Some time ago, I discussed a book Sea People that described the incredible navigational feats of the Polynesian people who were able to reach and populate all the habitable islands in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Westerners did not think that these ‘primitive’ people could do this and felt that the islands must have been populated by people traveling west from the Americas. Thor Heyerdahl was one of the key proponents of this idea and his balsa raft Kon Tiki experiment was aggressively promoted by him as showing that this was the case. That thesis is no longer considered tenable but that wrong idea still persist in the public mind.

This is not the only example of how western archaeologists and anthropologists, faced with what seemed like impressive achievements in countries that they deemed backward, discounted the possibility that indigenous people might have done them and instead created theories that gave the credit to others. In a review of a new book about the giant sculptures of faces known as moai found on the island of Rapa Nui (formerly called Easter Island), Margaret Talbot reviews some of the other examples of this tendency, the most extreme version being that of Erich von Daniken.

Finding out what actually happened in the deep past can be a slog, so when ancient history is packaged as mystery—spine-tingling but solvable—it’s hard to resist. Who doesn’t want to know how a lost civilization got lost, or where it might be hiding? The trouble is that what gets touted as a lost civilization often turns out to have been there all along. The people who can’t or won’t see the continuity in front of them have typically been European adventurers or armchair archeologists, busy spinning dismissive theories about the cultures of non-Europeans. The idea that the Pyramids of Egypt are so awesome they could only have been built by aliens is now a meme-able joke, fodder for Reddit debunkers and cheesy History Channel shows.

Still, the fancy persists, implanted like a microchip, ever since Erich von Däniken’s 1968 best-seller, “Chariots of the Gods,” begat the hugely popular 1973 television special “In Search of Ancient Astronauts.” Von Däniken argued that extraterrestrials must have visited Earth to lend a hand with various prehistoric undertakings—the Pyramids, the massive stone carvings of Easter Island, the Nazca Lines. What may have begun as trippy speculation fed on a darker premise: that the present-day peoples of Africa, Polynesia, or Latin America were simply not impressive enough to have had ancestors capable of such feats. (Stonehenge was the rare European site to make an appearance among von Däniken’s confounding examples.)

The belief that Indigenous monuments must have been made by outsiders has, in more respectable guises, long shaped Western accounts of Indigenous cultural achievement. It continues to do so.The Pyramids of Egypt and the statues of Easter Island are extraordinary, and before modern archeological methods it was often hard to see how such works could have been produced without metal tools or machinery. That conundrum, however, slid easily into a failure of imagination and, specifically, an inability to credit the capacities of people who were not white. Nineteenth-century European explorers concluded that the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe, now thought to have been built by the Shona between roughly 1100 and 1450 C.E., must be the work of Phoenicians or Babylonians or intrepid explorers from another far-flung place or, basically, anyone but the Africans who actually lived there. The pre-Columbian mound complexes scattered across North America met a similar fate. Their builders were variously imagined as giants, a vanquished white race of some kind, or members of the lost tribes of Israel—the last a notion promoted by Josiah Priest, a nineteenth-century pamphleteer with an animus against Native Americans, cited by Andrew Jackson to justify the Indian Removal Act, and taken up, in recent years, by Tucker Carlson.

In “Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island” (Mariner), a crisp, confident, and convincing new account of the place and its chroniclers, the British archeologist Mike Pitts calls these theories of lost European civilizations and alien drop-ins “demonstrable claptrap.”

What happened at Rapa Nui is a good example because we are all somewhat familiar with the nearly 900 massive stone carvings of faces, called moai, some of which weigh as much as 75 tons and stand on pedestals that dot the island. The current population is small (about 5,000) occupying a land area of about 65 square miles. One question that intrigued people was why these statues were created and how they were moved from the quarry area to their final locations. Another question is what happened to the trees of the island. There are few now and those that exist are small but archeological evidence points to the fact that at one time there were species of palm trees that could grow up to heights of 15 meters.

