Geography Is Easter Island: The One With The Big Statues

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Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui by the locals, is a far flung island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But while it's very far away and very small, it actually has a fascinating geography and history attached to it. In this episode, Hunter and Geoff dive into how Easter Island was settled in the first place, how it was colonized, and why Chile owns it today.

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
Hey, Jeff, question for youwhen someone says Easter Island or Rapanui,
what thoughts come to mind? Well, for Easter Island, I'm much more
familiar with that. I'm gonna guessRapunui is maybe the indigenous name of the
place, which I actually I'm notsure I knew that prior to you just
saying that. The first thing thatjumped in my mind, I think,

(00:27):
Yeah, I think the first thingthat's going to jump into everybody's mind is
those big statues. Right, It'slike a big it's like a big head,
like, very like pronounced features,eyes like usually like a big nose,
I think, and I think theideas that the indigenous people's at one
point put those up, but I'mactually not sure for what reason. This
This wasn't my episode to research,so I'm I'm here. I'm excited to

(00:49):
learn all about this hunter. Well, so, the I think that you're
right that in the popular imagination,the geographic imagination of Easter Island, it
involves these statues, which are calledmoi. And I think when I think,
particularly in post World War two era, people became very captivated by what

(01:11):
was going on there. You know, there were a lot of US soldiers
in the Polynesian theater during World WarTwo, and so there was a lot
more attention towards Polynesia, and youknow, these images of these giant statues,
which are kind of unlike anything else, really kind of got wrapped up
in this idea that there's a mysteryto unravel about Easter Island, and that

(01:34):
I mean, even when I wasgrowing up, I felt like that was
the way it was. That wasthe narrative that was out there for me,
that there's we don't really know what'sgoing on, and there's these mysteries
of this of this exotic place,and I think the exotic nature of it
was played up. And so Ithink that still kind of is lingering in
a lot of people's minds, particularlyin the United States perhaps about what this
place is all about. I thinkin my head it it rings similar to

(01:59):
maybe Stonehenge in the United Kingdom,where it's like this idea of like this
ancient maybe like mythical or or maybeeven like supernatural sort of ability of people
to cobble together these very ornate andprobably very heavy I don't know for sure,
but they look like the mid rocks, very heavy items, right,

(02:22):
So I think that's that's sort ofthe same. It's talking at that same
string. For me, it's likewhat did they do this? Yeah,
and I think that's that's a reallygood analogy. Stonehenge is much older than
the statues, the moai statues,and I think moai is a word for
statue in the rapin Nui language.But yeah, this idea that how did

(02:42):
why did they do this and howdid they accomplish this? And part of
when you're talking about how did theydo this is this sort of assumption that,
you know, how could these primitivepeople do something like this? You
know, there's this sort of likeinherent kind of kind of looking down upon
groups and and you know, eitherfrom the past or on remote islands as

(03:02):
it's like they couldn't possibly come upwith anything. And so I think that's
an undertone that has been pushed backagainst much more recently. And so that's
you know, we're have to exploresome of these different narratives of this place
throughout this episode. So we're doinggeography is Rapanui or geography is Easter Island,
and first we should talk about whereit is, so you know,

(03:23):
bust out your atlases and turn tothe page about the Pacific Ocean. It's
an extremely isolated, triangle shaped islandin the southeastern part of the Pacific Ocean.
It is about two three hundred andsixty miles from the Chilean coast and
today is a territory of Chile,so it could show up on a map

(03:44):
as being part of Chile, eventhough it's pretty far away. This has
to be and I don't know ifwe actually have this information, but this
has to be one of the mostisolated parts of the world. If you're
looking, if you're looking at amap, which I am right now,
it's there, doesn't seem to beanything nearby. There's not much nearby.
So we did an episode on antipodesa few months ago which was really cool.

(04:05):
Check it out if you haven't heardit. And one of the things
we talked about in that episode weresome of the most isolated places on the
planet, and Easter Island was oneof the places that we talked about.
The closest settled place to Rapanui isthe Pitcerrn Island, which is a territory
of the UK, which has apopulation of about fifty no airport and no

(04:28):
harbor, so there's no direct flightsthere or anything. So yeah, I
think Rapuanui is one of the mostisolated places in the Earth and also one
of the one of the most recentislands to be populated by people. And
by recent we're talking still maybe athousand years, right, I think,
you know, in one of ourepisodes, we tackled sort of the pathway

(04:49):
in order, you know, forpeople to I think in our Hawaii episode,
for the Polynesians to basically spread tothe Polynesian and Micronesian regions and in
general, that all happened relative late, again, probably because all of these
are so isolated and they they're hardto get to. They're hard to get
to today with airplanes, let alone. That's shifts, so right, So

(05:09):
yeah, the Polynesians work their wayfrom South East Asia and to the islands
of the Pacific, and that's aprocess that took maybe a few thousand years.
As we talked about in the Hawaiiepisode, there's some debate as to
when these things, when these placeswere settled. In the case of Rapanui,
and we'll get into this more,it's probably a thousand years ago,

(05:33):
maybe more recently, maybe older,but something like that. Something on the
on the realm of a thousand years. It is pretty small. Also,
it's sixty four square miles and fourteenmiles at its widest point, so using
our denominations of Connecticut, it isone seventy eighth of a Connecticut. Yeah,

(05:54):
I'm impressed that you did that math. I really labored over that math
for a whild as well. Iwasn't sure if I had it correct,
because I've made math errors on theprogram before, but yeah, I reached
way back. I dug deep andI figured that out. The first documented
mention of the name Rapuui came ineighteen sixty three, so apparently it is

(06:16):
what the indigenous people there refer tothemselves and the island as. But apparently
that was kind of a newish thingthat happened in eighteen sixty Rapanui with a
capital R and a separate nui isthe island, and then Rapanui all run
together with just a capital R wouldbe a reference to the people or to
the language as well. Islander mayhave referred what's that. I've heard similar

(06:42):
things about other indigenous peoples around theworld, where I think naming things in
general is kind of a European orbroadly European maybe even Eastern Asian sort of
concept. Right, it's like thisis a place and we're going to name
it after ourselves, and we areof this peat things, and we are
you know this, we are thesepeople. And I've heard this about other
indigenous peoples where I think, youknow, probably in more isolated areas where

(07:06):
there's just they don't really have aname for themselves because why would they need
They don't need it. They don'tneed it. That's who they are,
and that's that They've never needed tocall themselves or their area anything because that's
that's all there is to them.And I think it's just a fascinating anthropological
sort of study of like how namingdevices work and how I mean, there's

(07:28):
probably a whole books written about this, to be sure, there must be.
And I think, as you're pointingout, if you're isolated from other
people, then you don't really haveto refer to your place as anything,
because that's all there is sort of, that's what's known. Then, there
was a period of at least hundredsof years from in which the indigenous people
of Rapa Nui were not connected toother parts of the world. There were

