Easter Island’s supposed population collapse is debunked by recent findings, showing it supported a stable population of around 3,000 through innovative farming methods despite limited resources.
Historians have theorized that the ancient people of Easter Island lived beyond their ecological means, cutting down all their trees to build massive stone statues. The population crashed along with the environment, dwindling to a few thousand people by the time Europeans “discovered” Easter Island in 1722.
However, a new study published in Science Advances has debunked this persistent myth, revealing that there were never many people on Rapa Nui to begin with.
Revising Historical Narratives Through Technology
Binghamton researchers used modern technology to more accurately gauge the number of rock gardens on the island and Rapa Nui’s pre-contact food production. Co-authors include Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Science Carl Lipo; Environmental Studies Research Development Specialist Robert J. DiNapoli; and anthropology alumnus Dylan S. Davis ’17, MA ‘18, now a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Climate School.
The volcanic island was formed from eruptions a million years ago, giving the rain ample time to wash away the potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen plants need to grow, said Lipo. The salt-laden ocean spray further hurt soil fertility.
“The soils on Rapa Nui were never particularly productive,” Lipo explained. “When people reached the island, they had to deal with those constraints.”
Innovative Agricultural Methods on Rapa Nui
Their first method was slash-and-burn agriculture, which involved cutting down the island’s trees. This temporarily returned nutrients to the soil, but once the trees ran out, the islanders resorted to other methods: composting plant waste and rock mulch.
The fertility benefits of composting aren’t enough to support a culture’s food supply. Rock mulch did — but it was a highly labor-intensive process. Islanders broke off parts of the exposed bedrock and then turned these chunks of stones into the soil, which both restored nutrients and protected it from further weathering.
Rock mulch has been traditionally used in other places, such as among the Maori people in New Zealand, Indigenous peoples in the American Southwest, and in the Netherlands, Lipo said.
“We do it ourselves with non-organic fertilizer; essentially, we use machines to crush rock into tiny pieces, which is effective because it exposes a lot of surface area,” Lipo said. “The people in Rapa Nui are doing it by hand, literally breaking up rocks and sticking them in dirt.”
While the gardens could grow dry-land taro and yams, the primary crop was sweet potatoes of dozens of different varieties, DiNapoli said. Not every rock pile is an ancient garden, however.
Rethinking the Demographics and Survival Strategies
When they first encountered the island, Europeans reported that gardens covered 10% of the land. Researchers have previously relied on satellite imagery to map rock gardens, but that resulted in misidentifications — including, for example, roads.
Davis used shortwave infrared (SWIR) satellite imagery and machine learning to generate a more accurate estimate: around 180 acres were covered by mulching stones, much less than previously believed. Primarily used for geological mapping, SWIR imagery can differentiate between mineral compositions and moisture content, Davis said. The distinct mineralogical characteristics and moisture patches allow the rock gardens to stand out better from their surroundings.
Using the updated estimate of the number of gardens, the researchers calculated that approximately 3,000 people lived on Rapa Nui at the time of European contact. The earliest European accounts indicate a population of 3,000 to 4,000 people, which tracks with the artifacts discovered on the island, Lipo said.
“What we’re actually seeing here is that the island couldn’t sustain that many people to begin with based on ecological constraints,” Davis said. “People actually modified their landscapes to increase the amount of what they could intensively cultivate and that number was still very small. This isn’t an example of ecological catastrophe but of how people survived despite really limited natural resources in a fairly sustainable way for a long time.”
The misconceptions about the island’s population size come from its large and striking moai statues, Lipo said, and the assumption that it would take large groups of people to erect such statues. Ecologists also tend to use Easter Island as a model for how population size can lead to ecological catastrophe.
“We can’t use Easter Island as an example that’s convenient for stories,” he said. “We need to understand the island in its own context because what it’s really telling us is something very different than what people believe.”
For more on this research, see Debunking the “Ecocide” Myth: The Real Story of Easter Island.
