"A tiny bleak island in the Pacific, buffeted by wind..." "On the barren slopes of an extinct volcano are hundreds of mighty stone statues, remnants of a lost civilization." ""I'm John Rhys-Davies." "Join me as we probe the secrets of Easter Island, next on Archaeology."" "The local people call it Rapa Nui." "It is one of the loneliest spots on the planet:" "2000 miles west of South America and 1600 east of the nearest Pacific island." "Just 15 miles long, Easter has rocky soils, few trees and limited water sources." "Too far south of the equator to be a tropical paradise," "Easter Island winters are windy, wet, and cold." "How, then... and why..." "did the ancient islanders create nearly 900 mighty statues, some weighing up to 80 metric tons?" "Their achievement..." "in so stark a setting... has challenged and bewildered countless scholars, explorers, and writers." "The first European to land was the Dutchman Jacob Rogeveen in 1722 on Easter Sunday, giving the island its name." "He reported that the islanders worshipped in front of tall, strange statues." "Later visitors left conflicting reports, mostly because their stays were short and superficial." "In 1774, the English explorer Captain Cook found many statues toppled and broken, but others still standing on their ceremonial platforms, or ahu." "He noted plantations of bananas, sugar cane and sweet potatoes, and a few leaky canoes, and even though the islanders were friendly, few women were in sight..." "they seemed to be hiding." "In the last century, slave raiders from Peru decimated the population." "By the early 1970's, the islanders sole occupation was herding sheep." "The visitors were a rarity." "Today, all that has changed." "Twice a week, a 747 loaded with tourists lands here, at the islands only town, called Hangaroa." "The islanders now depend ecomically on promoting the powerful aura of mystery." "Surrounding the stones and the many theories and myths that have sprung up to explain them, the islanders have their own traditions... that the stones were moved by a supernatural source of power called mana." "Many islanders still believe the statues wee moved by mana, a supernatural power, otherwise how could they have done it?" "We think the statues walked by themselves to the ahu sites, and that's something that shouldn't be forgotten." "Outsiders have suggested equally fantastic ideas, that the statues were blasted out of the rock with the help of alien visitors and extraterrestrial technology." "Another powerful myth grew from Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl's celebrated Kon-Tiki raft voyage in 1947." "Through this heroic exploit," "Heyerdahl hoped to prove that the islands of the Pacific were colonized from the high civilizations of South America, such as the Incas." "The implication was that the native Polynesians weren't capable of developing an elaborate culture by themselves." "But there was almost no solid evidence to back up Heyerdahls theory or its implicitly racist overtones." "Recently a more subtle myth has grown up around the statues... that the builders wrecked their own environment and civilization in a process disturbingly similar to some modern scenarios of environmental catastrophe." ""Few monuments in the ancient world have provoked so many bizarre and conflicting theories." "Even level-headed archaeologists disagree about the real story behind the enigmatic statues of Easter Island." "Should we view the statues as a triumph of engineering brilliance, the handiwork or a resourceful and enterprising people?" "Or as the irrational products of a culture that indulged in an orgy of environmental destruction?" "Can science penetrate through the myths of Easter Island, and tell us what really happened?"" "It all began with an epic voyage, very different to the one envisaged by Thor Heyerdahl." "Instead of originating in South America, as Heyerdahl believed, we now know that the ancestors of all Pacific islanders came from southeast Asia." "Their great voyages of migration began at least 3,500 years ago." "Archaeologists have documented the ebb and flow of human movement as the first Polynesians explored and settled the islands of the Pacific." "The navigators of traditional voyaging canoes developed extraordinary skills for finding their way among the islands." "When out of sight of land, they steered by the stars, and their ability to read ocean swells, clouds, and the appearance of birds." "But could anyone have planned a voyage to Easter Island?" "It was extraordinarily difficult to reach." "In fact, once people arrived... perhaps a single boat-load around 400 AD... the island appears to have remained totally isolated until the Dutch came in 1722." "So the original discovery was probably an accident." "Those first colonizers found themselves in a very different place from the other Pacific islands." "Zoologist David Steadman has studied their impact on the islands Flora and Fauna." ""In most parts of Polynesia, there were people, well there were islands within a hundred miles or a couple hundred miles and these people were great voyagers." "So they were communicating back and forth." "You could trade plant and animal stocks and all these resources were a little bit interchangeable, if not a lot interchangeable elsewhere in Polynesia." "Easter Island was so isolated." "Once people got there, there's very little, perhaps no, further contact with other people." "So, what you have is what you have and once you lose something, you don't have the opportunity of sailing to a nearby island to replenish your stocks." "So the isolation is a major factor on Easter Island." "Another big factor is Easter Island is farther south that the tropical islands of Polynesia, so some of the food crops that the Polynesians typically would grow and eat, wouldn't grow on Easter Island." "So, the agricultural resources, right from the beginning, are stressed." "Another thing about Easter Island that puts it at a disadvantage is how rugged it is." "Its very windy - most of the coastline is cliffs." "So it's hard to get a canoe out to even go fishing."" "Yet this simple existence gave rise to the astonishing statue cult." "How did it happen?" "A volcanic crater known as Rano Raraku provided the quarry for most of the islands great statues." "No less than 397 of them are still lying here in various stages of manufacture." "Several explorers have probed the quarry." "But the first systematic study of Easter