(07:50):
certainly they had their legends and thestories of having coming over on ships from
other places in the Pacific. Islandersmay have referred to the island as the
navel of the world or maybe possiblyjust you know, of course in the
Rapanui language, or the land,perhaps because you know that was specific enough,

(08:11):
right, like this is the landand everything else is water. Right.
The current population there in Rapanui isabout eight thousand people, about half
of which are indigenous Rapanui, andthe only town on the island is called
Honga Roa, which means Wide Bay, and it's where most of the population
lives. So it's I've heard itreferred to even as a town, because

(08:35):
a city. It could maybe it'sa city, you know, four thousand
people, what does that make it. It's probably a city, but it's
it's not super developed compared to maybeother places in like Hawaii for example.
Yeah. Well, you know,if we had a US context onto this
for my days as a city planner, an urbanized area as anything larger than
twenty five hundred people. So thiswould be considered if all eight thousand of

(08:58):
those people, or let's see,at least twenty five hundred of them live
inside Hongaroa. That would be anurban area as far as the US census
is concerned, right, So nota US territory, but we can apply
the standards of the country we're broadcastingfrom and suggest that it's somewhat of an
urban area. So how did howdid this island form? A few episodes

(09:20):
ago, when we're talking about Hawaii, we talked about how Hawaii was formed
by a hotspot, which is volcanicactivity that's happening on the ocean floor in
the middle of a plate. Andso this similar thing for Rapanui. Three
distinct volcanic eruptions on the Nasca tectonicplate formed an underground underwater mountain range,
of which Easter Island is the highestpoint. So there's an underwater mountain range

(09:45):
around Easter Island. This when didthis happen? A while ago? Like
maybe a couple million years ago,maybe more recently who can sell? Who
can tell? The three volcanoes onthe island have been extinct for apparently some
ten thousand years. And there's alsodotting the landscape. There these satellite cones

(10:05):
which are remant you back to thevolcanic activity. And so it's got this
very kind of undulating landscape, thissort of very interesting landscape. There are
no rivers or streams on Rapanui,no permanent ones interesting, which is inconvenient
right for people who want fresh water. Apparently this is because the porous volcanic

(10:31):
soil quickly absorbs the rain and doesn'tallow for surface runoff. There are underground
aquifers there that collect groundwater that willdischarge above the ground if the ground is
properly saturated, if the saturation isreached. It has two lakes, at
least two lakes, but they're difficultto access, and I think at least
one of them may be mostly drythese days, So that wasn't people weren't

(10:54):
able to depend upon that necessarily fora steady supply of water. Are Polynesians
first arrived in Easter Island between maybeeight hundred and eleven hundred, so,
and I've read if you read aboutthis, there's all kinds of speculation what
it could be. Some have ita little earlier, some suggest it's a

(11:15):
little later, but most of whatI read suggests somewhere between eight hundred and
eleven hundred, which is probably afterPolynesians first arrived to Hawaii. So that's
why. It's it's the part ofPolynesia that was last populated and so in
that sense, one of the newerplaces where people have lived on the planet.
Having said that new if is likecould be twelve hundred years right,

(11:39):
and I still think it's I thinkwe mentioned this again. I think in
the Hawaii episode, how you know, Easter Island is pretty isolated, it's
pretty far out there, and yetstill I think they've only been able to
document human habitation to New Zealand.And actually I think we talked about this
in our Indigenous earns, in ourIndigenous our Invasive Species episodes. Yep,

(12:00):
it took until I think the yeartwelve hundred Common Era before people arrived there,
which is it's just like this reallymind boggling thing that it's just so
much closer than Easter Island is,and yet still the Polynesians managed to make
it so much farther out. Iguess there wasn't a huge desire to maybe
go south. Yeah, I knowthey recognized that it would start to get
cold or something like that, andwe don't want any of that. No,

(12:24):
they're not, they're not assigning upfor that. The settlers of Easter
Island arrived sort of like the onesin Hawaii, on these dual hulled sea
canoes, and they brought with themlike crops, plants, a few animals
perhaps, and this is the waythat Polynesians would travel from place to place.
When they arrived someplace new, theycould bring some of those things with

(12:46):
them and establish a new place,establish a new home circle. Around fifteen
hundred, apparently, trips to EasterIsland and other places in Polynesia sort of
there used to be sort of roundtrip round trips to La Hawaii and different
things like that. That seems tohave sort of died down, and so

(13:07):
there's a period of isolation that kicksin there at that point, and although
there's this Polynesian culture, it startsto emerge into something very distinct to Rapanui
itself. The peak population there itspeculated, may have been twelve thousand people,
so you know, three times ofwhat's there today, and at that
point, of course, it wouldhave been all Rapuanui. The evidence suggests

(13:31):
that the Rapuanui had some contact withpeople from South America. So if you
think about it, if they've comeas far as Easter Island, which is
the sort of if you make atriangle out of Polynesia. It's the far
southeastern corner. It's just another couplethousand So there was a couple thousand miles
to the closest islands basically where peoplemay have come from. So they're thinking,

(13:56):
maybe, well, well, let'sjust keep going and see what we
can find. And the reason thatthey know that there was contact with South
America is because they've found food remainsin obsidian blades and they've analyzed the food
remains and they've found some foods thatare common to Polynesia, like breadfruit,
but they've also found some starch remainsof sweet potato because nachira, which is

(14:18):
a root crop in the lower elevationsof the Andes. These are all native
to South America and evidence of thesewas found on Rapanui when Europeans first showed
up on the scene. There wassweet potatoes there. So this is a
very interesting thing to note that there'scontact going this few ways and we're there's
somebody that we're going to talk aboutlater in the episode whose name is Thor

(14:41):
hired All, and he speculates thatpeople actually populated Polynesia from South America and
not from Southwest Asia. That's theargument, and so we'll get into that,
because that's pretty controversial and nobody reallybelieves that, but he he was
pretty convinced, and so he spenta lot of his life trying to prove

(15:03):
that point. Interesting. I can'tI can't wait to hear more about that.
I guess when I'm looking at amap of Easter Island, it is
interesting because Easter Island. Just lookingat the map, I'm not actually doing
any measurements here, but it doeslook to be closer to let's say Chile,
rather than let's say Hawaii or someof the other like bigger islands inside

(15:24):
Polynesias such as New Zealand. Right, it seems to be much closer.
So he doesn't surprise me that there'smaybe some you know, back and forth
a little bit that it's not closed, right, But yeah, the islands
in which people migrated from to getto Easter Island were over two thousand miles
away. There's some debate without that. One of them is Mangareva as part

(15:46):
of French Polynesia, and the otherone suggests from the Marquis's Islands. So
both of those are some two thousandmiles away from Easter Island. The coast
of Chile what is now Chile isnot that much further away. I think
that, you know, in thinkingabout Thors, and we're probably gonna get
into this, but I want toget this thought out right now. Is
that And I could very well bewrong, but Polynesians in general have a

