants: “We
could hardly conceive how these islanders, wholly unacquainted with any mechanical
power, could raise such stupendous figures, and afterwards place the large cylindric
stones upon their heads”
(Flenley and Bahn, 2003). Foster, who had accompanied
Cook, also remarked that the statues “are so disproportionate to the strength of the
nation, it is most reasonable to look upon them as the remains of better times”

For much of the last 300 years, Easter Island’s indigenous population was
considered to be ‘savages’ and ‘degenerates’, incapable of carving, transporting or
raising the sculptures (moai) that symbolised the island’s landscape. The inhabitants
were declared uncivilised, uncultured or unable to have created their own, magnificent
cultural icons. The giant statues could not have been assembled by a few ‘savages’:

their construction would have required vast populations of epic proportion.
During the 19th and 20th century, many European writers attributed the features of
this advanced culture to a superior, former race that became extinct, to sunken
civilisations (such as the mythical continents of Atlantis or Mu) or to ancient societies
in South America and the Middle East. The reconstruction of hypothetical cataclysms
or imaginary migrations from ancient Peru, China or India was based on a widely held
perception and resulted in a sweeping conclusion: an outright denial that the
indigenous population discovered on Rapa Nui were the real masterminds of their
civilisation and its cultural features.

J.L. Palmer, who visited Easter Island in 1868, reported that the Jesuit missionaries
who had established a mission four years earlier dissociated their flock of new converts
from the ‘pagan’ culture of Rapa Nui. According to the missionaries, the giant statues
“were the work of a former race” and that “the present one came here more recently,
banished, it is said, from Oparo, or Kapa-iti, as they call it”
(Palmer, 1868:372). Palmer
was not entirely convinced by the Jesuits’ assertion that the current inhabitants had
nothing to do with the island’s culture. The giant sculptures, he reasoned, were
“apparently made by a race passed away, although it is possible that these people may
have partially continued their construction and fabrication”
(Palmer, 1870:110).

At the time, Palmer’s presentation to the Royal Geographical Society divided his
audience. One participant of the discussion that followed Palmer’s talk “thought it was
impossible to suppose that any people permanently established there would have been
in the habit of constructing these giant works”
and suggested that Peru was the origin
of the island’s civilisation (Palmer, 1870:116). Another participant countered “that the
small wooden figures, which are still made and sold to visitors, bear a certain similarity
to the stone images, which would scarcely exist if the present inhabitants were not
immediately connected with the race that formed the earlier statues”

Sir George Grey finally demystified the whole debate by explaining the likely
correlation between sufficient time and the large number of statues: “He thought it was
extremely easy to account for the images of Easter Island, if the inhabitants had for
centuries been Polynesians. If only eight or ten images were made in that number of
years, a few centuries would suffice to cover the island with them”
(Palmer, 1970:118).
Perhaps the most celebrated promoter of the notion that Rapa Nui’s culture was
founded by a superior race – a white race that settled on the island prior to the
Polynesian natives – was the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. He developed his
belief system long before he began to study Rapa Nui in situ. Heyerdahl was convinced
that Easter Island had been settled by ‘white-skinned’ Caucasian people who had
started off from Peru and Bolivia, but originated from a ‘non-Semitic’ race from the
Middle East. Only after this first colonisation, a second wave of Polynesian settlers put
down roots on the island (Heyerdahl, 1952).

Racially blinkered assumptions and misconceptions were the foundations of
Heyerdahl’s speculations about Easter Island: “The core of his Kon Tiki theory is that
a white ‘race’ came from the Middle East to the Americas and then on to Polynesia to
teach the dark-skinned people the arts of civilisation”
(Holton, 2004).

Easter Island has about 800 large statues, of which almost half remain unfinished in its
main quarry. The question arose as to why so many statues were left unfinished, and
when the last one was carved. The apparent cessation of statue production intimated
that some devastating event or some great tragedy had brought an end to the island’s
customary life and traditional culture. What happened?

Diamond claims to possess the answer to this central question. According to his
story line, the deforestation of Easter Island created dramatic societal consequences,
culminating in mass starvation, a population crash, and a plunge into cannibalism. As
the promises of the ruling elite and its statue cult could no longer be upheld, “the power
of the chiefs and priests was overthrown around 1680 by military leaders called
matatoa, and Easter’s formerly complex integrated society collapsed in an epidemic of
civil war”
(Diamond, 2005:109). Not only the time-honoured ideology (which was
“designed to impress the masses”) failed; the old religion too was overthrown. It
resulted in the abrupt and irrevocable termination of giant statue carving and
culminated, around 1680, in an orchestrated campaign of rival clans who attacked and
toppled one another’s statues. More than anything else, it is this line of argument, this
‘historical’ piece of evidence, on which Diamond’s entire edifice of Easter Island’s
‘ecocide’ rests. However, he fails to acknowledge the dubious sources for this

When the first missionaries arrived on Rapa Nui in 1864, they found a dying culture
in its final death throes. At the end of the century, hardly more than one hundred natives
had survived the series of attacks, slave-raids, pandemics and destructions that had
taken place for most of the 19th century. While Easter Island’s populace was on the
brink of extinction, its indigenous culture came to an end within less than four
years. Exhausted from the ravages of genocide and unable to hold on to their vanishing
traditions, the survivors surrendered to the calls of Christian missionaries. By 1868, the
last survivors of a once stupendous civilisation had been converted.

The first fragmentary oral traditions were chronicled by European missionaries and
visitors who interviewed a few locals about their ‘pagan’ history. It is important to
understand the context of these early conversations. While the customary keepers of
traditional folklore had been deported or killed, the island’s ethnicity had changed as a
result of population transfers on the 1860s and 70s, with an influx of a number of
foreign Polynesians on Easter Island (Thomson, 1891:453). As Holton (2004) points
out, “most of the island’s myths were collected in the nineteenth century, after the
population collapse.”
This was during a time when much of the cultural memory was
“already contaminated by tales from Tahiti and the Marquesas, and elements of
Yet Diamond, who heavily relies on these unreliable records, fails to
mention that these myths and legends were written down by Europeans after they had
converted the survivors to their own belief system.