One popular theory is that the island was the victim of ecocide, that at one time the island was a lush tropical forest but the native peoples were careless with their resources, cutting too many trees, perhaps to use as rollers to transport the moai, and to make boats, and this led to an ecological collapse. Thus the island became a cautionary tale as to what can happen when people neglect to take proper care of their environment. This was the thesis put forward by Jared Diamond in his best-selling book Collapse and, like Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki, it has captured the public’s imagination and will be hard to shake off. I heard Diamond give an excellent talk on this that inspired me to read his book and I was one of those who ended up believing in this story.

But more recent scholarship does not bear out that theory of collapse. Even more recent work suggests that what caused the death of the trees may have been the arrival of rats.

Polynesian rats (Rattus exulans) stowed away on those canoes, Hunt and Lipo say, and once they landed, with no enemies and lots of palm roots to eat, they went on a binge, eating and destroying tree after tree, and multiplying at a furious rate.
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As the trees went, so did 20 other forest plants, six land birds and several sea birds. So there was definitely less choice in food, a much narrower diet, and yet people continued to live on Easter Island, and food, it seems, was not their big problem.

As for moving the moai, we now think that rather than rolling them on logs, they were able to ‘walk’ them.

Mike Pitts’ book seeks to rescue from obscurity the anthropological work of Katherine Routledge and her husband who went to Rapa Nui in 1913 and spent considerable time there learning from the people and forming a bond with them. But her work was neglected.

In 1913, Katherine Routledge set out for Easter Island. She was from a wealthy Quaker family in the North of England, and formally trained in modern history. (She had studied at Oxford but received her degree from Trinity College Dublin, in 1895, because Oxford did not then grant diplomas to women.)
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However impressive the Routledges’ research, it was no match for the seductive notion of a populace living among the ruins of a once mighty civilization whose origins were a puzzle and whose downfall was an object lesson. That idea was spooky and poignant and metaphorically potent. In particular, the Routledges’ research was no match for the narrative skills and indefatigable energy of the swashbuckling Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.
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The story Pitts tells—drawing on new archeological findings, a fresh reading of eighteenth-century visitors’ accounts, and a reconsideration of Katherine Routledge’s neglected work—is quite different. It will no doubt be contested; Rapa Nui studies is a notably argumentative field, perhaps because so little can be definitively proved in the absence of early written records.
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The island that the settlers discovered was probably less lush and hospitable than the one they had left. Much of it was open and grassy and studded with rocks, its soil fragile. It had coral reefs but not at sea level, rough surf, and no permanent freshwater streams. Still, the Rapanui made a go of it. Within a few generations, they began carving moai from volcanic stone and mounting them on plinths. Far from self-destructive, the Rapanui proved remarkably resilient.

The article also describes something that I was not aware of, and that was the impact of the slave trade on the population.

In the eighteen-sixties, an Irish entrepreneur named Joseph Charles Byrne proposed a solution to a growing problem facing the Peruvian economy. Plantations producing sugar, the red dye cochineal, and cotton, along with guano operations on coastal islands, needed labor, and the tightening constraints on slavery were making it harder to secure. Byrne suggested looking west, to Polynesia, where, he claimed, workers could be obtained cheaply. So began a round of slaving raids in Polynesia. Rapa Nui was especially attractive because of its relative proximity to South America. “Some 1,500 islanders were taken or killed,” Pitts writes, “as the rest of the community hid in coastal caves and cowered inland.
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By then, the damage was done. Some captives had come down with smallpox during an epidemic in Lima and carried it home, spreading it to others. After the crossings and the returns, according to Pitts, more than six thousand Polynesians died, with the Rapanui suffering the heaviest losses. By the late nineteenth century, Rapa Nui’s population had fallen to a hundred and ten people, only twenty-six of them women.

The damage done to indigenous people and their civilizations is considerable. The very least we can do is to not disparage their achievements and give them the credit that is their due.