(16:10):
very long history of sailing, culture, of sailing long distances. Right,
this is well established, that's right. And I've not heard of similar things
about the indigenous peoples of South America, certainly on the I mean, I'm
sure they did, right. Theyprobably went fishing, they probably had sailboats
that would go fishing, but theyalso had a lot of land that there
probably wasn't ever that need right togo out and find your own Yeah,

(16:33):
the cultural momentum to go and exploreother islands, which is what had been
happening for hundreds or a couple thousandyears on the case of in the case
of the Polynesians, let's talk alittle bit about the Moi now, because
I think those, as you mentionedat the very beginning, those are some
of the things that people immediately associatewith this island. They're thought to have

(16:56):
been carved between. Again, there'sa debate eleven hundred up until maybe sixteen
hundred Common Era, so maybe carvedover hundreds of years, and the size
and the detail sort of the sizeincreased and the detail increased over time as
well, so it sort of becamemore and more skilled at making these things.

(17:18):
Apparently there are approximately nine hundred orone thousand moai on the island.
A few have been taken to otherplaces. In fact, there's one in
the British Museum that many people ropAnwi want back. They're like, why
should this be in the British MuseumAnd the reason it was there because it
was brought from some explorer as agift to the queen. You know,
I bring you this giant, right. Yeah. They average about thirteen feet

(17:42):
tall, and that's the part that'sabove the ground, because it turns out
there's more underneath the ground, likewhat we think of as the heads.
There's usually a torso involved too that'sburied, and they weigh an average of
fourteen tons. I mean, Ithink you in thinking about the mass sifness
of these structures. Yeah, therewould have to be a lot underground too,

(18:03):
otherwise the thing would just topple overalmost immediately, right because and I'm
going to I'm looking at a pictureof them. These things aren't on flat
ground. They're not They're like onhills and stuff, so like well,
they would absolutely have to dig downthat you can get them to stay up
there are they are on all thesedifferent locations. Some of them are on
platforms, which they are called anew and and this is The idea is

(18:29):
that statues are tied to the religiousbelief systems of the Polynesians who settle there.
And the idea is that these statuesare representing the ancestors of Polynesians,
so departed chiefs or prominent members ofvarious clans are represented this way. And
the idea is that the statues thatoriginally we're not facing the sea, they're

(18:52):
facing inland. In a sense toit's interpreted as a protection. You know
that the ancestors are protecting the peopleof this island, and they don't need
to look out. They're not lookingout at anything, They're looking inward,
which is I think an interesting thing. It turns out that most of the
moi were toppled or fell over,and so the ones that are standing have

(19:15):
been re erected. Oh, thosehave happened since the nineteen fifties, because
that's when archaeologists started showing up thescene in numbers and they decided to well,
let's this is a mystery. Howdid they do this? And so
they figured out how to lift someof them up and put them put some
of them back in place. Andso there's efforts now to work with the

(19:36):
Raphanui to have some of these again. And we'll get into why that may
have happened in a little bit,but that's one of the things that gets
wrapped up. And I think themystery of Easter Island is like, what
are these giant heads? And youknow, I think a lot of people
don't realize that they were all mostlymost seemed to be knocked over, and
that they're they had to be reerected. The statues were all carved without

(20:00):
metal tools, because metal tools wereunknown to Polynesian people before contact with Europeans,
so that's an impressive thing. Theymostly came from one rock quarry called
Ranu Raraku, and there are Ithink hundreds of unfinished moi in that quarry
today, so that's I think probablysomething to behold. A research somewhat recently

(20:22):
out of the Binghamton University, whichis a city state university in New York.
The article published in twenty eighteen suggeststhat the mo i may have been
positioned where fresh water is immediately available, where sometimes fresh water would emerge from
the groundwater would emerge. So thisis pretty recent, and it's like everything

(20:44):
else it seems to be with thisplace is highly debated, but there may
have been sort of a practical reasonfor their location addition to the religious reasons
as well, which is also practical. You remember of that religion. I
mean, just given what you've alreadysaid about how dry the island was,
and then I mean, at leastseems like it would make sense they would

(21:07):
probably need markers for where. Imean, they're humans, right, Humans
need water, even you know indigenouspeople's you know back you know, a
thousand years ago. You know,there might have been less humans, there
might have been you know whatever,there might have been less strain on the
resources, but they still need water. And so if it's true that water
only occurs in certain places you needto find these aquarfers there's not any rivers,
then yeah, I could see thatas being a logical argument. Yeah,

(21:30):
if you're gonna if you're going tohave create a sacred space, right,
you consider a place to be sacredand you're going to congregate there and
spend time there. Maybe it helpsthat there's a water source in nearby.
I think that there's still speculation goingon, but this is a pretty recent
thing, so in other words,there's a lot of research going on and
still trying to interpreting what's going onthere, what you know, what the

(21:52):
past is. There's of course muchmore to say, but you will have
to take a short break before weget into more great hit our first bad
break, and we will be rightback and we're back. It's the Geography

(22:12):
Is Everything podcast. We're talking aboutgeography is Rapanui or Easter Island, and
we were just talking about the historyof the population of the place, how
it was first populated by Polynesians,the population of the Poei, which are
the iconic statues, because that's goingto change things. That changed things really
dramatically. Dutch sailors were exploring thePacific Ocean in hopes of finding Terra Australia's

(22:37):
incognita, which was the Unknown southLand. So this is this belief that
because there was all this land inthe northern hemisphere, there must be some
land in the southern hemisphere balancing itout, so to speak, and that's
Australia, right. So in sixteenknow six, a Dutch ship lands on
the west coast of what is nowcalled Australia. Generally it's the first documented
landing by Europeans. And then itwouldn't be until seventeen seventy that James Cook

(23:02):
lands on the east side of Australia. And so Cook has come up a
lot in some of our episodes becausehe also had a role in Hawaii as
well. In seventeen twenty one,the Dutch West India Company sponsored Dutch explorer
Jacob Rogavine to search for Terra Australiasto go explore Australia, and so on

(23:23):
April fifth, seventeen twenty two,kind of nowhere near Australia, which was
Easter Sunday, Rogavine and his crewcited an uncharted island that they called Easter
Island because it was Easter Sunday.That name is stuck pretty hard. Yeah,
I had no I was always curiousas to why it was called Easter
Island. I mean, obviously there'sthe context of that being a major Christian

(23:47):
holiday right now makes holiday yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, the major Yeah,
that's right. It's a central holiday, the most important in Christianity in
this place in the Middle, ornot in the Middle, but in the
Pacific is named after that holiday.That first visit of Europeans there was pretty

