Far removed from the traditions of the Americas but linked closely to those of Polynesia, the people of the tiny South Pacific island of Rapa Nui are a unique case in humankind’s cultural evolution. From the first small group of settlers that arrived on the island around 8000 A.D. to their high point some 400 years later, the Rapa Nui people became a society capable of carrying out large-scale, technically complex collective works.
Their legacy includes huge ceremonial platforms, called ahus, upon which they erected great stone sculptures, moais, as well as the ceremonial village of Orongo. They achieved these great feats with an economy based on marine resources and horticulture. They irrigated their crops with rainwater, as there are no rivers on the island. Upon this economic foundation and despite their circumstantial limitations, the Rapa Nui people developed a highly complex social structure comprised of different social classes and clans that often came into conflict with each other, even to the point of inter-communal war. While their way of life flourished for some time, the frequent disputes, coupled with the pressure exerted on the island’s limited resources ultimately led to its collapse, and the once-thriving population that had numbered several thousand at its high point had fallen to a mere one hundred individuals by the time the island was annexed by Chile in 1887.