Project Proposal

Project Title – Rapanui and the Obliteration of Isolated Civilizations: Causes, Effects, and Methods of Comprehension 

Word Count: 656 

Rapanui, a tiny grass-covered rock that is more commonly referred to as Easter Island, is the most isolated island in the Pacific Ocean and as of 2022 C.E. houses a population of over 9000 people. Looking backwards to the start of the 19^th century and that number was around 4000, but by the middle of said century it was exactly 110.¹ Just 110 individuals were all that made up the Indigenous Rapanui population, those people that share the name of the island. Unseen by this raw number is that most of the cultural knowledge departed with this population drop as slave traders carried heritage sharers to slave plantation in Peru. This is societal collapse and destruction. The how, why, and aftereffects of this deep destruction will be the focus of this project. As in my writing I will seek to examine how Rapanui’s interaction with the wider world resulted in the near obliteration of the Indigenous island’s culture, not solely in materialistic terms, but in systematic fashions.  

In doing this, a dual challenge will come in my research in the form of the lack of first-hand accounts of the actual Rapanui themselves, with most “primary” sources coming in the form of either explorers or missionaries recordings, and the nature of many of my secondary sources being of technical disciplines other than history. I believe the purpose of my writing being to explore how a civilization can be destroyed will solve the first issue, as the gaps themselves can help speak to areas left empty. The second issue, while requiring extensive work and reading to obtain an adequate understanding, will serve to better my project as it will aid in obtaining a multi-faceted, and directional, view of the island’s societal collapse. 

Accompanying this, contradicting narratives confuse the collapse of Rapanui society. The damage to the island and its inhabitants’ post-contact, namely in the form of the slave raids of the 19^th century and the sheep farms in the 20^th, stands as obviously harmful, but an addendum often accompanies their stating. For the traditional narrative, described as “On Easter Island, the people cut down every tree, perhaps to make fields for agriculture or to erect giant statues to honor their clans. This foolish decision led to a catastrophic collapse, with only a few thousand remaining to witness the first European boats landing on their remote shores in 1722,” has been challenged in more recent years in favor of evidence that points to a stable, if troubled, society that was by no means suffering population decline or societal collapse.² Thus, part of my research will pertain to how much the Western influences truly drove the collapse of the societal structures on the island versus how much pre-contact events were merely accompanied by post-contact ones. 

In contemplating these ideas, it becomes important to ask what worth studying Rapanui has to the larger discipline of history. Besides the more standard historical notions of examining and effectively studying part of the world that lies criminally underdiscussed, which Rapanui and the larger Pacific Islands sphere lies in, there also stands bigger notions connecting Rapanui with ideas of transnationalism. For while more specifically Rapanui in my project stands as a case study of an individual isolated civilization interacting with a wider world, the process of globalization, in both the past and present, has increasingly eroded the walls between the separated and connected. Through this then, this project in its most comprehensive form will add to the tapestry of how said isolated peoples survive, or do not, in transnational world, and how we as historians should study it. 

Bibliography: 

Binghamton University. “Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong.” ScienceDaily, 13 July 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210713090153.htm>.  

DiNapoli, R.J., Crema, E.R., Lipo, C.P. et al. “Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).” Nat Commun 12, 3939 (2021). 

Haun, Beverly. Inventing Easter Island (Toronto, 1952), p. 29.