Easter Island

Easter Island

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. It is a Chilean territory since September 9, 1888, by means of the "Treaty of Annexation of the island". It is famous for its monumental statues, called moai, created by the Rapanui people. Most of the island is protected within the Rapa Nui National Park.

Easter Island is one of the world's most isolated inhabited islands. It is 3,600 km (2,237 mi) west of continental Chile. It has an area of 163.6 km² (63 sq mi), and a maximum altitude of 507 metres. There are three Rano (freshwater crater lakes), at Rano Kau, Rano Raraku and Rano Aroi, near the summit of Terevaka, but no permanent streams or rivers.

Easter Island is a volcanic high island, consisting mainly of three extinct volcanoes: Terevaka (altitude 507 metres) forms the bulk of the island. Two other volcanoes, Poike and Rano Kau, form the eastern and southern headlands and give the island its approximately triangular shape. There are numerous lesser cones and other volcanic features, and many volcanic caves including lava tubes.

The island and surrounding islets such as Motu Nui, Motu Iti are the summit of a large volcanic mountain which rises over two thousand metres from the sea bed. It is part of the Sala y Gómez Ridge, a (mostly submarine) mountain range with dozens of seamounts starting with Pukao and then Moai, two seamounts to the west of Easter Island, and extending 2,700 km (1,700 mi) east to the Nazca Seamount.

History and more

It is estimated that the first inhabitants arrived to Rapa Nui in the VI century A.D approximately, on board of two catamarans, guided by the Ariki Hotu Matu 'a and his sister Ariki Vi'eAva Rei Púa, following the instructions given by the real Councilor envoy Haumaka.

For the Occident, Rapa Nui was discovered by the Dutchman Jacob Roggenberg in 1722 on Easter Sunday, what explain its name. Until 1860, few ship visited the island and the islanders had become openly hostile towards any attempt to land.

A series of devastating events nearly exterminate the entire population of the island in the 1860s. In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck Easter Island. Violent abductions continued for several months, capturing or killing around 1500 men and women, about half of the island's population. A dozen islanders managed to return from their slavery, but brought with them smallpox and started an epidemic, which decimated the island's population. Moreover violent clan wars exploded with the remaining people fighting over the newly available lands, bringing further famine and death among the dwindling population. Furthermore, the first Christian missionary, Eugène Eyraud, brought tuberculosis to the island in 1867 which decimated a quarter of the island's remaining population of 1,200.

Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier bought up all of the island apart from the missionaries' area around Hanga Roa and moved a couple of hundred Rapanui to Tahiti to work for his backers. In 1871 the missionaries, having fallen out with Dutrou-Bornier, evacuated all but 171 Rapanui to the Gambier islands. Those who remained were mostly older men. Six years later, there were just 111 people living on Easter Island, and only 36 of them had any children.

From that point on and into the present day, the island's population slowly recovered. But with over 97% of the population dead or having left in less than a decade, much of the island's cultural knowledge had been lost.

Easter Island was annexed by Chile on September 9, 1888, by Policarpo Toro, by means of the "Treaty of Annexation of the island" that the government of Chile signed with the Rapanui people.
 

Ecology

The island was formerly forested, with a range of trees (Palm and Toromiro), shrubs, ferns, and grasses, but trees are sparse on modern Easter Island, rarely forming small groves. It has suffered from heavy soil erosion in recent centuries, perhaps aggravated by agriculture and massive deforestation. This process seems to have been gradual and may have been aggravated by extensive sheep farming throughout most of the 20th century. 

However, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Göteborg Botanical Garden are jointly leading a scientific program to reintroduce the toromiro to Easter Island.

Culture

Rapa Nui is a volcanic island consisting of geologically recent igneous rock. The Rapa Nui people had a Stone Age civilization and made extensive use of different types of native stone that you can still discover visiting the island.

Like the large stone statues, or moai, for which Easter Island is world-famous, were carved during a relatively short and intense burst of creative and productive megalithic activity. Each statue represents a deceased long-ear chief or important person, their body interred within the ahu, or coastal platforms, the moai stand upon (only a quarter of the statues were installed, while nearly half still remain in the quarry at Rano Raraku and the rest elsewhere on the island, probably on their way to final locations). The largest Moai is known as "Paro" weighing 82 tons. There are several others close to this size.
 
One of the highest-quality examples of Easter Island stone masonry is the rear wall of the Ahu at Vinapu. Made without mortar by shaping hard basalt rocks of up to seven tons to match each other exactly, it has a superficial similarity to some Inca stone walls in South America.
You can apreciate as well some 1,233 prehistoric stone "houses", called hare moa ("chicken house"), that are more conspicuous than the remains of the prehistoric human houses which only had stone foundations. Stone houses were up to 6 meters long, with a distinctive boat-shaped structure combined with a stick and palm leaf or thatch superstructure. The entrances were very low, and getting in required crawling.

Easter Island has one of the richest collections of Petroglyps (pictures carved into rock) in all Polynesia. Around 1,000 sites with more than 4,000 petroglyphs are registered. Designs and images were carved out of rock for a variety of reasons: to create totems, to mark territory or to memorialize a person or event. The recurrent theme was a Birdmen and some other subjects like sea turtles, Komari (vulvas) and Makemake, the chief god of the Tangata manu or Birdman cult

The island and neighbouring Motu Nui are riddled with caves, many of which show signs of past human use and fortification, including narrowed entrances and crawl spaces with ambush points. Many caves feature in the myths and legends of the Rapa Nui.

Maps