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.)
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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.” Yet a much more reputable but equally insulting theory about Easter Island has remained influential, even dominant, Pitts argues. In this version of events, Easter Island is a cautionary tale of a population that destroyed itself, its island paradise, and whatever mysterious civilization had created its thousand or so stone monuments, or moai. (A Dutch captain who landed there on, yes, Easter gave it the name many Westerners still know it by. Rapa Nui is the Polynesian name for the island; Pitts follows the convention of using “Rapanui” for its Indigenous inhabitants.)
Europeans who arrived in the late nineteenth century on this speck of land in the vast eastern Pacific encountered a very small local population in whom they saw little of interest or value. By contrast, the statues—hewn from volcanic stone, with beetle brows, long ski-slope noses, down-turned mouths, and distant gazes, once upright and now toppled or partly buried—earned their respect. They were blocky, minimalist, stylized, enormous, and strikingly different from the representational statues of people and gods the Europeans knew from home.
It was common in these late-nineteenth-century accounts, Pitts writes, to describe Rapa Nui’s inhabitants as “born cannibals,” and to wonder who could have carved the stone figures. Perhaps a cataclysm—an earthquake, a volcanic eruption—had driven those people away. The dearth of trees on the island implied to some that the inhabitants had cut them down to make clubs and shields.
In 1868, when the British naval frigate H.M.S. Topaze stopped at Easter Island to assess its usefulness to the Empire, the captain instructed his men to find a statue that they could bring home. With the assistance of islanders, they dug out an approximately eight-foot figure—one of the smaller, more portable moai, whose head had been spotted protruding from the ground—and hauled it back to the British Museum, where it stands to this day. The statue, known to the islanders as Hoa Hakananai’a, caused a sensation and, Pitts suggests, helped set off a new round of fervid conjecture about Rapa Nui. (Chile, Germany, and the United States soon dispatched ships to collect statues of their own.)
Martin Farquhar Tupper, a poet and an antiquarian favored by Queen Victoria, argued that Rapa Nui was the remnant of a lost continent whose people had perished. The spiritualist Madame Blavatsky saw the statues as evidence of a vanished race of giants who’d fled a mythical continent called Lemuria just before it sunk into the sea. Rapa Nui, Pitts writes, was subjected to “the full fantasy treatment,” based on a cluster of false premises: that the stone was too hard to carve with simple tools; that the island and its inhabitants were incapable of the civilization implied by the monuments; and that the real creators must have come from elsewhere—South America, Mexico, “Lemuria,” or beyond—and then disappeared. Running through it all was a strong note of judgment. The trees were gone because the islanders had cut them down to make war, and their world had been ruined, as Pitts writes, “because they had worshipped the wrong gods and reached above their station.”
When a serious archeological expedition finally took place on Rapa Nui, in 1913-15, its leaders, the British husband-and-wife team Katherine and William Scoresby Routledge, concluded that the islanders they’d met were indeed the descendants of those who had carved the statues. Yet much of their work—Katherine’s in particular—was later lost or ignored. Pitts, who edited British Archaeology for many years and has written books on Stonehenge and the search for Richard III’s remains, first visited Rapa Nui three decades ago and has taken an interest in it ever since. He seems to see a kindred spirit in Katherine, whose legacy, he believes, might have reshaped the island’s existing narrative had it not been cut short in a notably harsh way.
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.) By the time of the expedition, she was in her late forties and had already carried out archeological field work in East Africa with her husband, Scoresby Routledge, an anthropologist in the gentleman-explorer mold. The impetus for Rapa Nui came from Thomas Athol Joyce, an ethnographer at the British Museum who’d urged the Routledges to go while elderly islanders who remembered the old ways were still alive. Katherine read everything she could about the place, and the couple secured support from the Royal Geographical Society and commissioned a two-masted, ninety-one-foot wooden schooner for an archeological and ethnological survey designed to collect “scientific facts in relation” to the “inhabitants and their arts.”
