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Easter Island, Earth Island: The Enigmas of Rapa Nui
Easter Island, isolated deep in the South Pacific and now a World Heritage Site, was home to a fascinating prehistoric culture--one that produced massive stone effigies (the moai) and the birdman cult--and yet much of the island's past remains shrouded in mystery. Where did the islanders come from, and when? How did Rapa Nui culture evolve over the centuries? How, and why, did their natural environment change over time? Paul Bahn and John Flenley guide readers through the mysteries and enigmas of Rapa Nui, incorporating the records of early explorers, folk legends, and archaeological evidence along the way. They cover the island's geological and environmental history and explore its flora and fauna, illustrating how human actions affected the natural environment of the island. This fourth edition draws in: recent DNA studies of ancient human and animal bones as well as plant remains; evolving understandings of how the moai were transported; and current efforts to reforest the island.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
304 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1992
2 people are currently reading
137 people want to read
About the author
Paul G. Bahn
126 books44 followersPaul G. Bahn is a British archaeologist, translator, writer and broadcaster who has published extensively on a range of archaeological topics, with particular attention to prehistoric art. He is a contributing editor to Archaeology magazine.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 23, 2023
Sometimes, the price of enlightenment is the death of the sense of wonder.
'Tis the case with Bahn and Flenley's comprehensive analysis of Easter Island's past and the theories that what little evidence of its people we have has caused us to dream up. I picked this up five, six, seven years ago at a thrift sale right when I started buying books. It sat on my TBR Towers for all that time, always looking to kitschy to grab my attention like it should've, partially because I major in science fiction. Lately, though, I have meant to widen by historical nonfiction palette, and going back to one of the longest-sitting books in my library suited that goal. If I had known what lay under the dust jacket (in regards to both its content and its pretty embroidered black bookcloth), I would've opened it up a lot sooner.
The book's introduction largely covers the Western's worlds initial contacts with Easter Island (whether they were Spanish or named Christopher Columbus) and some of the people who've studied it (like Thor Heyerdahl) before a first chapter on the legendary island's geography and ecosystem. Chapter 2 reunites us to Thor Heyerdahl, a European who believed that the Easter Islanders originated from South America, a claim that Bahn and Flenley artfully debunk throughout this chapter, citing the mass of archaeological, biological, and linguistic evidence pointing towards their Polynesian ancestry. Chapter 3 analyzes and explains Polynesian history for those of us who aren't up to date on our Pacific history, and Chapter 4 - "Living on an Island" - talks about the archaeological traces that they left and what we can construe about their daily lives.
The book then shifts gears to the moai, the giant stone statues which the island is best known for. We explore how the islanders might have made them (all signs point to using basalt and other harder volcanic rocks to carve tuff, a softer volcanic byproduct), how they might have moved them (with a lot of ropes and/or wooden rollers, it seems), and what their purpose was. The question of their purpose slides nicely into the back third of the book, where our fearless co-authors examine the island culture's demise on both a material and social level, represented by the extinction of Easter Island trees and the war that sprouted between its murkily understood thin and stockier stocks, respectively. We are also taught about the birdman "cult" which steered the people during Easter Island's cultural eclipse. All signs point towards an exhaustion of the island's resources and a subsequent social collapse, during which Bahn and Flenley are careful to draw a parallel between the once thousands-strong culture and our current civilization; do we sit atop such a fine line as they once did?
*Easter Island, Earth Island* packs quite the punch for being less than 250 pages and crammed with a lot of photos (which are, by the way, very nice and well placed and answered most of the questions that I had during the reading). Many things are inconclusive due to the nature of archaeology and unreliable oral histories, but that's no fault of our documentarians, who seem to have done a pretty good job of telling us everything there was to know about Easter Island's past circa 1992. I guess the estimations the arrival of Polynesian colonization have shifted from between 300 and 400 to AD to somewhere closer to 1300 AD, although I'd like to believe in colonization somewhere between 700 and 800 AD. And don't even got me started on whether or not South American natives made contact with the Easter Islanders...