Islands statues began in 1982 and continues today." "It is the work of UCLA archaeologist" "Jo Anne Van Tilburg and her Chilean collaborators." ""Easter Island and the Rapa Nui people produced a Neolithic culture." "That means they used stone tools, and they used stone tools to cut these statues." "They basically roughed out rectangular blocks."" ""And then, under the direction of master carvers, added details mostly of the hands and face first, and added all the features that they wanted the statues to possess, and then undercut the rectangular block," "braced it in place, and then moved it out of the quarry."" ""When the Rapa Nui people discovered and settled this island, it was relatively well forested, not lavishly, but certainly lushly forested." "There was a palm tree here"" ""that's very useful." "And they could use that palm tree and the wood of it for levers and rollers in statue transporting and construction." "There were also other types of trees and shrubs here that the fiber from those trees could be used to make good stout ropes." "And so they used basically natural products that were already here on the island."" ""But the tools the carvers used were only part of the mystery." "How, exactly, did the islanders move the statues from the quarry to the sacred platforms... or ahu... which they built all over the island?" "Van Tilburg decided to investigate the different theories with the aid of a computer."" ""In order to define the average Easter Island sculpture, we first took measurements and descriptions of about 480 statues." "We then did a statistical analysis to arrive at the average form, and average size and weight." "We then searched the whole island for the statue that best fit that description." "And these statues at Ahu Akivi, particularly the first one, best defines the average statue."" "The average statue they found here is four meters tall and weighs thirteen and a half metric tons." ""Our goal here at Ahu Akivi with this average statue was to try to understand two things:" "One, a possible transport method for moving this size statue, and secondly, to get some insight into the Rapa Nui chiefdom that was able to accomplish this task." "In other words, we wanted to know how many people were involved, how much food they ate, and how much land they would have needed to control to produce that food." "So we were looking at both politics and resources, as well as transportation technology."" "Back at the University of California," "Van Tilburg used her field data to recreate the average statue inside the computer." "First, she converted the measurements of the statue into a scale model." "With the help of the computer image and scale models, she tested different ways of transporting the stones." "The simplest turned out to be this one... the statue lies face up on a simple sledge made of two wooden beams, and hauled on rollers." "But just how much effort would it have taken to transport the statue like this from the quarry to the Ahu Akivi site, over nine miles of uneven, rocky terrain?" "To find out, Dr. Zvi Schiller of the robotics lab of UCLA took the original survey map, then digitized the contours of the island landscape." "The idea was to figure out the best route from the quarry to the ahu where the statue was finally erected." ""To compute the energy optimal path, what we did first was to compute or to calculate the energy that it would have taken to move the statue along every grid segment on that grid that we first entered into the computer." "The energy, then, is calculated by the force that is required to push the statue and that segment times the distance along that segment." "The force is a function of the weight of the statue, the coefficient of friction that we estimated for that mode of locomotion and the slope of the terrain at that point." "Given this data for every grid along that terrain, we then use standard search techniques to find the optimal path." "And I believe from my..." "engineering standpoint this is the optimum, and that's the way..." "the best way to mush... to move the statue from the quarry to the site." "Now if the Rapa Nui people did not choose that path, they should have."" "This optimal route would have required 70 laborers to push the statue." "Schiller estimates that the job would have taken four and a half days." "Two things really surprised me." ""When we looked at our computerized study." "The first was the relatively small amount of wood it took in order to accomplish the task of moving the statue from Rano Raraku to Ahu Akivi." "The other thing that somewhat stunned me was the number of days we were dealing with." "At best, they could have moved that statue in four and a half days." "The other model showed seven days." "That's really a relatively short period of time."" ""At its best, archaeology tells us as much about people as it does about things." "And I think, the significance of this research is that it tells us about the size of the Rapa Nui chiefdom, the number of people involved, the number of resources they would have needed, the amount of food required" "to accomplish this megalithic task." "I think were learning as much about the society as we are about the methods the society used to move the sculpture."" "But not all the statues were average." "There are some 'monsters' at least 65 feet long at the quarry site." "The scale and manpower involved are staggering." "Was there a kind of ritual competition at work, one group trying to outdo the other in producing bigger and better statues?" "And did that competition eventually lead to war and the extinction of Easter Island's great culture?" "Maybe the old legends conceal a clue to what happened." "The old myths of Rapa Nui tell how the first humans arrived." "They say a great chief, Hotu Matua, landed here... a place called Anakena, on the northern coast of the island, and divided the land among his six sons." "So were created the six key divisions of the land, known as mata." "But the word mata has another meaning... eyes... the eyes of the ancestors which imbued the statues with power." "Ancestral power, invested in the six sacred territories of the island, was the most important force on Rapa Nui." "To capture that power, the islanders raised their mighty statues." ""The Rapa Nui people carved so many statues because they used them to assert land ownership." "They used them as vehicles into which the spirits of the gods could be called to insure