In the course of sixteen months, from 1914 to 1915, the Routledges and their crew crisscrossed the island on horseback, worked closely with an influential islander named Tepano Ramo a Veriamo, and produced a pioneering survey of Rapa Nui’s topography and monuments. But the oral histories Katherine conducted, interviewing elderly islanders, with Tepano translating, may have been more valuable still. Her informants told her, for example, about funeral practices—about how they wrapped bodies and carried them aloft to the base of coastal plinths. Pitts thinks that Katherine came to understand not only the island’s physical layout but its “psychogeography”: what certain places meant to the people who lived there.
She also formed a bond with a Rapanui prophetess named Angata, the leader of an uprising against the sheep-ranching operation then dominating the island, which took place during the Routledges’ stay. Scoresby dismissed Angata as a “mad woman” and her followers as “ruffians.” Katherine saw a “charming, frail old lady,” with expressive eyes, at the center of a movement that could not be reduced to livestock raiding. As the only woman on the expedition, and as someone who had long chafed at the limits imposed on her in Edwardian England, Katherine may have been predisposed to sympathy. When she thanked Angata for a gift of poultry and potatoes, Angata replied that no thanks were needed; the food, she said, came from God.
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.
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Heyerdahl became an international celebrity largely on the basis of his fascination with Easter Island and his eagerness to prove his theories about it, at great personal risk. Heyerdahl, whom Pitts describes as “a charismatic expedition leader, and a driven writer and self-publicist untroubled by historical nuance,” shared the common supposition that the moai could not have been made by ancestors of the present-day islanders. His particular spin was that the moai’s true creators were people who had travelled from the Americas. Pacific peoples weren’t known to be strong on massive visages and the like, popular opinion suggested at the time, whereas groups like the Inca, the Olmec, and the Toltec were. But Heyerdahl had further theories about where these ingenious Americans had come from originally. He took the “patronizing premise” that the Rapanui were not up to the task, Pitts writes, “and bolted on explicit racism.” And so Heyerdahl recast the island’s earliest settlers as members of a Caucasian race who had migrated from what is now Iraq or Turkey to the Americas and then across the Pacific, and who were tall, fair, blue-eyed, and bearded—not unlike Heyerdahl himself, as Pitts wryly observes.
In 1947, to demonstrate that a pre-Columbian voyage from South America to Polynesia was at least possible, Heyerdahl and a crew of five set off from Peru on a forty-square-foot balsa-wood raft he named the Kon-Tiki. After a hundred and one days and some forty-three hundred miles drifting through shark-infested waters, they landed on a reef near Tahiti. The journey showed that such a crossing could be done—which did not, of course, mean that it had been. Still, it was a daring thing to have pulled off, and it yielded a best-selling book, an Oscar-winning 1950 documentary, and fuel for America’s postwar tiki-bar craze.
Heyerdahl’s ideas have been disputed by many scholars working on Rapa Nui, but they found a large and receptive audience, in part because they aligned with some of the conventional wisdom about Rapa Nui’s culture and its supposed violent rupture with its past. In 1994, the island received the Hollywood treatment in a film co-produced by Kevin Costner, not long after “Dances with Wolves.” In “Rapa-Nui,” bare chests, male and female, gleam in firelight, and internecine warfare—a love triangle gone apocalyptic—tears the island apart. Far more seriously, Easter Island became the exemplary case study in Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.” Diamond called it “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources”—through deforestation, soil exhaustion, and overfishing—turning it into a worst-case metaphor for our collective future. The “ecocide” narrative, with Easter Island as its emblem, was eagerly taken up by politicians and podcasters, liberals and conservatives alike. New evidence from pollen analysis indicated that the island had once been home to tall palm trees, possibly even a primeval palm forest. In his writings and lectures, Diamond posed a chilling question: “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree”—like the Once-ler in “The Lorax”—“say while he was doing it?”
