MULTI-SCIENCE PUBLISHING CO. LTD.
Reprinted from
ENERGY &
ENVIRONMENT
VOLUME 16 No. 3&4 2005
From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape
of
by
Benny Peiser
FROM GENOCIDE TO ECOCIDE: THE RAPE
OF
Benny Peiser
Email: b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
The ‘decline and
fall’ of
the poster child of
a new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that
goes hand-in-hand
with predictions of environmental disaster. Why did this
exceptional
civilisation crumble? What drove its population to extinction? These
are some of the key
questions Jared Diamond endeavours to answer in his new
book Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. According to Diamond,
the people of
wiped out their
plants and drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this selfinflicted
environmental
devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into
civil war,
cannibalism and self-destruction. While his theory of ecocide has
become almost
paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs
over the premise of
fails to address the
true reasons behind
the victims of
cultural and physical extermination into the perpetrators of their
own demise? This
paper is a first attempt to address this disquieting quandary.
It describes the
foundation of Diamond’s environmental revisionism and explains
why it does not hold
up to scientific scrutiny.
INTRODUCTION
Of all the vanished
civilisations, no other has evoked as much bafflement, incredulity
and conjecture as
the Pacific
was discovered by
European explorers more than three hundred years ago amidst the
vast space that is
the
complexity that
gave rise to one of the most advanced cultures and technological feats
of Neolithic
societies anywhere in the world.
proficiency were
far superior to any other Polynesian culture, as was its unique writing
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
extinction? These
are some of the key questions Jared Diamond endeavours to answer
513
in his new book Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (Diamond, 2005)
in a chapter which
focuses on
Diamond’s saga of
the decline and fall of
be summarised in a
few words: Within a few centuries after the island was settled, the
people of
their plants and
drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this self-inflicted
environmental
devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into civil war,
cannibalism and
self-destruction. When Europeans discovered the island in the 18th
century, they found
a crashed society and a deprived population of survivors who
subsisted among the
ruins of a once vibrant civilisation.
Diamond’s key line
of reasoning is not difficult to grasp:
cultural decline
and collapse occurred before Europeans set foot on its shores. He spells
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
week, Jared Diamond
drew attention to populations, such as those on
who denied they
were having a catastrophic impact on the environment and were
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
uncomplicated
shorthand for explaining the so-called cultural devolution of
society” (Rainbird,
2002).
The ‘decline and
fall’ of
the poster child of
the new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that
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
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
suicide has become the
prime case for the gloomiest of grim eco-pessimism. After
more than 30 years
of palaeo-environmental research on
leading experts
comes to an extremely gloomy conclusion: “It seems […] that
ecological
sustainability may be an impossible dream. The revised Club of
more than a few
decades. Most of their models still show economic decline by AD
2100. Easter Island
still seems to be a plausible model for
1998:127).
From a political
and psychological point of view, this imagery of a complex
civilisation
self-destructing is overwhelming. It portrays an impression of utter failure
514 Energy &
Environment · Vol. 16, No. 3&4, 2005
that elicits shock
and trepidation. It is in form of a shock-tactic when Diamond
employs
today: “Easter [
destroyed itself by
overexploiting its own resources. Those are the reasons why people
see the collapse of
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
an actual genocide
terminated
culture. Diamond
ignores, or neglects to address the true reasons behind
collapse. Other
researchers have no doubt that its people, their culture and its
environment were
destroyed to all intents and purposes by European slave-traders,
whalers and
colonists – and not by themselves! After all, the cruelty and systematic
kidnapping by
European slave-merchants, the near-extermination of the
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
Polynesian history”
(Bellwood, 1978:363).
So why does Diamond
maintain that
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
ecocide? In short, why
have the victims of cultural and physical extermination
been turned into
the perpetrators of their own demise?
This paper is a
first attempt to address this disquieting quandary. It describes the
foundation of
Diamond’s environmental revisionism and explains why it does not hold
up to scientific
scrutiny.
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.
South Pacific.
Separated by some
Dutch explorer
Jacob Roggeveen. At the time, the island was inhabited by a population
of Polynesian origin
who had arrived on
the island’s
extreme remoteness (
island), the
inhabitants depended on the island’s endowment of natural and marine
resources.
Diamond’s historical
reconstruction is based largely on fallacious mythologies
and legends. He
claims that
From genocide to
ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui 515
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
Island.
It is generally
agreed that
relatively late
origin; they are extremely contradictory and historically unreliable. As
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
archaeological
evidence for any of the key claims of societal dissolution and breakdown
before the 18th century (Rainbird,
2002). Only by relying on incongruous myths and
contradictory tales
can Diamond weave a superficially coherent reconstruction of
Nui’s prehistory.
To understand how
Diamond arrived at the premise of
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
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
adventurers.
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.
