A bit of geography!

As I will be talking about Easter Island in the following blog posts, I suppose it is necessary, as a Geographer, to give an overview of the island's geography.

Easter Island, as mentioned previously, is a very remote island located in the south eastern Pacific Ocean many thousands of miles from any other landmasses (2300 miles from Chile, 1300 miles from Pitcairn Island) (Diamond 2005). The island is located at a latitude of 27 degrees south in the subtropics. This subtropical location gives it a mild climate but interestingly as all other Polynesian settlements lay much closer to the equator, Easter is relatively cool in comparison. The weather on the climate involves relatively strong winds but a very small amount of rainfall at around just 50 inches per year (Diamond 2005). This rainfall percolates very quickly into the soil of the island due to it's volcanic nature, cutting down freshwater supplies significantly, as shown by the island's one intermittent stream (Flenley and Bahn 2003).

Easter Island - Middle of nowhere!

Why is this important?

Even if you didn't ask, I feel like I should probably tell you anyway. The isolation of the island made life difficult for the islanders in two important ways. Not only did it make communication with other Polynesian colonies difficult but it also made it relatively deficient in biota:

• Flenley (1993) reports only 48 plant taxa for the island, fourteen of which were introduced by Polynesians 
• Few if any indigenous terrestrial vertebrates with just two lizard species being native to the island (Klemmer and Zizka, 1993 cited in Hunt 2007)
• Steadman et. al. (1994 cited in Hunt 2007) report just 25 seabird species 
• Diamond (2005) documents just 127 species of fish compared to over 1000 species at Fiji 

Similarly, the subtropical location of the island brings a lot of negatives for the colonists. As all other Polynesian colonies were far closer to the equator, many crops they brought over to Easter grew poorly there, such as coconuts (Diamond 2005) or breadfruits (Hunt 2007). Furthermore, this cooler climate meant the ocean surrounding the island could not support coral reefs as other Polynesian islands could, greatly reducing the amount of fish and shellfish available to them. 

Finally, the relatively low amount of rainfall has obvious implications, as the islanders would have had to put a considerable amount of effort into obtaining freshwater with such a limited supply. As Hunt (2007:486) comments, not only was the rainfall limited but it could also "fluctuate dramatically" and "serious droughts could have been a significant problem" due to the low rainfall and excessive drainage of Easter's soils. Additionally, strong and salty winds would have had a devastating impact on agriculture (Hunt 2007) as well as causing breadfruits that could grow to drop before they were ripe (Diamond 2005).

From this overview we can see that the Polynesians that settled on Easter would have had a comparatively hard time surviving there than on many of the other islands in the south Pacific. Not only were resources relatively limited, the weather was against them, they had little ability to remain in contact with other islands and many crops and foods they brought to the island were ill suited to it's climate. However it is clear, purely by the fact that the islanders were around for many hundreds of years to follow, that they could adapt to these problems - to an extent, at least.