Notably, many of the new converts denied that the island’s cultural icons - its
imposing statues, its writing system – were the creation of their own society. According
to Palmer’s account of his conversation with the missionaries, the giant sculptures
“were the work of a former race; the present one came here more recently” (Palmer,
1868). This curious and historically untenable form of cultural self-denial did not
receive much attention by the first historians of Easter Island. Nor was the crucial issue
addressed of how the new belief system of these Christian converts may have shaped
their attitude towards their ‘pagan’ past and its iconic ‘idols’.

The few remains of Easter Island’s traditional culture were finally brought to an end
by activities of the missionaries and the traders who had arrived in their wake.
“Missionization changed the culture to the point that within a year or two it no longer
functioned in the traditional way. For purposes of indoctrination into Christianity, the
‘pagan’ natives were concentrated in a single settlement at Vaihu […] thus effectively
breaking the link to ancestral territories”
(McCoy, 1976:147). The unique writing
system that was discovered on wooden tablets on Easter Island during the 19th century
did not survive the introduction of Christianity.

Easter’s few survivors had no real historical recollection of most of the events that
transpired prior to the annihilation of Rapa Nui’s culture and its people in the 1860s
and 70s. Routledge found that they had no idea whatever why the carving of statues
had been abandoned. Instead they “invented a story which entirely satisfies the native
mind and is repeated on every occasion”
(Routledge, 1919:182). Most of Easter’s
legends and mythologies that were transmitted by European missionaries were
originally inspired in the course of their campaign to convert the survivors of the 1860s
deportations, slave labour and population crash. Given the evident fabrications found
in a number of their accounts, it is extremely doubtful that any of the information is
based on pre-historical events. In all likelihood, most stories are retrospective
inventions that attempt to provide a mythical explanation of the present situation, in
short, fabrications “which satisfies the native mind”.

It is doubtful that the European missionaries and traders who settled on the island
after the mass destruction (some of which went on even in the 1870s) felt any sense of
guilt or shame in view of the appalling crimes. What is striking, nonetheless, is the
conspicuous obsession of the missionaries and European visitors with Rapa Nui’s pre-
European history and antiquities. Two key questions dominated this new fixation: who
were these ingenious builders of the vanished civilisation and who had exterminated

Given the racially prejudiced views of the time, it was perhaps not surprising that
the search for an answer rummaged far into the past, focusing on ancient conflicts
among ‘savages’ and tribal warfare – rather than exploring the most obvious and most
recent reasons – that is to say the carnage and atrocities committed by European
slavers, whalers and colonists.

It is generally agreed among judicious scholars that Easter Island’s myths and
legends transmitted and reported by European missionaries are unreliable. The same is
true for the compilation of oral traditions collected under even shoddier conditions
more than half a century later when Routledge and Métraux interviewed a few old
natives. By that time, the inhabitants had absorbed the missionaries’ teachings and
doctrines. Not surprisingly, the first scientific expedition to Easter Island in 1914 found
that hardly any reliable historical recollection remained among the few survivors. “The
information given in reply to questions [about the history of the island] is generally
wildly mythical, and any real knowledge crops up only indirectly”

Undoubtedly the most anomalous and dubious aspect of Easter’s traditions is
the apparent reticence about the island’s most traumatic disaster in its entire history:
the violent confrontations with European invaders and slave-raiders during much of the
first half of the 19th century and the near-extinction of its people and their culture in the
second half of this catastrophic century.

Katherine Routledge began to collect the island’s traditions systematically during
her expedition in 1914. She divided the legends into three groups: the first dealt with
the legendary arrival of the islanders under their fabled culture-hero Hotu-matua; the
second related to the extermination of the so-called Long-Ears a couple of generations
after the legendary settlement; the third focused on the bloody wars, deportations and
conflicts between two different groups of people, the Kotuu and Hotu Iti. According to
the natives, the conflicts between various adversaries and invading enemies were
squarely dated to the post-European period (Routledge, 1919: 277).

In his description of Easter Island’s gory self-destruction, Diamond takes advantage
of these legends of civil war, violence and societal collapse – but consigns them to the
17th century: “As their promises were being proved increasingly hollow, the power of
the chiefs and priests was overthrown around 1680 by military leaders called matatoa,
and Easter’s formerly complexly integrated society collapsed in an epidemic of civil
(Diamond, 2005:109).

It is extremely unlikely that the oral traditions of violence, deportation and genocide
belong to the pre-European era, that is, two hundred years before the 19th century era
when the natives experienced real attacks, violence, abductions and deportations.
Diamond’s theory of the island’s self-destruction holds up only as long as the legendary
traditions of violence and genocide are relocated to the time before the island’s violent
encounters with European visitors and raiders. That is why he disregards explicit
testimony by the survivors of Rapa Nui’s genocide. According to their accounts, they
were “quite positive” that the ferocious events took place during the 19th century
(Routledge, 1919:289) – and not, as Diamond asserts, 200 years earlier.

Where, then, does the story of civil war, bloody revolution and societal collapse in
1680 come from? As it happens, Diamond’s theory is based on the fabrications of Thor
Heyerdahl, an author who created and popularised an almost Orwellian-style pseudohistory
of Easter Island’s self-destruction – an event which he dated to 1680 no less.

Most authors who have written about Easter Island have acknowledged the enduring
influence and popularity Heyerdahl’s theories had during the second half of the 20th
century. Diamond readily admits that his own interest in Easter Island “was kindled over
40 years ago by reading Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki account and his romantic interpretation
of Easter’s history; I thought then that nothing could top that interpretation for
(Diamond, 2005:82). Yet Heyerdahl’s appeal was not just his eccentric
romanticism; his narration contained a much darker, racialist streak. One cannot help
but wonder how Diamond can be so blissfully oblivious of these connotations and the
inadvertent influence they have asserted on his own depiction of Eastern Island’s

To understand the similarities (and differences) between Heyerdahl’s and
Diamond’s historical reconstructions, one must consider the views of those
archaeologists and anthropologists who preceded Heyerdahl’s paradigm of Rapa Nui’s
self-destruction. There is indeed a striking contrast between the position of those
researchers who impugn European atrocities for the collapse of Rapa Nui’s civilisation
and those (like Heyerdahl and Diamond) who blame the natives themselves for their
demise. An examination of the viewpoints held by eminent researchers prior to
Heyerdahl elucidates this point.

