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Fine di Pasqua [2 of 2]
[seconda parte]
Archeologists have also enlisted surviving islanders in experiments
aimed at figuring out how
the statues might have been carved and erected.
Twenty people, using only stone chisels,
could have carved even the largest completed
statue within a year. Given enough timber and
fiber for making ropes, teams of at most a few
hundred people could have loaded the
statues onto wooden sleds, dragged them over
lubricated wooden tracks or rollers, and
used logs as levers to maneuver them into a
standing position. Rope could have been made
from the fiber of a small native tree, related to
the linden, called the hauhau. However, that
tree is now extremely scarce on Easter, and
hauling one statue would have required
hundreds of yards of rope. Did Easter’s now barren
landscape once support the necessary
trees?
That question can be answered by the technique of
pollen analysis, which involves boring
out a column of sediment from a swamp or pond,
with the most recent deposits at the top
and relatively more ancient deposits at the
bottom. The absolute age of each layer can be
dated by radiocarbon methods. Then begins the hard
work: examining tens of thousands of
pollen grains under a microscope, counting them,
and identifying the plant species that
produced each one by comparing the grains with
modern pollen from known plant species.
For Easter Island, the bleary-eyed scientists who
performed that task were John Flenley,
now at Massey University in New Zealand, and Sarah
King of the University of Hull in
England.
Flenley and King’s heroic efforts were rewarded by
the striking new picture that emerged of
Easter’s prehistoric landscape. For at least
30,000 years before human arrival and during
the early years of Polynesian settlement, Easter
was not a wasteland at all. Instead, a
subtropical forest of trees and woody bushes
towered over a ground layer of shrubs, herbs,
ferns, and grasses. In the forest grew tree
daisies, the rope- yielding hauhau tree, and the
toromiro tree, which furnishes a dense,
mesquite-like firewood. The most common tree in
the forest was a species of palm now absent on
Easter but formerly so abundant that the
bottom strata of the sediment column were packed
with its pollen. The Easter Island palm
was closely related to the still-surviving Chilean
wine palm, which grows up to 82 feet tall
and 6 feet in diameter. The tall, unbranched
trunks of the Easter Island palm would have
been ideal for transporting and erecting statues
and constructing large canoes. The palm
would also have been a valuable food source, since
its Chilean relative yields edible nuts as
well as sap from which Chileans make sugar, syrup,
honey, and wine.
What did the first settlers of Easter Island eat
when they were not glutting themselves on the
local equivalent of maple syrup? Recent
excavations by David Steadman, of the New York
State Museum at Albany, have yielded a picture of
Easter’s original animal world as
surprising as Flenley and King’s picture of its
plant world. Steadman’s expectations for
Easter were conditioned by his experiences
elsewhere in Polynesia, where fish are
overwhelmingly the main food at archeological
sites, typically accounting for more than 90
percent of the bones in ancient Polynesian garbage
heaps. Easter, though, is too cool for the
coral reefs beloved by fish, and its cliff-girded
coastline permits shallow-water fishing in only
a few places. Less than a quarter of the bones in
its early garbage heaps (from the period
900 to 1300) belonged to fish; instead, nearly
one-third of all bones came from porpoises.
Nowhere else in Polynesia do porpoises account for
even 1 percent of discarded food
bones. But most other Polynesian islands offered
animal food in the form of birds and
mammals, such as New Zealand’s now extinct giant
moas and Hawaii’s now extinct
flightless geese. Most other islanders also had
domestic pigs and dogs. On Easter, porpoises
would have been the largest animal
available--other than humans. The porpoise species
identified at Easter, the common dolphin, weighs
up to 165 pounds. It generally lives out at
sea, so it could not have been hunted by line
fishing or spearfishing from shore. Instead, it
must have been harpooned far offshore, in big
seaworthy canoes built from the extinct palm
tree.
In addition to porpoise meat, Steadman found, the
early Polynesian settlers were feasting on
seabirds. For those birds, Easter’s remoteness and
lack of predators made it an ideal haven
as a breeding site, at least until humans arrived.
Among the prodigious numbers of seabirds
that bred on Easter were albatross, boobies,
frigate birds, fulmars, petrels, prions,
shearwaters, storm petrels, terns, and tropic
birds. With at least 25 nesting species, Easter
was the richest seabird breeding site in Polynesia
and probably in the whole Pacific.
