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Easter Island Stone Head
However, the demands placed on the environment of the island by this development were immense. There were increasing conflicts over diminishing resources resulting in a state of almost permanent warfare. The primitive people living in such poverty-stricken and backward conditions when the Europeans first visited the island could not have been responsible for such a socially advanced and technologically complex task as carving, transporting anderecting the statues. When the first people found Easter Island, they discovered a world with few resources. Over 300 of these platforms were constructed on the island, mainly near the coast. Prodigious quantities of timber would have been required and in increasing amounts as the competition between the clans to erect statues grew. The only research on process writing advantage of this monotonous, though nutritionally adequate, diet was that cultivation of the sweet potato was not very demanding and left plenty of time for other activities.
Easter Island therefore became a 'mystery'and a wide variety of theories were advanced to explain its history. They resorted to stone shelters dug into the hillsides or flimsy reed huts cut from the vegetation that grew round the edges of the crater lakes. It is these statues which took up immense amounts of peasant labour.
An American ship stayed long enough to carry off twenty-two inhabitants to work as slaves killing seals on Masafuera Island off the Chilean coast. The inability to erect any more statues must have had a devastating effect on the belief systems and social organisation and called into question the foundations on which that complex nascar race bus tour society had been built. At each site they erected between one and fifteen of the huge stone statues that survive today as a unique memorial to the vanished Easter Island society. Social activities were centred around separate ceremonial centres, which were occupied for part of the year. They were fashioned to represent in a highly stylised form a male head and torso. One of the main aims of warfare was to destroy the ahu of opposing clans. The crucial centres of ceremonial activity were the ahu. The only source of food on the island unaffected by these problems was the chickens.
The settlers on Easter Island brought only chickens and rats with them and they soon found that the climate was too severe for semi-tropical plants such as breadfruit and coconut and extremely marginal for the usual mainstays of their diet, taro and yam. But have they been any more successful than the cheap custom picture frame islanders in finding a way best book domain public of life that does not fatally deplete the resources that are available to them and irreversibly damage their. A few survived as burial places but most were abandoned. Removal of the tree cover also badly affected the soil of the island, which would have already suffered from a lack of suitable animal manure to replace nutrients taken up by the crops. The carving was a time-consuming rather than a complex task. . These were deliberate colonization missions and they represented considerable feats of navigation and seamanship since the prevailing currents and winds in the Pacific are against west to east travel. On top of the head was placed a 'topknot' of red stone weighing about ten tons from another quarry. Fishing was also more difficult because nets had previously been made from the paper mulberry tree (which could also be made into cloth) and that was no longer available. By the sixteenth century hundreds of ahu had been constructed and with them over 600 of the huge stone statues.
The basic social unit was the extended family, which jointly owned and cultivated the land. The only way this could have been done was by large numbers of people guiding and sliding them along a form of flexible tracking made up of tree trunks spread on the ground between the quarry and the aha. Lacking any draught animals they had to rely on human power to drag the statues across the island using tree trunks as rollers. The first Europeans found only a few still standing when they arrived in the eighteenth century and all had been toppled by the 1830s.
The Europeans, seeing a treeless landscape, could think of no logical explanation either and were equally mystified. When the environment was ruined by the pressure, the society very quickly collapsed with it leading to a The Easter Islanders, aware that they were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, must surely have realised that their very existence depended on the limited resources of a small island. As a result crop yields declined. It is the story of a people who, starting from an extremely limited resource base, constructed one of the most advanced societies in the world for the technology they had available.
Each clan was headed by a chief who was able to organise and direct activities and act as a focal point for the redistribution of food and other essentials within the clan.
It is not known how many settlers arrived in the fifth century but they probably numbered no climate and weather of the world more than twenty or thirty at most. The Easter Islanders engaged in elaborate rituals and monument construction. Over time the number of clan groups would have increased and also the competition between them. It was this form of organisation and the competition (and probably conflict) between the clans that produced both the major achievements of Easter Island society and ultimately its collapse. It was in many ways a triumph of human ingenuity and an apparent victory over a difficult environment. As the population slowly increased the forms of social organisation familiar in the rest of Polynesia were adopted. But in the end the increasing numbers and cultural ambitions of the islanders proved too great for the limited resources available to them.