(24:07):
short. I think they were anchoredfor like a week and they only went
on land once. They ended uphaving a skirmish and ended up killing twelve
of the local people. So thatwas pretty aggressive move when you first get
someplace for that to happen. Iguess the seas were rough and the winds
were adverse, and so they didn'tend up spending a lot of time there
and also didn't find that much thatthey thought they could exploit, so they

(24:33):
decided to split. And the nextEuropeans that arrived were fifty years later,
so this would have been in seventeenseventy, and this was a Spanish expedition
headed by Felipe Gonzalez de Haido,and he named the islands San Carlos after
King Carlos the Third. As youmentioned, Europeans loved to name stuff after

(24:53):
people that are trying to curry favorwith Oh, they love it. They
love it. That name I thinkdidn't even stick, like, and they
don't call it that the proving,I mean, the Chileans don't call it
that today. They call it EastLa Pasqual, you know, they call
it Easter Island. So this Spanishexpedition laid claim for Spain and left after

(25:14):
six days and never returned to enforcetheir claims. It was just that that
is so stereotypical Spanish colonizer right there. They had done that. They did
that so much. So they wetalked a little bit about Alaska. They
had claims all up and down Alaskabecause they cited it once and they said,
that's ours. They wrote it down, that's ours, and they never

(25:36):
even really visited and they never wentback, but they still claimed that's very
That's exactly what happened here. Yeah, they're like, wow, this is
ours. But then they didn't reallytell anybody about it or forgot or something
like that. So four years later, in seventeen seventy four, the HMS
Resolution rolls up, captain by JamesCook and arrived on the island and they

(25:59):
had just like I think one hundreddays at sea or something. So I
apparently Cook was pretty sick and spentvery little time on the island. But
again the crew was looking for provisions, didn't find much, and so after
four days set sail for Tahiti.Wow, not a lot of interest in
and to rap Anui at this pointof time, there's just fascinating. Yeah,
we're here, Okay, we've kindof seen it. Let's move on

(26:22):
to the next place. Not reallywhat we're looking for. It's pretty small.
There were very few trees at thatpoint, so the island had largely
deforested, and so there wasn't thereweren't resources that they could take basically,
so they split. That's generally whatwe see like whenever there's like that colonial

(26:45):
aspect, if there's nothing for themto like bring back, there's nothing that
that there's value inherent into, youknow, whatever the society is, then
then they're probably just not going tobe interesting. They're probably just gonna leave
it until at some point when there'ssomething there for them to exploit. Well,
and then there was you know,there's no surface water, so like

(27:06):
even using it for agriculture something likethat seemed pretty unviable. It's pretty isolated,
not near anything else they were interestedin, so yeah, it's sort
of its isolation caused it to besomewhat dismissed by Europeans for a while.
There is no record of what thepeople of Easter Island themselves experience regarding the
rival of Europeans. There's no there'sa written language which I'll get to,

(27:29):
but that's completely undecipherable by people today, like even Roppadelions can can't are unable
to read it. So apparently fromCook's records, from the record of his
expedition, there was some reports thatlocal people were fighting, that some people
were ill, and that many ofthe stone statues seen by the Spanish expedition

(27:51):
four years ago had been knocked over. So this is documentation that we have
to look at with a critical eye. Because they didn't spend much time there,
they may have embell a little bit, so it's not really clear.
But this also sort of feeds thisidea that this where these were clans of
people that were at war with eachother, and this gets fed into the

(28:11):
popular image of the place, andso it's even seen as like I don't
know if it was Jared Diamond orsomebody's talking about potential cannibalism happening and this
kind of thing. And it's thisclassic thing where you encounter some people that
are a little bit different and thenyou just describe like the worst things you
can think of to them. They'resavages, they're uncivilized. I mean,

(28:34):
if I can hazard like a theory, it's probably I mean, there's there's
a part of me it's like,Okay, they've been visited a number of
times by Europeans at this point,which probably was enough time to introduce illnesses,
which probably was caught breaking havoc,which then probably causes strife as people
have to deal with this new thing. And maybe that's a little bit of

(28:55):
what they were seeing. It's sortof what that strife was for twenty years
later. Like that, That's exactlywhat scholars are saying today. I think
that this isn't a case of thisgroup of people who came upon this island
and then you know, used allthe trees to move the moe and then
suddenly found themselves marooned in the middleof the Pacific and started to go to

(29:17):
war with one another. Like thatis this is the old way of looking
at it from a Western perspective,which I think academics today are trying to
get people passed and say, actually, no, this is an example of
how you can live very environmentally likethe people there that lived, and that
the speculation is that population was perhapseven on the increase, not on the
decrease when Europeans showed up, Soit's not an example of you know,

(29:41):
ecological collapse as Jared Diamond would describeit, but rather of amazing survival and
working with the natural environment to createa society. So there's a new spin
from what I think was often talkedabout circa the nineteen fifties. But I
mean still even today, I thinkyou probably can go find some articles online

(30:04):
that have this sort of mystical mysterywhat happened? How come these people used
all their trees? Kind of situationthat was probably there's probably a dozen YouTube
videos out there right now that reallyreally glamed that all up. There probably
are, But luckily there's also someresearch and probably some videos out there too

(30:26):
that suggest that this is not theway to see things. This is probably
not the way it went down.At some point though in the eighteen hundreds,
it does seem to be somewhat documentedthat most or all the MOI had
been toppled over, So whether thatwas by people who were in conflict with
one another, or whether people startedto engage less with those statues, in

(30:51):
other words, that they were focusingon other things. And maybe when contact
with Europeans came up, that completelychanged the worldview of Hawaiians, for example,
talked about that, and so thatmay have also had some kind of
impact on the way they saw themselvesin the world. Again, because there's
no written record of this, andthe oral traditions are mostly lost as well,
we don't really know what happened.The other thing is, and we

(31:15):
talked about whaling because we had anepisode on whales as well recently, and
during the years of heavily whaling theseventeen eighteen hundreds, whaling ships would sometimes
anchor off the shores of Rapanui andpeople would come on to land. So
that was another potential vector for diseaseas well, and an example of how

(31:37):
this very remote enterprise of whaling,you know that this island came into a
play with that. So things areabout to get worse here in the history
of Rapanui in the eighteen sixties,because between eighteen sixty two and eighteen sixty
six Peruvians conducted a series of violentraids on Rapanui and captured and enslaved like

(31:59):
half the population and brought them backto Peru. Now, the interesting thing
is that Peru had abolished slavery ineighteen fifty, So I'm thinking, what's
going on here. And obviously they'relike, well, we can take these
people because that wasn't part of thatsituation, and so they at one point
can say they eliminated slavery and thenthey immediately go and find some other people
who enslave. Right, They're probablywell, And the other part of it,

(32:22):
I was going to say, itwas okay, well, we don't
technically have slavery anymore, just likehow a lot of European countries didn't technically
have slavery anymore. But that doesn'tmean they can't go and find slaves and
sell those slaves to people who dohave slavery. Right, there's that whole
market aspect of it too. I'mnot sure if that's what was happening with
the Peruvians, but what I'm tryingto get at there's a lot of vectors

(32:43):
that people will exploit unless everything isright clamped down, some kind of loophole
almost or something like that. Apparently, many of the Rapanui did not make
did not survive the voyage to themainland of South America. Many more died
when they were there, and itwas quickly brought to the attention of Peru

(33:04):
that they can't do this, andso they attempted to repatriate the people who
had been taken, but only fifteenpeople survived from like fifteen hundred people who
were taken, about half the island. Only fifteen people were repatriated back to
Rapanui, and at that point throughsome of the diseases that those repatriated individuals

(33:24):
and Europeans that had visited the islandcaused a huge smallpox epidemic, and so
the population went down to just afew hundred people from like three thousand or
something. So there was there wasa collapse, but it didn't have anything
necessarily to do with the people onthe island who were managing resources badly.