The Franco-Belgian expedition in 1934 led by Alfred Métraux and Henry
Lavachery (Métraux, 1940) scrutinised Easter Island’s statues in detail. The team tried
to reconstruct the stylistic and historical evolution of statue building. Both researchers
came to a reasonable – and some might say plausible – explanation of why the
production of statues and the entire statue cult came to an end.

Lavachery divided the cultural history of statue production into five periods, the last
of which corresponded with the disaster brought on by European slave-raids and the
natives’ subsequent near-extinction. He proposed that the carving of statues in the
quarries actually continued until the sculptors and their customers were taken captive
and hauled off from the island by whalers and slave-raiders in the 19th century
(Lavachery, 1935). In short: “For a lack of orders, the sculptors did not finish the works
they had begun, and as a result of the disaster that struck the island monumental
sculpture disappeared” (Metraux, 1957:161).

This explanation was by far the most compelling reconstruction of the history and
end of Rapa Nui’s statues. Not only was there no solid evidence that the statue cult had
come to an end by the time of European discovery in 1722 - in fact, the statue cult was
still in practise during much of the 18th century. Unfortunately, the views by Métraux
and Lavachery have been largely forgotten in contemporary discussions about the
possible reasons for the cessation of the statue cult.

The main culprit for this amnesia was Heyerdahl and his imaginative rewriting of
Easter Island’s prehistory. His theory was a direct attack on the findings by Métraux
and Lavachery. Not only had their research confirmed the Polynesian origins of Rapa
Nui’s indigenous culture; they also placed most of the blame for its destruction at the
feet of Europeans. It was this two-fold conclusion that Heyerdahl attacked head-on
after World War II – and which he finally succeeded to overturn.

Heyerdahl had organised an expedition in the mid 1950s and began excavations in
order to prove his critics wrong. “Even before going to Easter Island he was determined
to demonstrate the existence of a superior Caucasoid group as a substratum in Polynesia,
and to his own satisfaction he naturally did so” (Bellwood, 1978:374). Corresponding
to Routledge’s three groups of myths and legends, Heyerdahl’s team divided Rapa Nui’s
“prehistory” into three racially distinct periods: an Early Period (AD 400–1100), a
Middle Period (1100–1680) and a “decadent” Late Period (1680–1868).

It was Heyerdahl’s conviction – based on his belief in the authenticity of these
myths and oral traditions – that the large statues were produced by the superior
Caucasian settlers during what he called the Middle Period. These were members of a
race of “light-skinned” people who were called ‘Long-Ears’ due to their large plugs
that elongated their earlobes. According to Heyerdahl’s race theory, they constructed
the stone statues, cutting them in their own image (Holton, 2004). It was during this
imaginary zenith of the island’s civilisation that the “dark-skinned” Polynesian
migrants arrived. After centuries of peaceful coexistence, conflicts between the two
races mounted and finally culminated in a war of extermination. Relying on dubious
and largely unreliable genealogies put together by the island’s parish priest, Father
Sebastian Englert (1948/1970), Heyerdahl maintained that the legendary “race war”
resulted in the extermination of the light-skinned ‘Long-Ears’ by their dark-skinned
adversaries and the termination of the statue cult in AD 1680 (Heyerdahl and Ferdon,
1961). Thus, the mythological civil war which caused the collapse of the statue cult
plays a decisive role in Heyerdahl’s racial history of Easter Island’s collapse.

It is important to understand the implications of Heyerdahl’s revisionism.
According to his plot, the destruction of Rapa Nui’s statue cult and its complex society
was not the fault of European perpetrators. On the contrary, he blamed the natives for
their own demise: Heyerdahl claimed that shortly before the arrival of the Europeans,
in 1680 to be precise, a civil war had already led to Easter Island’s self-destruction.

During the last few decades, genetic, linguistic and archaeological research has
essentially ruled out his claim of two separate settlement movements by two distinct
populations. Yet in spite of overwhelming rejection of his theories, Heyerdahl’s key
premise – that of a civil war around 1680 – is generally accepted by Diamond and most
of his contemporaries. Even some of his foremost critics who blame climatic changes
during the Little Ice Age rather than human action for Easter Island’s deforestation
consent to Heyerdahl’s story line of civil war and societal collapse in the 17th century
(Orliac and Orliac, 1998:132).

Diamond also seems prepared to accept Heyerdahl’s erroneous dating of these
mythological events. Oral traditions allege that a major battle between the Long-Ears
and the Short-Ears took place shortly after the island’s original settlement at the
so-called Poike Ditch, a series of trenches of natural or human origin. Heyerdahl’s
expedition in 1955 discovered what appeared to be a ‘burned’ zone. Charcoal remains
found in this location were radiocarbon-dated and yielded a date of AD 1676 +/- 100.
It was decided that this piece of evidence was confirmation of the reality of the “war
of extermination” and that it must have happened in 1680. Hence, Edwin Ferdon, a
member of Heyerdahls’ expedition, concluded: “The AD 1680 date, dividing the
Middle from the Late Period, is based upon the C-14 date obtained from the large
charcoal deposit in the Poike Ditch. This carbon is believed to be the remains of the
great fire made during the battle that legend says took place here”
(Ferdon, 1961:527).

While oral tradition had located this mythical event at the very beginning of the
island’s history, Heyerdahl now moved it to its very end, just before its rediscovery by
Roggeveen. Easter Island’s history was rewritten accordingly. For Heyerdahl, AD 1680
was a scientifically significant date, providing unambiguous evidence which seemed to
confirm what he had believed all along: “The Late Period, a decadent phase, begins
with the great Poike ditch fire and the abrupt cessation of statuary carving at Rana
(Heyerdahl, 1961:497). But was the charcoal really proof of warfare? Wasn’t
it just a piece of burned wood, perhaps entirely unconnected to any historical event?

The clue to Diamond’s reconstruction of civil war and societal collapse is found
here: it is based on Heyerdahl’s creative dating and its speculative correlation.
Subsequent research revealed that neither the “burned zone” nor the tentative dates
could be confirmed. “More recent excavations in the ditch uncovered only root and
vegetable moulds and a tree hole with charcoal […] which gave a radiocarbon date in
the eleventh century AD, which seems to cast the gravest doubt on this ‘ditch’ having
been involved in a battle of the type and date mentioned in the traditions”
(Flenley and
Bahn, 2003:153/54).

