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A long-held theory that a dramatic population collapse occurred at some point on the southeast Pacific Ocean’s Easter Island has been dubbed a myth by a new study.
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Researchers analyzed the island and found the land’s potential agricultural production could never have supported a larger number of people than were known to live there.
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Rock gardens were the most prevalent form of gardening on Easter Island, a labor-intensive endeavor with low yields.
There’s a clear reason that researchers haven’t been able to pinpoint the reasons for a so-called dramatic population collapse on the southeast Pacific Ocean island of Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island): it’s all a myth.
The belief that the population somehow crashed alongside the environment to leave just a few thousand inhabitants on the island by the time European explorers arrived in 1722 is nothing more than conjecture, according to a new study published in Science Advances.
A team of researchers used modern technology to more accurately gauge the number of rock gardens on the island, a key indicator of how many people lived there, and found a gross over-estimation of the population, concluding the island “could not have supported the large population sizes that have been assumed.”
“The soils on Rapa Nui were never particularly productive,” Carl Lipo, professor of anthropology and environmental science at Binghamton University in New York, said in a statement. “When people reached the island, they had to deal with those constraints.”
The long-held narrative is that the original inhabitants of Easter Island grew so fascinated with stone statues they decimated the ecological bounty of the island to clear the way to live and build. That’s simply not the case, according to the report.
“What we’re actually seeing here is that the island couldn’t sustain that many people to begin with based on ecological constraints,” Dylan Davis, post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Climate School, said in a statement. “People actually modified their landscapes to increase the amount of what they could intensively cultivate, and that number was still very small. This isn’t an example of ecological catastrophe but of how people survived despite really limited natural resources in a fairly sustainable way for a long time.”
The volcanic island was believed to form from an ancient eruption, but as rain washed away the potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen plants needed to grow, the salt-filled ocean spray degraded soil fertility further. Inhabitants did cut down the island’s trees to temporarily return nutrients to the soil, but when the trees ran out, they started composting plant waste and rock mulch, a labor-intensive chore that involved breaking off parts of exposed bedrock and turning the chunks into the soil to restore nutrients, all by hand, which helped them grow sweet potatoes and dry-land taro.
“We do it ourselves with non-organic fertilizer,” Lipo said. “Essentially, we use machines to crush rock into tiny pieces, which is effective because it exposes a lot of surface area.”
It’s these rock gardens that hold the key to the history of the island. The new research featured shortwave infrared satellite imagery to give a more accurate assessment of the amount of garden area on the island, estimating around 180 acres were covered by mulching stones. That is a number far below earlier estimates.
The updated figure allowed the team to approximate that 3,000 people lived on Rapa Nui at the time of European contact, which also fits with the artifacts discovered on the island and the estimation the Europeans made at the time of their arrival.
Lipo said that much of the misconception of the population may come from the large moai statues the relatively small population constructed. “We can’t use Easter Island as an example that’s convenient for stories,” Lipo said. “We need to understand the island in its own context because what it’s really telling us is something very different than what people believe.”
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