(33:49):
It had to do with coming tocontact with Europeans and catching European diseases and
having their society almost collapse. Hasn'tcollapsed because there's still people there today,
but it also a lot of themost educated people are the people who were
the religious leaders. Many of themdied, and so a lot of the

(34:10):
knowledge that was wrapped up in thissociety, a lot of that was lost
during this period of time as well. I mean this this is not unfortunately
a unique story, right, thisis something that I mean, we talked
about this countlessly on this podcast,right, and going back to our Hawaii
episode, right, that's a verysimilar story, right. I mean,

(34:31):
this is never there's always that pointwhere it's like, and then the Europeans
arrived and things, you know,and that upended everything, and then you
ask for word a little bit,and then it's like and then everything got
much worse, right right up intoeverything and that it got worse, and
then they sent in the missionaries.Right, So the same thing happened,
and following the period of proving enslavement, Christian missionaries started to arrive from Tahiti.

(34:58):
Apparently there was a permanent Catholic missionestablished there in eighteen sixty six.
And the missionaries, as they didin other places, were pretty pretty antithetical
to the beliefs and traditions of thepeople who already lived there. So they
did away with them as best theycould and tried to supplant their own worldview
with the people there. The missionariesin this case also brought horses to the

(35:23):
island. So today there are aboutthree thousand horses on the island, which
of course would have never been thereotherwise. There's also about a thousand cows,
and apparently the horses aren't wild,but they don't. They're branded because
they're considered to be property now.But there's not any fences necessarily set up

(35:45):
all over the place because they didn'treally need to do that. There's no
place for the horses to go.It is a small enough place so that
there are horses just seemingly wild aroundthe island and if you go there,
you'll run into them, apparently.I mean, yeah, it's it's a
small island, right, you said, sixty four square miles or something like
that, so it's pretty small.Pretty at that point, there's probably not

(36:07):
that you can probably always find themif you want them. It kind of
reminds me, I yeah, itkind of reminds me of the American bison
that are on Catalina off the coastof California, where again, like this
is an animal that was brought thereand at one point I'm not sure what
the current status of them. Atone point they were all owned by I
believe one very prominent family and Ican't remember exactly who it is, but

(36:29):
they brought them there. But again, they weren't I don't think they were
ever fence and in fact, ifyou go there, you can kind of
just stumble upon them and they're justkind of wandering around. But I believe
that at one point they were allowned by somebody. But it's just like,
where are they going to go to? Yeah, no place for them
to escape too, But it isfascinating to think about this really small,

(36:50):
remote island in the middle of thePacific that has these I mean, horses
are pretty big creatures, right,and so that's a pretty small change to
what's going on there. Apparently acensus of the island taken in eighteen seventy
seven enumerated only one hundred and elevenpeople. Wow, So this was an,
you know, an almost complete eradicationof a group of people. In

(37:15):
eighteen eighty three, Chile defeated Peruand Bolivia in the War of the Pacific,
and they were encouraged by Britain tolay sovereignty over Easter island, and
I guess the British didn't want theFrench to take it with the rest of
Prince Polynesia, so they said Chile, maybe maybe you should take over,
and so this happened on September ninth, eighteen eighty eight, where they annexed

(37:36):
the island and made it part ofChilean territory. The document laying claimed of
the territory and this will probably notshock you, was written only in Spanish
and misrepresented to the people of Rapanuilike sign this it means we're friends or
something like that, and so thatbecomes this legal background for being able to
take over this territory. Yeah,doesn't surprise me. Not surprised a Chilean

(38:01):
colonist arrived in Rapanui, only formost to return after a short time because
I guess they didn't take to ittoo much. They didn't find the kind
of landscapes in place that they wereused to at all, and probably the
lack of surface water probably was partof that as well. So Chili was
so disinterested in administering this place thatthey had just laid claim to. They

(38:24):
actually leased the island to an AngloChilean sheep farming company called Williamson Balfour in
Company and they got a twenty fiveyear lease on this, so it was
a company basically running this. Nowyou gotta have to brace yourself for this
one, all right. The nameof the company that they formed to do

(38:44):
this this Williamson, Balfour and Company. The new company was called the Easter
Island Exploitation Company. Wow, that'sjust making no bones about it, right,
that's just yeah. I mean,I'll just call it what it is,
you know. Yeah. And thensubsequently the island became a sheep ranch,
you know, so this is likeshades of New Zealand where today there

(39:05):
are you know, sheep outnumber peopleten to one or something like that.
The sheep industry didn't do so hotapparently, and that eventually fell to the
side. But some stone walls wereconstructed sort of in the English style,
and this is what happened the riseof industrialization for the sheep ranges in the
UK. And then, of coursethe stones were taken largely from ceremonial platforms,

(39:29):
so it was the dismantling of theprevious religious infrastructure for this new capitalist
enterprise. Again, this is notshocking as disappointing as it is to hear
about. It's all very, veryunsurprisingly tragic, and we say that a
lot on this show. Well we'lltry to we'll try to bring it back

(39:52):
on an upswing here when we getto our next segment. But let's take
a short break, our final break, and we'll get back and we'll talk
a little bit more contemporary about whathappened as well. Great, we will
be right back, and we're back. It's the Geography Is Everything podcast.