fertility of the land and also in order to assert their status and rank in this highly competitive society of which they were a part."" "For a time, the resources of land and sea sustained the Rapa Nui people." "But what happened as the population grew?" "When archaeologists began to survey the ruins of ancient houses and settlements, they discovered a startling fact." "As the statue cult got under way, the number of living sites on the south coast began to multiply." "In just a few centuries, there was a ten-fold increase in the number of sites." "Eventually," "Rapa Nui was crowded with perhaps seven or eight thousand people... all sharing the same landscape... and all needing wood for houses, winter fuel, canoes..." "and for moving statues." "The stage was set for a crisis." "David Steadman has studied the environmental impact." ""You have to keep in mind that, like all Polynesian islands," "Easter Island was divided up into districts." "It might not have been beyond an early Easter Islander to not worry about wiping out the timber in their own district because they might see some timber in the next district and they figure, "well, we're stronger than them"" "or "maybe we can negotiate something" - whether it's peacefully or not." ""Maybe we can score on some wood from that next district."" "Of course, as timber gets scarcer and scarcer, that next district is going to be less and less likely to just give up their timber or trade it or whatever." "The reason why that a reforestation program never really successfully got off the ground on Easter Island... why they never could keep - every district could keep groves of trees going was that the resource became so scarce that people started raiding from district to district" "and the ensuing chaos resulted in the inability to ever reforest the island - ever keep a stock of trees going."" "But Jo Anne Van Tilburg is cautious." ""Now I think we're having another set of myths constructed and this new set of myths has to do with ecology, it has to do with the damage that the Rapa Nui people are believed to have done to their environment." "And I think there's no question there was damage done to the environmental science shows that, but we don't know the extent of it." "We don't know the pulse and change of it over time." "We have many, many questions and I think it's unfair at this stage of research to construct a metaphor for disaster about Rapa Nui and without really having more information." "I think we have to be cautious in our interpretation of the ecological data."" "One thing is certain... the islanders kept on developing new beliefs even after most of the trees were gone and the statues raised." "This is Orongo, overlooking an extinct crater at the southwest end of the island." "Around 1500 AD, a whole new cult took root here" "Each year, selected members of the island clans would swim from Orongo to the islet of Moto Nui nearly a mile out to sea." "Whoever found the first egg of the migratory sea bird, the sooty tern, won the coveted title of birdman... the spiritual leader of the island." "Immense privileges would flown to that man and his family." ""The cult was created, in part, as a response to the Rapa Nui needs to find a new way to deal with an ecological crisis they were faced with." "And it grew out of the statue cult, and it had great similarities in many ways to some of the practices of the statue cult." "But it also is uniquely different." "I think the major reason that the..." "Rapa Nui people moved their ceremonial behavior from ahu sites up here to Orongo and got involved in this incredible cult is because they we're faced with... a really serious crisis in terms of soil depletion, lower levels of crop productivity," "and one of the major concerns they had was the availability of fish." "Because when the birds come to Rapa Nui, they're following schools of tuna, primarily yellow fin." "And, so, the Rapa Nui people were very well aware of that, and I think that as much as their concern was for birds and birds' eggs, they were deeply concerned about the availability of tuna and fish," "which they needed to sustain life..."" "While the birdman cult took over once the great burst of statue-building had ended, the old values weren't totally lost." "Easter Island's final secret is here... at Ahu Akivi." "Chilean archaeologists discovered these statues were raised well after 1600... just a century or less before the first Europeans arrived." "Island legends say this was a time of chaos and bloodshed." "Science tells us nearly all the trees had gone, and there was little food to be had." "Yet one chief managed to transport and erect these seven statues..." "a final triumph, and a challenge to the many myths about Easter Island." ""Rapa Nui is usually described as a sort of scary parable or a metaphor for disaster, and we know that they did make major changes on this island ecologically." "They did damage to the soil, they cut down the trees, they destroyed numbers of bird species, they were hard on the fish and other kinds of resources that they had here." "There was some over-population with time." "There's no question that all those things happened." "But I think its really, really important to think about this place in terms of the adaptations that the Rapa Nui people made to the changes that they were faced with." "They did change the way they lived in many ways." "They developed new technology to grow plants." "And they changed the statue cult." "It adapted and changed over time." "And I think that what these statues represent is not failure." "These statues represent a palpable hope for change." "These people kept looking for a way out." "And I think that if we see anything here we see that." "It's a real hymn to the human spirit."" "It all began with an astonishing stroke of luck - a million-to-one chance landing by that first boat-load, blown to Rapa Nui across thousands of miles to the open Pacific." "The story of their descendants is one of dramatic changes..." "First, prosperity - then shortages of food and fuel - later diseases and slavery inflicted by outsiders - and now, an invasion of tourists." "Throughout it all, the islanders have held on to their culture - a culture so remarkable that westerners cooked up one myth after another to explain it." "But can it survive for another generation?" "And do tourists want to hear the story that science has revealed, or one of the many myths of Easter Island?"