In other words, the very foundation of Heyerdahl’s civil war and societal breakdown
in 1680 has been comprehensively debunked. Notwithstanding this rejection, the
modern myth of a 17th century civil war between indigenous tribes and societal
collapse before the arrival of the first Europeans remains an almost universally
accepted core belief among Easter Island historians and researchers.

But there are more reasons to doubt Diamond’s claims. His reconstruction of events
also contradicts more reliable historical accounts. Métraux (1957) recorded many oral
histories of tribal warfare. These accounts demonstrate that the fighting which engulfed
the island occurred in the aftermath of European contact. After all, Easter Island’s
statues were still standing in 1722. What is not entirely clear, however, is whether these
vague and predominantly fickle accounts refer to inter-tribal conflicts among the
indigenous population, or whether they also include reflections of the historically
documented battles with European whalers and slave-traders.

Be that as it may, in view of the evidence that confirms a post-European date for
the end of the statue cult, some new light should be shed on the traditions regarding
the ‘legendary’ extermination of the Long-Ears. After all, this saga was fundamentally
an attempt to explain the disappearance of a large section of Rapa Nui’s
indigenous population. Evidently, there was a recollection that they were wiped out by
their enemies. The question is: could this tradition reflect real events that actually
happened to the historical ‘Long-Ears’ in the not so distant past? Métraux (1957:228)
seems to hint at a genocidal explanation when he contrasts the legendary date of the
stories with real, historical events:

The historical conclusions drawn from this tale are disconcerting when we recall
that the ‘Long-Ears’, so brutally exterminated by their rivals in the seventeenth
century, were seen and described by voyagers in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. For at this time all the Easter Islanders had long ears, if by this is
meant that they deformed the lobe of the ear so as to insert heavy ornaments.

According to Métraux, the last ‘long-eared’ Easter Islander perished in the nineteenth
century – together with the last remnants of a once brilliant civilisation. Evidently, the
Long-Ears were not exterminated as a result of a mythical civil war but due to the
atrocities committed by Europeans.

Diamond also employs archaeological evidence for his claim of the pre-European
date of civil war and societal collapse. He refers to obsidian points (mataa) as
indicators of increased fighting as a result of environmental degradation. Their exact
dating, however, remains ambiguous. Bahn and Flenley (1992:165) point out that these
spear points only “proliferated in the 18th and 19th centuries when they became the
commonest artefact on the island”
The implications of archaeological evidence thus contradict Diamond’s argument that
the collapse occurred prior to Easter’s traumatic collision with European visitors and
attackers. Rainbird (2002:446) emphasises: “It thus appears from the evidence presented
by Bahn and Flenley themselves that the majority of the major indicators of apparent
competition, warfare, and social disarray, apparently caused by islander-induced
ecodisaster, dates to the decades and centuries following initial European visits.”

Diamond’s speculations regarding population pressure and the lack of an escape
valve appear equally implausible. As long as canoes were available, emigration from
the island was not only possible; it must have been a near certainty imposed by
victorious tribes or a chance for young men to demonstrate their courage. After all,
maritime expansion had occurred throughout Polynesia. In short, population pressure
would not necessarily lead to civil war.

Nor is there any solid evidence for any population pressure or pre-19th century
population crash. In fact, some of the most fertile areas with the best water supply (in
close proximity to the large fresh-water late of the Rano Kau crater) were never used
or indeed needed for agriculture (McCoy, 1976:154); they never saw any permanent
habitation, a fact that is at odds with Diamond’s claim of overpopulation, soil erosion
or diminished crop yields.

Easter Island presents a problem because the case for demographic decline
caused by anthropogenic environmental devastation is insufficiently
documented at critical points. […] All estimates of the peak size of the
prehistoric population are entirely speculative; it may never have exceeded the
From genocide to ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui 529
2000–3000 that can be estimated from early historical records. Warfare was
endemic on most Polynesian islands and does not indicate demographic
(Anderson, 2002:382)

So, is there any compelling evidence for Diamond’s belief in extensive and prevalent
warfare before the onset of the European disaster? In contrast to Diamond’s claims,
osteological data (i.e. bone pathology and osteometric data from human skeletons)
found on Easter Island show no palpable evidence of widespread or chronic civil war:

The impression given by folklore and sporadic historical documentation is of
chronic, lethal warfare during the late prehistoric and early historic periods.
Based on the osteological evidence, this assessment is somewhat misleading.
Fractures indicative of cranial trauma are fairly common, and examples of fatal
injuries are evident; however, most skeletal injuries appear to have been nonlethal.
Few fatalities were directly attributable to violence. The physical
evidence suggests that the frequency of warfare and lethal events was
exaggerated in folklore, presumably because of its horrific results and
importance in the daily lives of participants.
(Owsley et al., 1994:)

In brief, there is little if any archaeological evidence for pre-European civil war or
societal collapse. On the other hand, there is forceful evidence to suggest that the
natives’ recollections of warfare and violent conflict most likely belong to the
hostilities in the wake of European attacks on the island. They may conceivably be
linked to tribal conflicts that resulted from societal breakdown and the apparent
transfer of foreign populations which occurred in the 1860s. Whatever the case may be,
Heyerdahl’s erroneous dating of a mythological civil war to the year 1680 forms a
cornerstone of Diamond’s narrative of Easter Island’s self-destruction, without which
there is no solid evidence for either civil war or societal collapse.

Given Diamond’s self-declared ecological commitment, it is not surprising to find that
his views on what he has called Easter Island’s self-inflicted “holocaust” were fully
formed long before he started to study the island’s history in any great detail. The
blueprint for “Collapse” and its key thesis of ‘ecological suicide’ goes back to his first
bestseller, published in 1991 under the Gibbon-esque title “The Rise and Fall of the
Third Chimpanzee” (Diamond, 1991). On one page, and without much elaboration,
Diamond asserted that Easter Island’s “society collapsed in a holocaust of internecine
warfare and cannibalism”
as a result of deforestation and soil erosion.