This book is responsible for sparking my newfound interest in Polynesian culture and for sending me down a few Easter Island Wikipedia rabbit holes which I'm still finding joy in. It has opened up a whole new area of prehistory, one of my favorite types of history, and the concept of a culture strewn about the seas which lost touch with itself centuries ago, which is an entrancing and fertile playground for a science fiction writer and conceptualist like myself.
I do think that one downside to reading this book (which is negligible next to the knowledge and inspiration I gleamed from it) is that, as I implied in the opening line, it demystified Easter Island for me. I enjoyed reveling in the mystery, the impossibility, every time I saw a picture of the moai. Alas, this feat of ancient architecture was not nearly as far-out as I'd led myself to believe. The same goes for its inhabitants. It leads to interesting philosophical questions of how greater knowledge strips the world of its splendor (as Arthur C Clarke was getting at when he said the technology is indistinguishable from magic), but I don't feel smart enough to write something about that today.
Inevitably, the hardest Easter Island question to answer is: does my lack of literary critiques mean that this book deserves a four-star rating? This also leads to a philosophical question - how is a biblio-maniac supposed to rate nonfiction? - that I don't know if I can answer today. This book either gets a strong 7.5 or a relatively mellow 8/10. I think it shall be a.... <7.5/8>/10. Historical nonfiction has been doing well for me this year, between books on Californian libraries and Monopoly and Metallica, and I think that a musical biography on Louis Armstrong is right around the corner. Before I can read that, though, I must say goodbye. So... goodbye. Thanks for reading through the whole of this book's only English-speaking Goodreads review, and if you're interested in my other thoughts on historical nonfiction, I'm sure you can find them on Darnoc Leadburger's Goodreads page, sandwiched between science fiction reads. Here's hoping that you - Hell, and me - are lucky enough to see a moai sometime in this life.
'Tis the case with Bahn and Flenley's comprehensive analysis of Easter Island's past and the theories that what little evidence of its people we have has caused us to dream up. I picked this up five, six, seven years ago at a thrift sale right when I started buying books. It sat on my TBR Towers for all that time, always looking to kitschy to grab my attention like it should've, partially because I major in science fiction. Lately, though, I have meant to widen by historical nonfiction palette, and going back to one of the longest-sitting books in my library suited that goal. If I had known what lay under the dust jacket (in regards to both its content and its pretty embroidered black bookcloth), I would've opened it up a lot sooner.
The book's introduction largely covers the Western's worlds initial contacts with Easter Island (whether they were Spanish or named Christopher Columbus) and some of the people who've studied it (like Thor Heyerdahl) before a first chapter on the legendary island's geography and ecosystem. Chapter 2 reunites us to Thor Heyerdahl, a European who believed that the Easter Islanders originated from South America, a claim that Bahn and Flenley artfully debunk throughout this chapter, citing the mass of archaeological, biological, and linguistic evidence pointing towards their Polynesian ancestry. Chapter 3 analyzes and explains Polynesian history for those of us who aren't up to date on our Pacific history, and Chapter 4 - "Living on an Island" - talks about the archaeological traces that they left and what we can construe about their daily lives.
The book then shifts gears to the moai, the giant stone statues which the island is best known for. We explore how the islanders might have made them (all signs point to using basalt and other harder volcanic rocks to carve tuff, a softer volcanic byproduct), how they might have moved them (with a lot of ropes and/or wooden rollers, it seems), and what their purpose was. The question of their purpose slides nicely into the back third of the book, where our fearless co-authors examine the island culture's demise on both a material and social level, represented by the extinction of Easter Island trees and the war that sprouted between its murkily understood thin and stockier stocks, respectively. We are also taught about the birdman "cult" which steered the people during Easter Island's cultural eclipse. All signs point towards an exhaustion of the island's resources and a subsequent social collapse, during which Bahn and Flenley are careful to draw a parallel between the once thousands-strong culture and our current civilization; do we sit atop such a fine line as they once did?
*Easter Island, Earth Island* packs quite the punch for being less than 250 pages and crammed with a lot of photos (which are, by the way, very nice and well placed and answered most of the questions that I had during the reading). Many things are inconclusive due to the nature of archaeology and unreliable oral histories, but that's no fault of our documentarians, who seem to have done a pretty good job of telling us everything there was to know about Easter Island's past circa 1992. I guess the estimations the arrival of Polynesian colonization have shifted from between 300 and 400 to AD to somewhere closer to 1300 AD, although I'd like to believe in colonization somewhere between 700 and 800 AD. And don't even got me started on whether or not South American natives made contact with the Easter Islanders...