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. All the same, Pitts’s account reflects a broader shift in the consensus, one that many readers will find persuasive, as this one did. He begins from a premise now widely shared: that Rapa Nui was settled in around 1200 by Polynesians who’d sailed in dugout canoes across uncharted reaches of the Pacific from another island. It was an extraordinary journey, but one that requires no transoceanic, or extraterrestrial, embellishment. The settlers spoke a Polynesian language, practiced Polynesian customs, and left descendants who continue to. Genetic studies of ancient and modern Rapanui confirm their Polynesian origins while also suggesting limited contact with South America, likely the result of later voyages rather than founding migration.
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.
When Europeans first arrived—a Dutch West India Company ship in 1722, a Spanish expedition from Peru in 1770, a British voyage under James Cook in 1774, and a French one in 1786—they encountered a population that appeared stable and well organized. Visitors noted agricultural practices that included crop rotation and other methods of soil renewal, carried out with what the French captain Jean-François de La Pérouse called “a great deal of intelligence.” The islanders kept chickens and grew taro, yams, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, and bananas.
They also described the statues as depicting distinguished ancestors, and interacted with them—lighting fires in front of them, dancing around them, or sitting before them with bowed heads. None of the eighteenth-century visitors “made a cultural distinction between living islanders and the statues,” Pitts writes. “They took it for granted that the statues were made by the people they met, and had meaning for them.” Population estimates varied, but Pitts places the likely number at around five thousand. (That’s high when compared with other scholars’ approximations, but several thousand seems like a safe assumption.)
These eighteenth-century European accounts have been underused, Pitts thinks, in part because they were hardly systematic or scientific, and also because some were thought to be lost in a shipwreck and others were scattered and difficult to consult. Today, there’s a range of archeological and genetic work that tends to support their basic observations while countering, or at least complicating, the familiar ecocide narrative. A 2024 genomic study tracking the island’s population over roughly four centuries found no sign of the sharp demographic collapse that is supposed to have occurred around 1600. Research by the American archeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt, among others, suggests that the islanders continued to prosper, and to build stone platforms for their statues, well beyond that date.
The evidence for environmental ruin, too, turns out to be less stark than advertised. The landscape of Rapa Nui probably never incorporated the sort of primeval forest of palm trees imagined in popular accounts, Pitts writes, but was more mixed, and scrubbier, with no one species of charismatic megaflora dominating. And, besides, it seems unfair to single out the Rapanui for cutting down their trees when, as Pitts notes, forest loss is a nearly ubiquitous consequence of human settlement. Medieval Europeans, to take one example, cleared enormous stretches of woodland—up to seventy per cent in parts of France and England by the fourteenth century—for farming, fuel, and timber. Later archeological research, including forensic examination of skeletal remains, has turned up no evidence for cannibalism or for a particularly bellicose society on Rapa Nui.
Something cataclysmic did happen to the Rapanui, but it was no great mystery, or shouldn’t be. 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.” Byrne skirted formal bans on slavery by having captives sign work contracts—in Spanish, which they could not read—and selling the contracts rather than the people themselves. The slaving raids became a public-relations problem, anyway. They drew criticism in Chilean and Peruvian newspapers, and the French Ambassador in Lima made a fuss. The trade was halted, and ships carrying Polynesian laborers were ordered back.
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.
Even so, the island drew outsiders seeking to save souls or make their fortune. First came Catholic missionaries from Europe, who found willing converts among a population still reeling from catastrophe. Then came Chile, which had a navy and a long coastline and was looking for a toehold in the Pacific; in 1888, it annexed Rapa Nui. (The island remains a Chilean province. In the Chilean Presidential elections that brought a law-and-order conservative to power last month, it voted for a leftist woman.) Then came the Chilean branch of Williamson, Balfour, a global firm founded by two Scotsmen with interests in everything from flour mills to railroads and oil fields in Chile and Peru. It alighted on Rapa Nui as the site for a sheep-farming enterprise. From the late nineteenth century to the nineteen-fifties, the island functioned, in effect, as a company state where, as Pitts observes, the sheep got better treatment than the people, with the pastures as well watered as a golf course. The population slowly recovered, but most of the land was given over to grazing, and the remaining Rapanui were confined to a walled settlement. As a result, “generations of gardens, houses and monuments lay abandoned and inaccessible,” Pitts writes, and the practices that sustained historical memory were badly disrupted. Knowledge of the statues grew tenuous among survivors of the raids and their descendants.