In Collapse, Diamond attempts to buttress this core premise with reference to
selective data and arguments. Failing to assess many of the contentious issues in an
even-handed and impartial manner, he approaches scientific problems from the
standpoint of an environmental campaigner and inevitably arrives at flawed

This deficiency in scrutiny and critical analysis is particularly apparent in his
treatment of alleged cannibalism among Easter Island’s indigenous population.
Already in 1995, he contended that civil war and starvation drove the natives to eat
each other:

whose bones became common in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral
traditions of the islanders are rife with cannibalism; the most inflammatory
between my teeth.”
(Diamond, 1995)

Throughout his writings, Diamond seems obsessed with what Arens (1979) calls the
Man-Eating Myth, a gullible belief unsupported by any empirical evidence. Just as his
certainty in the folklore of pre-European civil war and collapse is based on his
confidence in myth and legend, Diamond’s fascination with the island’s “holocaust of
cannibalism” relates to his acceptance of unreliable sources.
A closer examination of his claims reveals that the accusation of “cannibalism” was
a European fabrication invented during a time when European whalers and raiders
repeatedly attacked the island’s population. The allegation first surfaced in 1845 in a
report in the French journal L’univers. According to the sensationalist tabloid-style
story, the young commander of a French vessel that had landed on Easter Island
fortuitously “escaped being the victim of cannibals…. Mr Olliver was brought back on
board; his whole body was covered with wounds. He had, on various parts of his body,
the teeth marks of these cruel islanders, who had begun to eat him alive”
1992: 73).

Most researchers concur that this horror-story is most likely a hoax, “one of the
most ridiculous yarns ever spun about the island”
(Bahn, 1997), in short the fictional
fantasy of mid-nineteen century European bigotry. Nevertheless, the anecdote appears
to have had a significant impact on the French missionaries who were the first
Europeans to settle on the island about 20 years after the reported incident. It is from
their reports and allegations that we hear about the practice of cannibalism among the
natives. More importantly, the French missionaries invoke the traditional claim that
cannibalism was rampant among Easter’s population until the introduction of
Christianity (Métraux, 1940:150).

The mere fact that some converts to Christianity later accused their pagan ancestors
of engaging in cannibalism can hardly be taken as adequate evidence for the practices.
After all, the converts had absorbed the new creed and its teachings which inevitably
tainted their views of the ‘detestable’ past of their pagan culture. What is more,
admitting to cannibalism may have played an important part of the ‘dialogue’ with
their European masters, perhaps as a “weapon of terror, one of the few weapons they
possessed in an unequal contest”
(Hulme, 1998: 23).

Bahn (1997), who has critically evaluated the missionaries’ dubious reports of
alleged cannibalism, points out that “it is certainly noteworthy that none of the early
European visitors before the missionaries ever alluded to the practice.”
importantly, the first scientific exploration of the island in 1914 confirmed that the
indigenous population vehemently denied that they (or their ‘fathers’) had ever been
cannibals (Routledge, 1919).

Despite the lack of any empirical evidence and notwithstanding prevalent
scepticism, Diamond bolsters his allegation of cannibalism because it reinforces his
horror-scenario of an ecological ‘holocaust’. Contemporary ethnographical research,
however, has confirmed that there is hardly any tangible evidence for the existence of
cannibalism (other than individual) “anywhere, in any period” (Flenley and Bahn,
2003:157). Given the extreme rarity of cannibalism ‘anywhere, in any period’, the
so-called ‘oral traditions’ shaped by European missionaries and their converts about its
practice on Easter Island should be discarded once and for all.

The slave raids during the 1860s and the enforced population transfers of the 1870s had
a crushing impact on Easter Island. They decimated the island’s population and
shattered its culture. Despite hundreds of books and thousands of papers on the
‘mysteries’ of Easter Island, this genocide which wiped out Rapa Nui’s civilisation has
been largely ignored. As a matter of fact, nobody to date has written a detailed history
of these traumatic events.

The striking lack of research into actual European atrocities contrasts noticeably
with the fixation of most researchers on hypothesised ecological ‘suicide’ which is
squarely blamed on the self-destructive actions of the natives themselves. As a result,
our knowledge about the exact number, gravity and detrimental consequences of the
more than 50 European incursions on Easter Island during the 19th century remains
extremely incomplete. We don’t even know whether the island’s
population – before it
crashed in the 1860s and 70s – stood at 3,000, 5,000 or as high as 20,000, a dubiously
high estimate provided by A.A. Salmon who was the first to take a population census
in 1886 (Thomson, 1891:460).

What is undisputed, however, is that as a result of the series of slave raids, the
subsequent small pox pandemics and numerous population transfers of the 1860s and
‘70s, the population was chopped down to a mere 100-odd survivors in 1877.

Between the first European contact in 1722 and the beginning of the Peruvian slave
raids in 1862, some 53 European vessels called at Easter Island (McCall, 1976). Most
probably, other ships visited the island without our knowledge. What attracted these
ships? “The greatest resources of the island were the people themselves, whom the
Europeans viewed as sources of labor and, in the case of women, sexual satisfaction”

(Owsley, 1994:163). Sporadically, whaling ships also abducted islanders to replace or
supplement crew members. Given what we know about the often violent assaults of
early visitors, whalers and the raids of slave traders on the native population, it is likely
that many atrocities went unrecorded. From what little we do know, an appalling
picture of indisputable genocide and ecocide emerges. Murder, rape, mass deportation
and repeated attempts to destroy the island’s environment characterised the poignant
history of Rapa Nui during much of the 19th century (Owsley, 1994; Maziere, 1969).

The year 1805 saw the first in a series of slave-raids when the captain of the New-
London Schooner Nancy landed on Easter Island with the intention of kidnapping
labour slaves. After a bloody battle with the natives, the crew managed to abduct
12 native men and 10 women (the exact numbers of those killed and deported are
unknown). Between 1815 and 1825, three further traumatic encounters with intruders
and slave-raiders resulted in battles and warfare-like conflicts between Europeans and
natives. According to some ship logs and accounts of sailors, Rapa Nuians drove back
European visitors on a number of occasions by attacking and repelling them. Given
these recurring and war-like skirmishes (which also included the premeditated
kidnapping and rape of women), it is probable that some of the oral tradition of tribal
conflict and warfare may reflect also these traumatic clashes, many of which led to
heavy casualties among the native defenders. By the 1830s, whalers reported that
sexually-transmitted diseases had become a chronic peril on Easter Island (Routledge,

In October 1862, two marauding ships landed on Easter Island in search for slave
labourers. The crew seized and captured 150 natives and transferred them to Peru
where they were sold as slaves for an average price of $300 (Englert, 1948/1970).