This book is responsible for sparking my newfound interest in Polynesian culture and for sending me down a few Easter Island Wikipedia rabbit holes which I'm still finding joy in. It has opened up a whole new area of prehistory, one of my favorite types of history, and the concept of a culture strewn about the seas which lost touch with itself centuries ago, which is an entrancing and fertile playground for a science fiction writer and conceptualist like myself.
I do think that one downside to reading this book (which is negligible next to the knowledge and inspiration I gleamed from it) is that, as I implied in the opening line, it demystified Easter Island for me. I enjoyed reveling in the mystery, the impossibility, every time I saw a picture of the moai. Alas, this feat of ancient architecture was not nearly as far-out as I'd led myself to believe. The same goes for its inhabitants. It leads to interesting philosophical questions of how greater knowledge strips the world of its splendor (as Arthur C Clarke was getting at when he said the technology is indistinguishable from magic), but I don't feel smart enough to write something about that today.
Inevitably, the hardest Easter Island question to answer is: does my lack of literary critiques mean that this book deserves a four-star rating? This also leads to a philosophical question - how is a biblio-maniac supposed to rate nonfiction? - that I don't know if I can answer today. This book either gets a strong 7.5 or a relatively mellow 8/10. I think it shall be a.... <7.5/8>/10. Historical nonfiction has been doing well for me this year, between books on Californian libraries and Monopoly and Metallica, and I think that a musical biography on Louis Armstrong is right around the corner. Before I can read that, though, I must say goodbye. So... goodbye. Thanks for reading through the whole of this book's only English-speaking Goodreads review, and if you're interested in my other thoughts on historical nonfiction, I'm sure you can find them on Darnoc Leadburger's Goodreads page, sandwiched between science fiction reads. Here's hoping that you - Hell, and me - are lucky enough to see a moai sometime in this life.
December 2, 2023
Paul Bahn es un arqueólogo y escritor conocido por su trabajo en arqueología prehistórica y arte rupestre.
Ofrece un análisis arqueológico y cultural de la isla, explorando temas como las estatuas de moái, la historia de los habitantes originales de la isla y sus prácticas culturales, además de abordar el tema de sostenibilidad y el medio ambiente, ya que la Isla de Pascua ha sido objeto de debate debido a la aparente deforestación y otros problemas medioambientales.
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Paul Bahn is an archaeologist and writer known for his work in prehistoric archeology and rock art.
It offers an archaeological and cultural analysis of the island, exploring topics such as moai statues, the history of the island's original inhabitants and their cultural practices, as well as addressing the issue of sustainability and the environment, as Easter Island has been the subject of debate due to apparent deforestation and other environmental problems.
Ofrece un análisis arqueológico y cultural de la isla, explorando temas como las estatuas de moái, la historia de los habitantes originales de la isla y sus prácticas culturales, además de abordar el tema de sostenibilidad y el medio ambiente, ya que la Isla de Pascua ha sido objeto de debate debido a la aparente deforestación y otros problemas medioambientales.
------------------------------------------
Paul Bahn is an archaeologist and writer known for his work in prehistoric archeology and rock art.
It offers an archaeological and cultural analysis of the island, exploring topics such as moai statues, the history of the island's original inhabitants and their cultural practices, as well as addressing the issue of sustainability and the environment, as Easter Island has been the subject of debate due to apparent deforestation and other environmental problems.
May 25, 2014
Una excelente presentacion de la isla de Pascua, sus mitos, sus leyendas, su cultura e sua historia. Los autores apresentan la mas recentes descubiertas arqueologicas y ecologicas. Sin concession al sensacionalismo, mostran que las ultimas investigaciones scientificas pruebaran que la descontrolada explotacion de los pocos recursos provocaran el desastre final antes de la llegada de los primeros occidentales. Asi dos mensajes: uno, que la desconsideracion al medioambiente puede ser fatal a la civilisacion, dos, que los pueblos nativos tambien pueden ser mortalmente negligente con la ecologia.
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