Head to head

摘要

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is a perennial favourite of scholars and the media because of its numerous giant stone figures and supposed mysteries. Most of these enigmas - including the origins of the statues and the denuded landscape - have been solved in recent decades through painstaking work by archaeologists, anthropologists, environmentalists, linguists and geneticists. A consensus view has emerged, summarized in Easter Island, Earth Island (Thames and Hudson; 1992) by botanist John Flenley and myself, that the island was deforested by its inhabitants. They cleared the land for crops and used timber for the transport and erection of ever more statues, with war the end result. In The Statues That Walked, archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo present a different picture, portraying the islanders as environmentally sensitive and peace-loving until Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century. But some recent publications don't support their hypothesis.