Between December 1862 and March 1863, an estimated 1,000–1,400 native people
(the actual number is unknown) were captured and deported by Peruvian and Spanish
slave-raiders (Thomson, 1891:460; Owsley et al., 1994). Among them were King
Kamakoi and his son. It is believed (but by no means certain) that almost 90% died in
the following weeks and months of diseases and maltreatment. Due to international
protests, Peru repatriated around one hundred Polynesians who had survived the
horrors of slave labour, although some of those selected for repatriation probably
originated from other Polynesian islands (a policy that was not unusual at the time in
order to instigate tribal conflicts and confusion). According to some later accounts, 100
or so slave labourers were shipped back to Easter Island, but most of them died on their
way from smallpox.

Only fifteen regained the island, to the greatest misfortune of the population that
had been left behind; shortly after their return, smallpox, the germs of which they
had brought with them, broke out and transformed the island into a vast charnelhouse.

Since there were too many corpses to bury in the family mausoleums, they
were thrown down clefts in the rock or dragged into underground tunnels. […]
Civil war added their toll to the havoc wrought by this murderous epidemic. The
social order had been undermined, the fields were left without owners, and people
fought for possession of them. Then there was famine. The population fell to
about six hundred. The majority of members of the priestly class disappeared,
taking with them the secrets of the past. The following year, when the first
missionaries settled on the island, they found a culture in its death throes: the
religious and social system had been destroyed and a leaden apathy weighed
down the survivors from these disasters.
(Métraux, 1957, 47)

With the deportation and deaths of the hereditary tribal and community leaders, the
social and religious system disintegrated. The old social order of Easter Island had
been entirely destroyed. Internal strife and tribal fighting that occurred when relatives
of deported and dead islanders clashed over their property and land rights in 1863 and
1864 finally led to societal collapse and starvation. Much of Rapa Nui’s traditions of
internal violence and warfare that were collected, infered and construed many decades
and generations later by European researchers are most plausibly collective reflections
and individual recollections of these extremely traumatic clashes – and not accounts of
some mythical events many hundreds of years earlier.

As if this cataclysmic population crash and the collapse of Rapa Nui’s society wasn’t
enough, renewed slave-raids on the survivors commenced in the 1870s. These attacks
resulted in brutal conflict with shootings and casualties and culminated in a genuine
ecocide. In a deliberate attempt to empty Rapa Nui of its last remnants of indigenous
population, two European traders, J.B. Dutroux-Bornier and J. Brander, agreed to remove
the entire remaining population to Tahiti. Their houses were burnt and destroyed. “After
burning the natives’ huts, Dutroux-Bornier had all their sweet potatoes pulled out of the
ground three times, to facilitate the persuasion of the starving natives who had thus little
hope of surviving on their own island”
(Heyerdahl and Ferdon, 1961:76).

By 1877, the annihilation of Rapa Nui’s civilisation was practically complete: most
of those who had survived the atrocities, pandemics and ecocide were transported to
Tahiti, leaving behind just one-hundred odd natives. Ten years later, after Chile
officially annexed the island in 1888, the few survivors of Rapa Nui’s forgotten
genocide were forced into a detention centre in the village of Hangaro, a camp where
they were kept confined under the most appalling conditions for nearly 100 years:

It was surrounded by a barbed-wire enclosure with two gates in it, and no one
was allowed to pass through them without the permission of the Chilean
military leader. At six in the afternoon these gates were locked…These
regulations have remained almost unchanged…In 1964, 1,000 surviving
Easter islanders [were] living in the most unbelievable wretchedness and lack
of freedom.
(Maziere, 1969: 35)

The physical destruction of one of mankind’s most illustrious civilisations and its
people occurred during much of the 19th and 20th centuries. These atrocities took place
in the open. They were witnessed, recorded and decried by many observers. Yet the
disappearance of Rapa Nui’s civilisation has generated a myriad of bizarre theories and
wild speculations, most of which focus on what is often regarded as its “mysterious”
culture and its “puzzling” downfall. The real mystery of Easter Island, however, is not
ecological suicide when the actual perpetrators of the civilisation’s deliberate
destruction are well known and were identified long ago.

Throughout his writings, Diamond maintains that he is reasonably hopeful about the
future of humanity. Nevertheless, he does not hesitate to foretell environmental
calamity and societal breakdown in the most unhinged imagery: “By the time my
young sons reach retirement age, half the world’s species will be extinct, the air
radioactive, and the seas polluted with oil … I have no doubt that any humans still alive
in the radioactive soup of the Twenty-second Century will write equally nostalgically
about our own era”
(Diamond, 1991:285).

It is this profound anxiety about the future and its impact on the environment that
stirs Diamond’s writings and imagination. Regrettably, his eagerness to forestall doom
often clouds his ability to assess historical and archaeological evidence in an impartial,
even-handed approach. This fixation bears a striking resemblance to other authors who
have tried to apply other standardised theoretical models to Easter Island history.

In a powerful critique of the methods applied by Heyerdahl and a number of other
authors, Bahn has highlighted a fundamental problem of contemporary research on
Easter Island: “The authors make their assumptions. They then look for evidence, pick
out the bits they like, ignore the bits that don’t fit, and finally proclaim that their
assumptions have been vindicated”
(Bahn, 1990:24). A similar criticism can be made
of Diamond’s eco-biased approach to the question of Rapa Nui’s collapse.

In many ways, Diamond’s methodological approach suffers from a manifest lack of
scientific scrutiny. Instead of carefully weighing up and critically assessing the quality,
authenticity and reliability of the data he employs to support his arguments, he
consistently selects only the data and interpretations that seem to confirm his
conviction that Easter Island self-destructed. Within science, this method is generally
known as Confirmation Bias, an often inadvertent mental process among researchers
“which refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look
of what contradicts one’s beliefs” (Carroll, 2003).