516 Energy &
Environment · Vol. 16, No. 3&4, 2005
DID DEFORESTATION
CAUSE CIVILISATION COLLAPSE?
evidence on which
Diamond has based his theory of ecocide. Diamond’s whole edifice
of ecological
self-destruction basically rests on
According to this
premise, the extinction of the native palm tree triggered a series of
environmental and
social catastrophes that culminated in
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,
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:
At first, these
stone figures caused us to be filled with wonder, for we could not
understand how it
was possible that people who are destitute of heavy or thick
timber, and also of
stout cordage, out of which to construct gear, had been able
to erect them;
nevertheless some of these statues were a good
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
From genocide to ecocide:
the rape of Rapa Nui 517
that existed on
Easter Island until their modern extinction in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries?
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
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
collapse.” 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
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
518 Energy &
Environment · Vol. 16, No. 3&4, 2005
preserved palm nuts
discovered in caves on Easter, all had been chewed by rats and
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
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
Needless to say,
neither Cook nor
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
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
From genocide to
ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui 519
grounds to suggest
that the disappearance of palms must have triggered civil war and
societal collapse
either.
EASTER ISLAND’S
ENVIRONMENT: POTENTIAL PARADISE OR
WASTELAND?
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
contrary, a
considerable population, with more beauty and grace than I
afterwards met in
any other island; and a soil, which, with very little labour,
furnished excellent
provisions, and in an abundance more than sufficient for the
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
520 Energy &
Environment · Vol. 16, No. 3&4, 2005
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
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
natives are
exceedingly expert in the various methods of capturing them. The
bonito, albicore,
ray, dolphin, and porpoise are the off-shore fish most highly
esteemed, but the
swordfish and shark are also eaten. Rock-fish are caught in
abundance and are
remarkably sweet and good. Small fish of many varieties are
caught along the
shore, and the flying-fish are common. Eels of immense size
are caught in the
cavities and crevices of the rock-bound coast … . Turtles are
plentiful and are
highly esteemed; at certain seasons a watch for them is
constantly
maintained on the sand beach. A species of crayfish is abundant.
These are caught by
the natives by diving into the pools among the rocks, and
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
poisonous” (Routledge,
1917:345).
Together with
abundant and virtually unlimited sources of seafood, the cultivation of
the island’s
fertile soil could easily sustain many thousands of inhabitants interminably.
In view of the
profusion of broadly unlimited food supplies (which also included
abundant chickens,
their eggs and the islands innumerable rats, a culinary ‘delicacy’ that
were always
available in abundance), Diamond’s notion that the natives resorted to
cannibalism as a
result of catastrophic mass starvation is palpably absurd. In fact, there
is no
archaeological evidence whatsoever for either starvation or cannibalism.
From genocide to
ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui 521
THE DENIAL OF
INDIGENOUS CIVILISATION
“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
island?”, 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
522 Energy &
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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” (Palmer,
1870:118).
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).
FALLACIOUS
MYTHOLOGIES AND FABRICATED TRADITIONS
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
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
assertion.
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
From genocide to
ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui 523
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
Christianity.” 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”.
524 Energy &
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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
them?
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” (Routledge,
1919:165).
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
war” (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
From genocide to
ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui 525
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.
THOR HEYERDAHL,
JARED DIAMOND AND THE MYTH OF RAPA NUI’S
SELF-DESTRUCTION
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
excitement”
(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
history.
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
526 Energy &
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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).
From genocide to
ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui 527
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
Raraku” (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
528 Energy &
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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
collapse.
(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.
“A HOLOCAUST OF
INTERNECINE WARFARE AND CANNIBALISM”?
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
conclusions.
This deficiency in
scrutiny and critical analysis is particularly apparent in his
treatment of
alleged cannibalism among Easter Island’s indigenous population.
530 Energy &
Environment · Vol. 16, No. 3&4, 2005
Already in 1995, he
contended that civil war and starvation drove the natives to eat
each other:
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.”
(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
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” (Fischer,
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.” Most
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).
From genocide to
ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui 531
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.
REAL COLLAPSE:
EASTER ISLAND’S FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE
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
532 Energy &
Environment · Vol. 16, No. 3&4, 2005
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,
1919).
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
From genocide to
ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui 533
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
its collapse. It is
why distinguished scientists feel compelled to concoct a story of
ecological suicide
when the actual perpetrators of the civilisation’s deliberate
destruction are
well known and were identified long ago.
CONCLUSION
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
534 Energy &
Environment · Vol. 16, No. 3&4, 2005
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
for what confirms
one’s beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance
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
line” 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
determinism and
cultural pessimism in the social sciences. It epitomises a new and
burgeoning doctrine
expounded largely by disillusioned left-wingers and former
Marxist
intellectuals. In place of the old creed of class warfare and socio-economic
driving forces that
used to explain every single development under the sun,
environmental
determinism essentially applies the same one-sided rigidity to historical
events and societal
evolution (Peiser, 2003).
As a final point, I
would argue that Easter Island is a poor example for a morality
tale about
environmental degradation. Easter Island’s tragic experience is not a
From genocide to
ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui 535
metaphor for the
entire Earth. The extreme isolation of Rapa Nui is an exception even
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
could not endure,
however, and what most of them did not survive, was something
altogether
different: the systematic destruction of their society, their people and their
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.”
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
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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