(40:15):
We're talking about geography is Rapanui orEaster Island, and I wanted to go
over a couple of different things thatgets wrapped up in this mystique of Easter
Island. And we talked about thiscutting down of trees and this idea that
perhaps this was done, you know, for religious reasons, so they could
roll the moi to different places.Whether that was the only or a way

(40:37):
of transporting these statues is debated today. It turns out that a lot of
the trees were cut down, butit's largely for agricultural purposes, right,
and so they needed to create fieldsand so trees were cut down for that
purpose. They needed cooking fuel,so wood was used for that purpose.
Later they may have been used totransport moi, but it's not believed now

(40:59):
necessary that the reason for cutting downthe trees was explicitly to move the statues.
There's another theory that suggests that themaui were the the mo i were
put upright with ropes, so thepulling in different directions to raise this thing
up, and that somehow they wereable to toggle the base of it enough

(41:21):
so that it would basically walk,you know. And there's a book,
one of the books I read aboutthis is called The Statues that Walk,
Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island,and the idea is there were the statues
that walked, and it was reallypeople who were not rolling them so much
as kind of wobbling them along totheir destinations, because you know, these

(41:43):
were pretty heavy. Yeah, Imean, I've I mean, I'm not
trying to suggest that, you know, I have done the same thing as
as the people in Rapunui, butI've definitely moved bookshelves that way before,
where it's like okay, and yousort of walk it to wherever it's going.
Yeah, I mean, I readthe same sort of thing that somebody
suggested that hey, when you're movingstuff in your house or your apartment.

(42:07):
You might not just use one methodto do it. You might do that
shimmy kind of thing for a while, and then you might try to put
something under it and slide it onthe floor or something, and you're just
going to do whatever works. Somaybe there's something like that going on here
as well. There's a written scriptI mentioned before. It's referred to as
Wronggo Wrong Goo. It's a pictorialscript or sort of glyphs, which are

(42:29):
inscribed on wooden tablets. None ofthe tablets remain on the islands because most
of them were taken by missionaries inthe eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies and brought
to other places in the world,and apparently after the period of Peruvian enslaver
era, no further tablets were knownto have been created. So there's no

(42:49):
evidence of this script on any otherPolynesian islands. It doesn't resemble any other
kind of alphabet the date to tothis date, the script has still not
then been deciphered. And of coursethere was people who suggested that the script
only came about after contact with Europeans, because you know, Europeans are bringing
all this knowledge that only they canhave, and so it's impossible to think

(43:14):
that this group of people could havehad their own language. However, they've
done some dating of some of thetablets and found that at least some of
the tablets date back the wood datesback to maybe fifteen hundred, so several
hundred years before Europeans arrived, andthat it wouldn't necessarily be practical to save
wood for a couple hundred years andthen start writing on it. So that
it's largely believed today that this isan independent language that is written and perhaps

(43:39):
the most recent written language in humanhistory is one of the speculations there,
and this is causing people to reallyrethink the way that they're they've positioned this
place and this people that this isnot a primitive group of people by any
means, but a very advanced groupof people that came up with a written

(43:59):
language independently from anything else as well. Anytime people have developed or written language,
I think is definitely a sign ofa certain level of advancement in sort
of your culture, right, becauseit means you're trying to historically in some
capacity preserve things so that they canbe referenced later, which seems like such

(44:22):
a simple concept that we all takefor granted now, but at one point,
no human was doing that, right, There was There was points where
there was no human writing anything down. It was all just oral traditions,
all oral tradition at one point,you know, and you know, we
see what the limits of that are, which is when a society is eliminated,
if there's no written record, thenit becomes very difficult to know what

(44:44):
happened, and especially if that written, any record, written record that remains
is an unknown language, is somethingthat's not been deciphered. There's this idea
I want to raise here at thispoint, since we're on this topic,
and that's called diffusionism, which apparentlyis an idea that stemmed from academic archaeology

(45:04):
but sort of probably one hundred yearsago, and there's some Pepeo maybe still
subscribed to this idea. But it'sthe idea that that human innovation is actually
a very rare thing, and sothat most culture came about because of diffusion
and not because of independent development orindividual innovation or something like that. And

(45:27):
so those who believe that tend tosay, well, there was must have
been one place where this happened,and that the culture from the world spreads
from this one particular place, andthat, of course lends itself to a
pretty xenophobic and downright racist perspective thatthese people couldn't have come up with this
concept or this idea or this invention. It must have come from someplace else,

(45:52):
and that usually gets tracked to somewhereon the Eurasian continent. So,
I mean, yeah, right,and so's that's the that's the sort of
bias that, well, how couldanybody else do this? It must be
from from our civilization. So oneof the people who kind of bought into
that idea was a guy named Thorthor hired All. Jeff, you've ever

(46:14):
heard of thor hired All before?Only as far as the first part of
this, I said, when wefirst started talking about him a little bit.
So like fifty minutes ago, youhad not heard of thor hired All.
Fifty minutes ago, I had notheard of him. I've encountered this
person before, not like in person, but like the name and in the

(46:36):
in the subcultures of like tacky tikatiki and stuff like that, Polynesian bars
and things like that, tiki bars. This person sort of has this high
status, and he was a Norwegianadventurer who developed a very strong interest in
Polynesia and South America, and hestudied zoology and geography at the University of
Oslo. And so one of hisbig theories was that at the Polynesia and

(47:01):
Easter Island were actually populated first bypeople from South America. And to believe
that is to ignore an enormous amountof archaeological evidence that says that that's not
the case. In fact, there'svery little evidence to suggest that is the
case. And the idea that hiredDoll had was that people from Southwest Asia,

(47:25):
you know what we call the MiddleEast, somehow made their way across
the Atlantic to South America and thenmade their way to Easter Island. And
apparently there's some recordings of the expeditionof Captain Cook and others that said that
when they arrived there they saw lightskinned people with beards and things like that.

(47:45):
And so that was Hired All justlatched onto that. It's like,
based on this report, there musthave been people who came from someplace else.
How else could they have come upwith all this stuff? And so
he set out to prove that thiscould have happened. The way he did
that was the other thing is thatit involves believing that Polynesians couldn't have navigated

(48:07):
the oceans, that they were capablenavigating thousands of miles, which there's clear
evidence to suggest that that is,Like, there's no dispute about that.
Nobody else is really disputing that.Very few people dispute that. But he
thought that it's possible that somebody,because the prevailing winds go against you,

(48:28):
are going towards the west. Sothe idea was, well, they couldn't
have navigated into the wind that wouldhave been impossible. And so what he
did is he built that. Hefigured that there were rafts, some kind
of rafts that people in South Americamade and drifted out into the Pacific,
and that's how it was populated.And so he built a balsa wood raft

(48:50):
with some other Norwegians using only thetools that would have been available to people
of that era, so not anysteel tools or anything like that, and
they launched it and they floated fivethousand miles into Polynesia on this raft.
The name of the raft was theKantiki, So this is the Kantiki expedition.