There can be little doubt that on a number of occasions indigenous populations have
destroyed animal species and seriously degraded parts of their habitats. Thus, my
criticism of Diamond’s eco-pessimism does not rest on an unjustifiable belief in what
he calls the “Rousseau-esque fantasy” of the ‘ecological noble Savage’ (Ellingson,
2001). The fundamental flaw in his treatment of Easter Island is that he approaches the
problems of its evolution and history with the zeal of an environmental campaigner,
and not with the dispassionate detachment of a scientist. He is too much inclined to
employ his historical reconstructions as a tool for the environmental agenda and
subordinates much of his analysis to moralistic and preconceived intentions.

According to Diamond (1991), the attack on what he calls the “progressive party
seeks to “demolish another sacred belief: that human history over the last million
years has been a long tale of progress”
. Instead of the old mantra of preordained
advancement and perfection, the progressive dogmatism he admits he grew up with,
Diamond claims to have uncovered a new principle: that human history has been beset
with self-inflicted environmental disasters, ecological degradation and cultural
degeneration. For an author who famously claimed to have turned history into a
science, it is quite remarkable to see a complete lack of awareness about the fact that
his brand of ‘eco-pessimism’ has deep historical roots (Herman, 1997).

Collapse is perhaps the prime upshot of the amalgamation of environmental
burgeoning doctrine expounded largely by disillusioned left-wingers and former
environmental determinism essentially applies the same one-sided rigidity to historical
events and societal evolution (Peiser, 2003).

tale about environmental degradation. Easter Island’s tragic experience is not a
among islands, and does not constitute the ordinary problems of the humanenvironment
interface. Yet in spite of exceptionally challenging conditions, the
indigenous population chose to survive – and they did. They tackled the problems of a
difficult and challenging environment which both geography and their own actions
forced upon them. They successfully adapted to changing circumstances and did not
show any signs of terminal decline when they were discovered by Europeans in 1722.

There is no reason to believe that its civilisation could not have adapted and
survived (in a modified form) to an environment devoid of large timber. What they
culture. Diamond has chosen to close his eyes to the real culprits of Rapa Nui’s real
collapse and annihilation. As Rainbird (2003) aptly concludes: “Whatever may have
happened in the past on Easter Island, whatever they did to their island themselves, it
totally pales into insignificance compared to the impact that was going to come
through Western contact.”

I wish to thank the staff of the Anthropological Library at the British Museum’s Centre
for Anthropology for their invaluable assistance. Paul Rainbird and an anonymous
reviewer provided many useful suggestions and corrections. Thanks also to Larissa
Price for her research assistance. This paper is dedicated to the heirs of one of the
world’s most remarkable civilisations and the descendants of one of the modern
world’s most forgotten genocides.

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5 Wates Way, Brentwood, Essex CM15 9TB, United Kingdom.

* Benny Peiser is from Liverpool John Moores University, Faculty of Science, Liverpool L3 2ET, UK. Email: b.j.peiser

No specific license (default rights)


Three steps to overcome trauma

Trauma affects so many of us. It challenges our ability to live normal, healthy and happy lives.

Sometimes, the effects of trauma can haunt us for a long time. But it is possible to work through trauma, and to overcome trauma.

This is important as working through trauma permits us the possibility of feeling joy. We are all entitled to feel joy.

Here are three things that have helped me work through trauma. I write them here, as maybe they will help you.

In working through trauma, I also strongly recommend you work with a mental health specialist. Our emotional experiences are very powerful, and emotional pain can drive people to self-harm. Other emotions such as anxiety, anger, and profound sadness will make themselves known to you through this process. It’s important you have someone who specializes in trauma who can be there for you when you need extra help.

1. Stop the trauma: First, you need to cut off anything that is causing or continuing an ongoing trauma. Are you being actively traumatized? Your emotions will tell you. It could be a toxic relationship (a friend, parent, or other loved one) or a toxic environment (a workplace). Listen to your emotions and feel where any strong negativity is coming from. You may already know what it is, but just can’t admit it to yourself.

In medicine they say to “stop the bleeding,” and that is true for mental health as well. If you feel you are actively bleeding, emotionally, you have to discover its source and stop it.

Our bodies and brains a very powerful, and I do believe they have the ability to self-heal. But self-healing is impossible in the face of constant damage. The most important thing you can do if you are being actively traumatized is find a way to stop the trauma.

If you’re not sure, talk to a friend or loved one. Ask someone you can trust if you keep talking about certain people, places, relationships, or experiences. The people who you know you best will be able to highlight for you potential sources of trauma. Sit with a mental health professional who can help you identify the active trauma.

2. Give yourself time to heal. Once you’ve stopped the source of trauma, you need to give yourself time to heal. With space and permission, your emotional consciousness is going to start processing a variety of emotions that perhaps were repressed or just kept silent while the trauma was ongoing.

Anger, sadness, anxiety: you may feel these things in very powerful spurts. This is normal, but as I mentioned earlier, you should work with a professional so that you have someone to process these emotions with.

Healing takes time. Just like with the physical body, your emotional body will heal at its own pace. Negative emotions will slowly settle and be processed. You may still feel some of the effects of the trauma, but over time, things will heal. Give yourself weeks, months, even years.

3. Give yourself permission to feel joy. One of the worst effects of trauma is that it destroys our ability to feel joy. Joy is like the capstone of a pyramid. To feel joy in your everyday life, you have to have a solid emotional foundation. Joy will not bloom in a storm. If you are undergoing constant trauma, joy will have a hard time taking root, and you may never really experience it.

To help with the healing process, one of the best things you can do is find activities that give you a lot of joy. Pick up a new hobby that lets you forget about things for a few hours and (ideally) gives you time outside and lets you move around. Find something that gives you a powerful sense of joy when you’re done. Give yourself permission to experience life other than as a storm.

In later posts, I’ll talk about how the experience of trauma can give us better peace and strength later in life.


Period detail and modern mews in D4

BALLSBRIDGE: €1.45 MILLION:This four-bedroom house has a pretty garden with a generous mews house at the end that is being sold separately for €840,000

The four-bedroom main house is not quite as big inside as you’d expect from its imposing exterior but it has a decent amount of living space for a family and the gardens, which were designed by the owner, are really lovely.