Land birds as well went into early Easter Island
cooking pots. Steadman identified bones of
at least six species, including barn owls, herons,
parrots, and rail. Bird stew would have
been seasoned with meat from large numbers of
rats, which the Polynesian colonists
inadvertently brought with them; Easter Island is
the sole known Polynesian island where rat
bones outnumber fish bones at archeological sites.
(In case you’re squeamish and consider
rats inedible, I still recall recipes for creamed
laboratory rat that my British biologist friends
used to supplement their diet during their years
of wartime food rationing.)
Porpoises, seabirds, land birds, and rats did not
complete the list of meat sources formerly
available on Easter. A few bones hint at the
possibility of breeding seal colonies as well. All
these delicacies were cooked in ovens fired by
wood from the island’s forests.
Such evidence lets us imagine the island onto
which Easter’s first Polynesian colonists
stepped ashore some 1,600 years ago, after a long
canoe voyage from eastern Polynesia.
They found themselves in a pristine paradise. What
then happened to it? The pollen grains
and the bones yield a grim answer.
Pollen records show that destruction of Easter’s
forests was well under way by the year
800, just a few centuries after the start of human
settlement. Then charcoal from wood fires
came to fill the sediment cores, while pollen of
palms and other trees and woody shrubs
decreased or disappeared, and pollen of the
grasses that replaced the forest became more
abundant. Not long after 1400 the palm finally
became extinct, not only as a result of being
chopped down but also because the now ubiquitous
rats prevented its regeneration: of the
dozens of preserved palm nuts discovered in caves
on Easter, all had been chewed by rats
and could no longer germinate. While the hauhau
tree did not become extinct in Polynesian
times, its numbers declined drastically until
there weren’t enough left to make ropes from. By
the time Heyerdahl visited Easter, only a single,
nearly dead toromiro tree remained on the
island, and even that lone survivor has now
disappeared. (Fortunately, the toromiro still
grows in botanical gardens elsewhere.)
The fifteenth century marked the end not only for
Easter’s palm but for the forest itself. Its
doom had been approaching as people cleared land
to plant gardens; as they felled trees to
build canoes, to transport and erect statues, and
to burn; as rats devoured seeds; and
probably as the native birds died out that had
pollinated the trees’ flowers and dispersed
their fruit. The overall picture is among the most
extreme examples of forest destruction
anywhere in the world: the whole forest gone, and
most of its tree species extinct.
The destruction of the island’s animals was as
extreme as that of the forest: without
exception, every species of native land bird
became extinct. Even shellfish were
overexploited, until people had to settle for
small sea snails instead of larger cowries.
Porpoise bones disappeared abruptly from garbage
heaps around 1500; no one could
harpoon porpoises anymore, since the trees used
for constructing the big seagoing canoes
no longer existed. The colonies of more than half
of the seabird species breeding on Easter
or on its offshore islets were wiped out.
In place of these meat supplies, the Easter
Islanders intensified their production of chickens,
which had been only an occasional food item. They
also turned to the largest remaining meat
source available: humans, whose bones became
common in late Easter Island garbage
heaps. Oral traditions of the islanders are rife
with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt
that could be snarled at an enemy was “The flesh
of your mother sticks between my teeth.”
With no wood available to cook these new goodies,
the islanders resorted to sugarcane
scraps, grass, and sedges to fuel their fires.
All these strands of evidence can be wound into a
coherent narrative of a society’s decline
and fall. The first Polynesian colonists found
themselves on an island with fertile soil,
abundant food, bountiful building materials, ample
lebensraum, and all the prerequisites for
comfortable living. They prospered and multiplied.
After a few centuries, they began erecting stone
statues on platforms, like the ones their
Polynesian forebears had carved. With passing
years, the statues and platforms became
larger and larger, and the statues began sporting
ten-ton red crowns--probably in an
escalating spiral of one-upmanship, as rival clans
tried to surpass each other with shows of
wealth and power. (In the same way, successive
Egyptian pharaohs built ever-larger
pyramids. Today Hollywood movie moguls near my
home in Los Angeles are displaying
their wealth and power by building ever more
ostentatious mansions. Tycoon Marvin Davis
topped previous moguls with plans for a
50,000-square-foot house, so now Aaron Spelling
has topped Davis with a 56,000-square-foot house.