Reference: “Island-wide characterization of agricultural production challenges the demographic collapse hypothesis for Rapa Nui (Easter Island)” by Dylan S. Davis, Robert J. DiNapoli, Gina Pakarati, Terry L. Hunt and Carl P. Lipo, 21 June 2024, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ado1459
Also contributing to the research were Gina Pakarati, an independent researcher on Rapa Nui; and Terry L. Hunt of the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology.
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11 Comments
I had seen these statues before in the books of Erik van Donnie and Marys Maeterlin, these two American authors. They are very strange. How many years did they make these statues, but those who made statues sixty million years ago, their statues are now in the cities. Underground, several miles underground in cities, those statues are all made of precious metals
“Popular Myth Debunked: New Findings Rewrite Easter Island’s History”
This is all wrong. You are using “debunk” incorrectly. Here is a definition: “Uncover while ridiculing; especially of pretentious or false claims and ideas”.
Jared Diamond in his book “Collapse” hypothesized that the reason the Easter Island culture collapsed was because they cut down all their trees. Look at the pictures above. They indeed cut down all their trees. This is not a pretentious claim to be ridiculed.
So some Brits come along and say well, they made do without trees. Well hell. That’s a new hypothesis only. There’s nothing to debunk.
I live in an area, the Desert Southwest of the United States, where, in Diamond’s book, it is claimed the Pueblo Native American civilization collapsed because of environmental stresses. That is not a pretentious claim. Diamond never claimed civilizations that do collapse are totally wiped out and the land left barren with no one returning.
Although many large settlements were abandoned, the Pueblo people continued to live in the Southwest, adapting to new environments and forming the modern-day Pueblo communities that still exist today.
Btw, the Brits, true to form, stole several Moai statues from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that were brought to the British Museum in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The British “explorers” are to be scorned. They are ecological and environmental outlaws. The British Museum is full of plunder from round the world.
Another example, the Elgin Marbles a collection of marble sculptures originally part of the Parthenon temple in Athens which were controversially stolen by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century and later acquired by the British Museum. They still have them despite Melina Mercouri’s heroic efforts to get them back to the Acropolis.
Howard Carter cleaned out King Tut’s tomb in the 1930s. Fortunately, the Egyptians have those artifacts, including what’s left of Tut, back. (Carter unwrapped the mummy thus contaminating it forever).
Thank G-D Lord Elgin ‘stole’ the marble sculptures.
The Greeks, at that time quite primitive,
were busy BURNING the marble to produce material for cement or concrete.
Incidentally, he bought them and protected these priceless architectural art objects.
Get your facts straight.
The “popular myth debunked” by science was actually a hypothesis created by earlier scientists. Nice try.
Indeed. These peole need to do their homework.
Even the Ancient Alien folk don’t argue Easter Island must have had a ton of trees in the past. But the conventional folk love that idea because the inhabitants MUST have used log rollers to move all those giant statues!
A better question is what happened to reported “giants” that were on the island when it was first discovered and belonged to the priest class? They were reportedly tall enough to move the statues on their own leading to speculation that they were the last of the so-called Nephilim on the Earth and perhaps the mythological “Watchers” removed them once their experiment was spotted by the ocean traveling mainstream population. It was these accounts that reported a decline in the population since its discovery.
Well alright, still very interesting.
Excuse me, there are 15 statues on this island, and they were carved very interestingly and primitively, and their sculptures were very old, these strange statues are older than the Egyptian pyramids
Unfortunately, the paper does not indicate the timing relationship between the earlier slash-and-burn agriculture and the start and growth of rock-garden agriculture, which at its height could support 3,000 or 4,000 people.
The question is, could a population of about 4,000 people have built, transported and erected hundreds of massive Moai? One would imagine that at an early stage, sweet potatoes could have been grown extensively before the soil became depleted and required lithic-mulching. Thus, the population before lithic-mulching was required could have been larger than 4,000.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to estimate the pre-lithic-mulching population, making concepts of collapse and sustainability difficult to apply.
Very good points.
Thank you.