The front garden and driveway, which are shared with number 17, have enough gravelled off-street parking for one car per household.

There is a remote-controlled lawn mower for the shared lawn which means a future buyer will never have to row with their neighbour over whose turn it is to cut the grass.

There are a dozen steps up to the main entrance level where there is a pair of interconnecting formal rooms with intricate cornicing, high ceilings, marble mantelpieces and a general air of splendour.

Unusually, there is also a bedroom at this level, and a cream marble-tiled shower room with an anti-fog mirror. All the bathrooms are decorated like this.

Downstairs at garden level there’s a compact cream gloss SieMatic kitchen with a Waterford Stanley Alpha range. While this room isn’t huge, it has plenty of wall- and floor-level storage, and enough space for a dining table and a small square island. There’s also a utility room off the entrance porch and concealed storage and a double wine cooler in the passage between the kitchen and the family room.

Other rooms off this passage include a pantry, a small double bedroom which is bright thanks to an adjacent internal courtyard and a family bathroom with a corner bath and shower. The family room, which is part of an extension built by the current owners, has a partially glazed roof and large doors to the back garden.

Upstairs, off the main landing, are two bedrooms. The main bedroom has modern fitted wardrobes and two sash windows overlooking Wellington Place. There’s also a second double room, and steps up to a quirky little bathroom perched at the top of the house with a marble-top sink, a bath and shower, and ornate cornicing similar to that in the main reception rooms.

The back garden has a decked path that curves around and crosses the lawn which is flanked with trees, shrubs, lush foliage and flowers. There’s also a good-sized patio, a pop-up irrigation system and motion-sensor outdoor lighting.

The 135 sq m (1,450 sq ft) mews to the rear has a big garage with an automatic door that opens on to Wellington Lane.

A decent amount of the back garden has been hived off for the mews and a dividing wall is currently under construction.

The mews has a good-sized room at garden level that’s currently a sitting room but is en suite and could be converted to a bedroom.

This level also has a kitchenette, utility area, lots of storage and a bathroom.

On the next level is a bright room with a double-height space that incorporates a sitting room or study area and a galley kitchen. Doors open out to a decked terrace with steps down to the garden.

The main bedroom is en suite. It isn’t very big but the wall between it and a narrow room beside it could be knocked to make a larger space.

The attic room is currently used as a bedroom.

19 Wellington Place, Ballsbridge Dublin 4

Description: three-storey, four-bedroom house with extension that has a partially glassed roof.

Agent: Lisney


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Fertility 101 Quiz

Do you think you have a high fertility IQ?
Take Washington Fertility Center’s “Fertility 101” quiz to test your knowledge on everything from fertility testing and treatment, egg freezing, fertility preservation, and more.

Let us know how you did! Share your results with WFC on Facebook.

  1. How long should a couple under the age of 35 wait to consult with a fertility specialist after trying to conceive naturally?
    A) 1 year
    B) 6 months
    C) 3 months
    D) 1 month

  2. How often is the male partner responsible for cases of infertility in the United States?
    A) One-third of cases
    B) One-half of cases
    C) Never

  3. If you already have one child from a naturally-conceived pregnancy, then you’ll never have fertility issues.
    A) True
    B) False
    C) Only true if under the age of 35

  4. Why do women freeze their eggs?
    A) For medical purposes, such as when undergoing chemotherapy or radiation
    B) Because they haven’t met they right partner
    C) Because they wish to delay family planning in favor of career or educational goals
    D) All of the above

  5. You can’t get pregnant with conditions like PCOS or endometriosis.
    A) True
    B) False
    C) Conceiving may be difficult without fertility treatment, but it is possible

  1. A – If you are under the age of 35 you should wait at least one year before consulting with a fertility specialist, unless you have a medical condition which affects your fertility. If you are over the age of 35, then you should seek a consultation with a specialist after six months of trying to conceive.
  2. A – One-third of infertility cases are attributed to men. One-third of cases are attributed to women, and the remaining third are attributed to “unexplained” infertility.
  3. B – Secondary infertility affects many couples who already have one child that was naturally conceived.
  4. D – There are many reasons why a woman may decide to delay building her family. These reasons may be medical, personal, or both.
  5. C – Conditions like PCOS and endometriosis may cause difficulty conceiving, but treatment options are available at Washington Fertility Center.

Related Topics: PCOS, Endometriosis, Egg freezing, Fertility preservation, Secondary infertility


標題: Observations of hysteresis in flow around two square cylinders in a tandem arrangement
作者: Liu, C.H.
Chen, J.M.
關鍵字: two square cylinders
tandem arrangement
vortex shedding
2 circular-cylinders
strouhal numbers
期刊/報告no：: Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, Volume 90, Issue 9, Page(s) 1019-1050.
摘要: This paper reports an experimental Study on the flow characteristics around two square cylinders in a tandem arrangement, The spacing between the centers of the cylinders ranges from 1.5 to 9 widths of the cylinder and the Reynolds number ranges from 2.0 x 10(3) to 1.6 x 10(4). Hysteresis with two discontinuous jumps is present for all the Reynolds numbers studied when the spacing is varied in two different ways, one being a progressive increase and the other a progressive decrease. The hysteresis is associated with two different flow patterns, and the discontinuity is attributed to a sudden change of the flow pattern. In the hysteresis regime, only one flow pattern is stable, differing from the bistable phenomenon that involves intermittent switching between two stable flow patterns as reported for higher Reynolds numbers by previous authors. It is found that the hysteresis regime shifts rapidly towards smaller values of spacing as the Reynolds number is increased in the lower range Re = 2.0 x 10(3)-5.3 x 10(3), and then remains nearly unchanged between Re = 5.3 x 10(3)-1.6 x 10(4). The time history and spectra of velocity as well as the flow visualization corresponding to the change of flow pattern in the hysteresis regime are presented and discussed in detail. The effects caused by hysteresis and Reynolds number on drag forces, mean and fluctuating pressures, and Strouhal numbers of the cylinders are examined. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/11455/44853
ISSN: 0167-6105
文章連結: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0167-6105(02)00234-9
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