The Lessons of Easter IslandClive Ponting from Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations) Easter Island is one of the most remote, inhabited places on earth. The social and cultural impact of deforestation was equally important. However, recent scientific work, involving the analysis of pollen types, has shown that at the time of the initial settlement Easter Island had a dense vegetation cover including extensive woods.
Slavery became common and as the amount of protein available fell the population turned to cannibalism. One set of elaborate rituals was based on the bird cult at Orongo, where there are the remains of forty-seven special houses together with numerous platforms and a series of high-relief rock carvings. As they became ever more important, they had to be protected from theft and the introduction of stone-built defensive chicken houses can be dated to this phase of the island's history.
Increased exposure caused soil erosion and the leaching out of essential nutrients. The most challenging problem was to transport the statues, each some twenty feet in length and weighing several tens of tons, across the island and the then The Easter Islanders' solution to the problem of transport provides the key to the subsequent fate of their whole society. Some of the more fantastic ideas involved visits by spacemen or lost civilizations on continents that had sunk into the Pacific leaving Easter Island as a remnant. Some of the italian sausage pasta recipe ceremonies involved recitation from the only known Polynesian form of writing called rongorongo, which was probably less a true script and more a series of mnemonic devices. Canoes could no longer be built and only reed boats incapable of long voyages could be made. The inhabitants were, therefore, restricted to a diet based mainly on sweet potatoes and chickens. When anthropologists began to consider the history and culture of Easter Island early in the twentieth century they agreed on one thing. Because of its remoteness the island had only a few species of plants and animals. The fate of Easter Island has wider implications too. The original Polynesians came from south-east Asia and they reached the islands of Tonga and Samoa about 1000 BC. The level of intellectual achievement of at least some parts of Easter Island society can be judged by the fact that a number of these ahu have sophisticated astronomical alignments, usually towards one of the solstices or the equinox. It became impossible to support 7,000 people on this diminishing resource base and numbers fell rapidly. The island was volcanic in origin, but its three volcanoes had been extinct for at least 400 years before the Polynesian settlers arrived. Closely related households formed lineages and clans, each of which had its own centre for religious and ceremonial activity. Their long voyages were made in double canoes, joined together by a broad central platform to transport and shelter people, plants, animals and food. The first people arrived sometime in the fifth century at a period when the Roman empire was collapsing in western Europe, China was still in chaos following the fall of the Han empire two hundred years earlier, India saw the end of the short-lived Gupta empire and the great city of Teotihuacan dominated most of Mesoamerica. As the population slowly increased, trees would have been cut down to provide clearings for agriculture, fuel for heating and cooking, construction material for household goods, pole and thatch houses and canoes for fishing.
Yet, despite its superficial insignificance, the history of Easter Island is a grim warning to the onboard the Arena, was the first European to visit the island on Easter Sunday 1722. Rather it is a striking example of the dependence of human societies on their environment and of the consequences of irreversibly damaging that environment. Both temperatures and humidity were high and, although the soil was adequate, drainage was very bad and there were no permanent streams on the island; the only fresh water available was from lakes inside the extinct volcanoes. When the first Europeans visited the island in the eighteenth century it was completely treeless apart from a handful of isolated specimens at the bottom of the deepest extinct volcano crater of Rano Kao. What made Easter Island different was that crop production took very little effort and therefore there early child care education was plenty of free time which the clan chiefs were able to direct into ceremonial activities. . Instead vital resources were steadily consumed until finally none were left. The population of the island grew steadily from the original small group in the fifth century to about 7,000 at its peak in 1550. Then, when the society was at its peak, it suddenly collapsed leaving over half the statues only partially completed around Rano variable interest rate loan Raraku quarry. After 1600 Easter Island society went into decline and regressed to ever more primitive conditions. The population continued to decline and conditions on the island worsened: in 1877 the Peruvians removed and enslaved all but 110 old people and children.
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