Concluding thoughts Part 2 - The Society

So now I will summarize my thoughts about what it was that pushed the society into complete demographic collapse. As I have argued in my blog, I don’t find the ecocide argument that convincing and have instead looked for other alternatives, most notably the argument that European contact was what really caused the population to rapidly decline.

The argument that places the degradation of the environment on Easter as the cause for the collapse of the society ‘ecocide’ argues that the islanders were dependent on the forests for numerous resources, not only for food but also the wood provided material for canoes used to fish, ropes and logs to transport the great stone statues and so on (Diamond 2005). Therefore once the forests became scarce the islanders ran out of resources and Easter exceeded it’s carrying capacity, causing the society to pushed into famine, internal strife and civil war, ultimately resulting in collapse.

 As mentioned previously Hunt & Lipo’s (2009) paper observes that the only sharpest and sustained population decline on the island occurs long after the greatest period of deforestation, but more notably directly after European contact, where it very sharply drops. This gap of several hundred years between deforestation and demographic collapse made the ecocide argument unconvincing for me on its own, but also important was, as I mentioned in ‘Part 1’, the fact that the islanders showed the ability to adapt to their degrading environment.

I therefore looked to the other major argument, that European contact was the cause for the collapse of the society on Easter. The main evidence for this I suggest is Hunt & Lipo’s (2009) observation about the only sustained population decline occurring after European contact. Indeed, this is something you would expect, with the well documented effect of Old World diseases wiping out New World populations upon contact. Furthermore, the main evidence used by other writers to display periods of warfare (obsidian points) appears to actually become most common after European contact in the 18^th century.

Additionally, Bahn (1997) documents frequent visits in the 18^th and 19^th century by Europeans on the island, a number of which involving abduction and murder (also to note is that a great amount of raids would have gone undocumented). Bahn (1997) estimated that around 1000 to 1400 natives were deported by slave raiders between 1862 and 1863, which would have been devastating to such a small island.

Finally, one key piece of evidence used to describe civil warfare that tore the island apart following the deterioration of the forests are oral traditions, are notoriously unreliable (Rainbird 2002), being transcribed by European missionaries who would likely want to portray the islanders as savages needing the Europeans to save them and turn them to civilization (and Christianity). Additionally, despite the dearth of oral traditions describing conflict placed before European contact, there are almost none that describe the traumatic experiences the islanders faced after contact, involving repeated slave raids, killings and other such atrocities (Rainbird 2002), again making the issue of bias clear.

I therefore find the argument that European contact was the cause of population collapse a more compelling one, mostly due to the observation that evidence for warfare is most prolific at this point and that the society on Easter increases in size right up to European contact and then very sharply declines. Furthermore, the other main source of evidence for warfare, oral traditions, are very dubious sources of information with the question of bias being significant, making the counter argument a relatively weak one.