After the Routledges returned to England, they gave lectures about and published their findings; Katherine wrote a well-received book about their expedition. She also retained reams of notes, interviews, transcripts, genealogies, and sketches, evidently intending to write up further studies. By the late nineteen-twenties, however, her marriage was foundering, and her mental health was in decline. In 1927, the couple agreed to separate. Living in a grand house overlooking Hyde Park, Katherine packed up Scoresby’s belongings, sent them to a warehouse, changed the locks, and left for Syria and Palestine.
When she returned, she withdrew almost entirely, barricading herself in her seventeen-room house. In 1929, Scoresby’s and Katherine’s siblings had her committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she would remain until her death, seven years later. She was diagnosed with “mania,” believed by her doctors to be hereditary (one of her brothers had spent his life in an asylum after attacking his wife), aggravated, according to the diagnosis, by her “spiritualism.” Katherine appears to have suffered from paranoia and, at times, auditory hallucinations—though not, it seems, during her years in the Pacific. She needed help. Even so, the outcome was undeniably sad: a woman whose life had been defined by travel, research, and writing was cut off from all three. In a 2003 biography of Katherine, “Among Stone Giants,” the archeologist Jo Anne van Tilburg writes that “there is no evidence she ever saw Scoresby again.” For long stretches, she was denied access to books and bridled against the monotony and regulation of institutional life. When she was granted limited freedom to pursue her interests, such as walking in the garden, she exceeded the agreed-on terms and told her doctors she had done so “on principle.”
Even worse, perhaps, the wishes Katherine had set out in her will—that her notes, manuscripts, sketches, and photographs be edited, published, and deposited in a public archive, under the supervision of Thomas Athol Joyce, at the British Museum, or some suitable substitute—were never carried out, even though she had left the means to pay for this work. Scoresby, living in Cyprus and in poor health, showed little interest, and after his death, in 1939, no one else took responsibility. The fact that Katherine had been institutionalized may have tainted her scholarly reputation.
But she is not quite the neglected figure Pitts suggests—there is van Tilburg’s biography, for one thing, and she is regularly cited among a cohort of formidable women archeologists of the early twentieth century. If her papers had been collected and published, they might not have overturned entrenched ideas about Rapa Nui as forcefully as Pitts hopes. He’s surely exaggerating when he writes, “It seemed to me that had Katherine Routledge’s research become fully public,” those reigning narratives “would never have been born.” After all, his whole book makes a strong case for their tenacious utility. Still, it’s a shame that the papers were not available to the archeologists and anthropologists who came looking for them later. And it’s satisfying to see her taken so seriously, by a writer whose indignation on her behalf nearly matches his impatience with the persistent misreading of the island itself.
Rapa Nui continues to generate serious research questions. One that has long absorbed archeologists concerns the movement of the moai: how statues weighing several tons were transported from the quarry where they were carved to their platforms. Some scholars favor a method preserved in Rapanui oral tradition in which the figures were kept upright and made to “walk,” rocked forward with ropes. Heyerdahl demonstrated the technique’s feasibility in the nineteen-eighties, and more recently Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt have done the same, though others still argue for sledges or rollers. The island, in other words, still inspires genuine wonder, which is something quite different from the manufactured mystery of a lost civilization. The real question we should be asking now, as Pitts suggests, is how a people forced to cope with an inauspicious habitat, enslavement, and exploitation managed to survive at all. ♦