(49:12):
It happened in nineteen forty seven.I don't know if you ever heard
of kantiki before. Maybe not.I've heard of peky bars, tiki bars.
Right. Yeah, that's again wherethis sort of cartoonish view of Polynesian
culture gets mimicked, and you know, highered all sort of the cult of
thor hired All sort of feeds intothat as well. So his balsewood raft

(49:34):
floated five thousand miles, so it'syou know, it's just floating, and
they're still using contemporary tools to navigate, however, which the Polynesians didn't have,
right, And so Kantiki is thename of a book as well,
is translated into seventy languages. Right, So this is the word that's getting
out about this place in the nineteenforties and nineteen fifties. Is thor Hi's

(49:58):
version of what happened here contique.He never made it to Easter Island,
they floated north of that, buthired All subsequently went back went to Easter
Island with some other with some archaeologists. He wasn an archaeologist himself, and
he spent seven months trying to learnabout the place and trying to figure out
how these statues were used. Andhow they were erected, and you know,

(50:19):
he and a group of people managedusing you know, traditional ropes and
things like that, managed to geta few of them up and upstanding.
And so he wrote another book Imentioned before, Akuaku about Easter Island,
and this became kind of what peopleknew about, and this became the truth
of Easter Island is what hired Allwas writing about. But again, even

(50:44):
at the time, most people didn'tbelieve in his perspectives, and today increasing
overwhelmingly people are like, now thisis this is not how this went down.
Yeah, I mean we talked aboutthis when we briefly mentioned this earlier
in the episode, and I'm like, there's just so much evidence that Polynesians
could and did and you know,went to different islands and populated them over

(51:07):
you know, hundreds of years.Right. This is there's cultural artifacts,
there's food from different parts of Polynesiathat have made its way to other parts
of Polynesia. And it's pretty unlikelythat they you know, drifted like that
bread drifted two thousand miles and thenrolled up on Easter Island and then started
propagating itself. It's pretty unlikely.And from a again I'm not an expert

(51:32):
inside the sort of indigenous peoples ofSouth America. But in my knowledge there,
it's not a it's not a seafaringlong long range seafaring civilization is correct.
Certainly, if people lived on thecoast, innovative ways to go fishing
and to travel on the water,but they weren't the Polynesian style ocean canoes,

(51:54):
and they didn't have the knowledge tonavigate without compasses and things like that.
Like the Polynesians figured this out becauseof their incredible ability to read the
stars as part of I think thereason why they're able to do that and
read currents and really subtle things thatthese groups of people became attuned to after
generations and generations. So let's getinto more of the contemporary era, by

(52:19):
which I'm going to say is postWorld War two, and this is the
time that hired Dollars sort of doinghis thing writing about it. The Easter
Island Exploitation Company eventually loses its lease, which was revoked in nineteen fifty three.
The sheep industry collapsed after World WarTwo because it didn't make any sense
to it wasn't practical to have,you know, sheep herds at this remote

(52:40):
location. In nineteen fifty a flatera area was smoothed out and cleared for
a grass airstrip, and in nineteenfifty one the first plane ever landed on
Easter Island. It was an amphibiousCatalina, which is a plane designed in
the thirties and the forties, wasused throughout World War Two, and it

(53:01):
took nineteen hours to fly from Chileon that plane. That's a lot,
so it doesn't fight long today.Now with the planes that they have today,
you can get from Santiago, Chileto Easter Island in five and a
half hours, still a long flight, though still a long flight. And
there's that airport only flies to twodifferent plates. If it only flew to

(53:24):
Santiago, wouldn't even be an internationalairport because it's considered to be Chilean territory.
But it also flies to Tahiti,which is part of French Polynesia.
So that's the two ways that youcan get there. I mean, you
could if you can sail your ownship there, but there's no harbor big
enough to have like a giant cruiseship or anything like that. It's not
to say that won't ever happen,but that's that's not part of what's going

(53:46):
on right now. So the ChileanNavy took over in nineteen fifty three and
Spanish became the official language, andthe rap of Nui language was banned for
a while. So this is sortof assimilation that we see. Another place
is in the America. So suchto take place in autonomy. Movement starts
to develop as the Rapanui become moreknowledgeable of the way the political world works.

(54:10):
In nineteen sixty five, the Rapanuiwere permitted to elect their own mayor,
and then in nineteen sixty six.Remember they became part of Chilean territory
in eighteen eighty eight. It tookuntil nineteen sixty six for the Rapanui to
be granted Chilean citizenship. So thesewere people without without a home. These

(54:30):
were stateless people for eighty years orsomething like that. In the nineteen sixties
there were some laws passed that startedto be a little bit more favorable towards
the native Rapanui. There's no incometax there like there is in other parts
of Chile, free school and healthcare. And then very importantly they passed a
rule that only the Rapanui could ownland on the island along with the Chilean

(54:52):
government, don't get me wrong,but no other individuals could own property there.
So that the idea was to tomake amends for everything that happened before,
not that it could ever be madeup, but that they should at
least give control of this land tothe people who are originally from this place.
Well, I mean not to saythat Easter Island is the same as

(55:15):
Hawaii, but just to bring itback to another similar you know, kind
of you know, Polynesian area.I mean, we've we've all seen what
has happened with Hawaii, where somuch of the land has been now owned
by you know, large corporations orincreasingly, you know, very wealthy people
from not who are not Hawaiian,and the Hawaiian, the native Hawaiians are

(55:37):
being sort of outpriced and sort ofpushed in, and you know they no
longer own land and all this otherkind of stuff. So you can see
that, you know, as beinga very valuable law for the Rapannui.
I mean, I think that there'speople who are trying to end around it
a little bit because some people whoare Rapanui who own the property apparently a
few of them have started to leasethat land to other people, and their

(56:00):
speculation that that could could develop tothe kind of commercial development of like the
resorts and stuff. There are verysmall resorts there, but nothing like what's
on Waikiki or something like that.So you know, the idea is that
didn't want that to happen, butit could potentially still happen now just to
not absolve the United States of anyinterference here, because you know, they

(56:22):
had to play a role somehow thiscountry. In nineteen sixty six, the
United States establishes a base on theisland, which several hundred troops are stationed
there, and I think apparently oneof the things I read was that they're
there to basically patrol the situation withthe French, who are doing testing in
the Pacific of nuclear weapons, andso this is a way to monitor that

(56:45):
situation a little bit. They builta hospital there and during that period of
time, and they paved the airfieldso it became a little bit more modernized
in that way, and a commercialairport was constructed there. So all of
a sudden, there was you couldfly there, I mean, hired all
was there. You couldn't fly therelike he was still taking boats to get

(57:07):
there. The US base, however, was shut down in nineteen seventy when
the socialist leader Savodorolande came to powerin Chile. Of course, he was
subsequently deposed by General Pinochet, wholed a dictatorship in Chile. And I'm
not completely clear on what the relationshipbetween Pinochet and the Rapanui were, but

(57:30):
there may have been some support forthat from that administration for Rapanui, but
it's not really clear to me,so I probably can't say too much about
that. I will say that anotherdevelopment happened in nineteen eighty five, and
this is when NASA announced that itwould launch some of its space shuttles from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa BarbaraCounty, California. So it made this

(57:52):
announcement they're going to do that,and the Mattaveri is the name of the
airport in Easter Island. That runway was lengthened just in case the Space
Shuttle needs to make an emergency landingthere. Interesting, and now moving forward
a little bit, what happened innineteen eighty six, the year after they

(58:13):
announced this, was that the Challengerdisaster occur, very tragic situation, and
NASA decided to scrap any plans tolaunch anything from California and continue to use
the Kennedy Space Center in Florida forall of its launchings and landings of the
Space Shuttle. So there's this scenariothat could have happened where people would have
been in outer space for several weeksor something and then re entered Earth by

(58:36):
landing on Rapanui, which would havebeen a pretty intense transition, I think
for the astronauts to go from outerspace to this very remote area, and
also for the Rapaannui who are nowyou know, they would have been playing
guests to people from space and allthis space equipment. What's going on here?