All that those buildings lack to make
the message explicit are ten-ton red crowns.) On
Easter, as in modern America, society was
held together by a complex political system to
redistribute locally available resources and to
integrate the economies of different areas.
Eventually Easter’s growing population was cutting
the forest more rapidly than the forest
was regenerating. The people used the land for
gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and
houses--and, of course, for lugging statues. As
forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of
timber and rope to transport and erect their
statues. Life became more uncomfortable--
springs and streams dried up, and wood was no
longer available for fires.
People also found it harder to fill their
stomachs, as land birds, large sea snails, and many
seabirds disappeared. Because timber for building
seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches
declined and porpoises disappeared from the table.
Crop yields also declined, since
deforestation allowed the soil to be eroded by
rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its
nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified
chicken production and cannibalism replaced only
part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes
with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest
that people were starving.
With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter
Island could no longer feed the chiefs,
bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex
society running. Surviving islanders
described to early European visitors how local
chaos replaced centralized government and a
warrior class took over from the hereditary
chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers,
made by the warriors during their heyday in the
1600s and 1700s, still litter the ground of
Easter today. By around 1700, the population began
to crash toward between one-quarter
and one-tenth of its former number. People took to
living in caves for protection against their
enemies. Around 1770 rival clans started to topple
each other’s statues, breaking the heads
off. By 1864 the last statue had been thrown down
and desecrated.
As we try to imagine the decline of Easter’s
civilization, we ask ourselves, “Why didn’t they
look around, realize what they were doing, and
stop before it was too late? What were they
thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”
I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not
with a bang but with a whimper. After all,
there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to
consider. The forest the islanders
depended on for rollers and rope didn’t simply
disappear one day--it vanished slowly, over
decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams;
perhaps by the time the carvers had
finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the
meantime, any islander who tried to warn
about the dangers of progressive deforestation
would have been overridden by vested
interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs,
whose jobs depended on continued
deforestation. Our Pacific Northwest loggers are
only the latest in a long line of loggers to
cry, “Jobs over trees!” The changes in forest
cover from year to year would have been hard
to detect: yes, this year we cleared those woods
over there, but trees are starting to grow
back again on this abandoned garden site here.
Only older people, recollecting their
childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized
a difference. Their children could no
more have comprehended their parents’ tales than
my eight-year-old sons today can
comprehend my wife’s and my tales of what Los
Angeles was like 30 years ago.
Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less
important. By the time the last fruit-bearing
adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since
ceased to be of economic significance. That
left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to
clear each year, along with other bushes and
treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of
the last small palm.
By now the meaning of easter Island for us should
be chillingly obvious. Easter Island is
Earth writ small. Today, again, a rising
population confronts shrinking resources. We too
have no emigration valve, because all human
societies are linked by international transport,
and we can no more escape into space than the
Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean. If
we continue to follow our present course, we shall
have exhausted the world’s major
fisheries, tropical rain forests, fossil fuels,
and much of our soil by the time my sons reach my
current age.
Every day newspapers report details of famished
countries-- Afghanistan, Liberia, Rwanda,
Sierra Leone, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia,
Zaire--where soldiers have appropriated the
wealth or where central government is yielding to
local gangs of thugs. With the risk of
nuclear war receding, the threat of our ending
with a bang no longer has a chance of
galvanizing us to halt our course. Our risk now is
of winding down, slowly, in a whimper.
Corrective action is blocked by vested interests,
by well-intentioned political and business
leaders, and by their electorates, all of whom are
perfectly correct in not noticing big
changes from year to year. Instead, each year
there are just somewhat more people, and
somewhat fewer resources, on Earth.
It would be easy to close our eyes or to give up
in despair. If mere thousands of Easter
Islanders with only stone tools and their own
muscle power sufficed to destroy their society,
how can billions of people with metal tools and
machine power fail to do worse? But there is
one crucial difference. The Easter Islanders had
no books and no histories of other doomed
societies. Unlike the Easter Islanders, we have
histories of the past--information that can
save us. My main hope for my sons’ generation is
that we may now choose to learn from the
fates of societies like Easter’s.