(58:58):
Yeah. But the other thing isthat the equipment that would have been
brought to Rapanui to accommodate the SpaceShuttle landing there that didn't even make it
there because the decision was reversed soquickly, So things might have played out
differently. The Matveri Airport does takethe crown of the world's most remote airport.
It is oney six hundred and seventeenmiles from Monngareva and French Polynesia.

(59:21):
Although I don't think there are anyflights there. There are now apparently about
twelve flights a week to Rapanui fromSantiago, Chile. Wow, Textee.
Quite a lot, quite a lot, because there's there's some tourism there now
as well. In nineteen ninety six, UNESCO recognized Rapanui as a World Heritage
Site. I don't know if it'sthe Rapanui National Park, which is over

(59:42):
forty percent of the island, orthe entire island itself. And the National
Park is now managed by a localorganization of Rapanui rather than the Chilean Forestry
Department, so there is increased controlof the indigenous people there. In the
past decades, the island apparently hasbeen received being less overall rainfall than it
had previously, but that experienced veryintense rainfall which helped contribute to erosion,

(01:00:09):
and then it would be followed byperiods of drought, and so the heavy
rains are seen as one of thethings that are accelerating the rate of erosion
on the moi themselves. Oh Wow. And then a wildfire that caught that
spread throughout most of the island andare part of the island. In twenty
twenty two, charred some of themoi. So there has been a lot

(01:00:32):
of concern that the moi are beinglost to perhaps amplified by climate change and
this kind of thing. So there'sa lot of concerns about cultural preservation.
Yeah, I mean you have toimagine these So these moi were built hundreds
thousand, maybe a thousand years agoor something like that. Right, that's

(01:00:52):
a long time ago, certainly,Yeah, like six or seven. Maybe
they're also made out of what isprobably like old volcanic rock, which I
know just from like you know,other sort of things that I've read about,
is tends to be much more fragilethan something like you know, you
know, you go into a mountain, like the rock that's sitting inside a

(01:01:13):
mountain for a thousand years, right, it's been condensed rather than like new
volcanic rock or relatively new volcanic kindof rock. So maybe that's that's made.
That's not surprising, No, that'sexactly correct. Volcanic rock from which
the moi are carved are of thatsort of it's a lighter rock because of
volcanic material, and they were ableto carve them by using heavier rock in
order which apparently they would carve themlaying down, and that sometimes there would

(01:01:37):
be torsos involved as well. Andthen the only thing that they finished once
they put them into their place ontotheir pedestals was the eyes. And so
they'd finished carving out the eyes there, and the idea was that the eyes
had to be looking up in aparticular way. And I think there's only
one moi that's been refitted with this, but there used to be coral shells
that were put in place the eyes, so they wouldn't have this sort of

(01:02:00):
uniform color, but there would beeyes that popped out and the eyes looked
to the sky. And so thisis something that archaeologists and anthropologists have been
able to determine. Let me sayjust a couple more things about this.
One is that I was fascinated tolearn that there's a medication that is derived

(01:02:20):
from the bacteria in the soil fromRapaanui that hasn't been found anywhere else on
the planet. The medication is calledrap a miceed. Interesting. I've never
heard about this. I had neverheard about it either. Apparently it's used
after organ transplants help aid in thebody accepting and not rejecting those those organs.

(01:02:42):
That's an pretty amazing medication to likethat has benefited a lot of people
who've gotten organ transplants. It's it'sincredible. It's also apparently used now to
treat some cancers as well, andthat it's more recently been used to delay
aid for those with age related diseases. There's very few side effects apparently associated

(01:03:05):
with the drug, and the popularmedia and media now has speculated that rapamycin
might someday be used widely to extendthe lives of people all over the world,
so that that sort of adds tothis sort of mystique of Easter Island
or Rapanui that you know, thefountain of use kind of situation has been
found there, you know how Imean this, Yeah, this sounds amazing

(01:03:30):
the aspect of this, of thisdrug being here. I mean, it
seems very important, right using organtransplants, maybe potentially cancer or medication,
all this kind of stuff extending thelives of people. I mean it seems
a little bit more commercial of anaspect of it, which you know,
doesn't tend to you know, helpthe local indigenous peoples very much when that
becomes something of value. What Iwould say though, is that this is

(01:03:52):
this seems very analogous to something likethe rainforest, where there's always that common
idea of like, well, don'tchop down the rainforest because there's medicines in
there that we just don't know aboutyet that could go on to then cure
or what have you x y thingslike, yeah, who would have ever
known that there was a potential medicinefor these kinds of things or something that

(01:04:14):
was existing only on Easter Island orRapanui. Well then the colonial mindset,
though, comes back to roost,right, because it's the idea that like,
no, you can't do this anythingto your area here because we might
need something from it also that todistract, right, and so you know
that's what's often been used to talkabout to push back this idea of yeah,

(01:04:35):
all right, maybe there's all kindsof wonderful cures in the rainforest,
but like that's not necessarily our callto make you know that this should be
under the control of people who've beenliving there for generations. So one can
travel to Rapanui today. Apparently innineteen eighty nine there were less than four

(01:04:55):
thousand people who visited, but intwenty nineteen, right, before the pandemic,
there was about one hundred and twentythousand people who visited, and Robin
Nui basically shut down for two anda half years. Like the mayor is
like, you can't send the planeshere anymore. You know, we've been
through this before. We don't wantto bring this disease to our people here,

(01:05:16):
to our residents here, And soit opened up again maybe two and
a half years into the COVID situation. You can spend Chilean pesos or US
dollars or sometimes even euros there.Apparently it's an economy that's largely based on
tourism. As you might imagine,nearly everything from the outside world comes on
planes from Santiago to that island,and it's you know, this is the

(01:05:41):
kind of place that I'm I've beenfascinated with for a long time. I
also want to call it. There'sa couple of really good books here.
A Companion to Easter Island by JamesGrant Peterkin. The Statues that Walk by
Terry Hunt and carl A LiPo aregreat resources for people who want to learn
more about this, And you know, books can sometimes have a lot more
than random websites. Can it turnsout, But it's the kind of thing

(01:06:03):
is like, it would take alot of will to make this particular trip,
because you know, we can onlyvisit so many places in our lives,
and you'd really have to feel apull to this particular area in order
to go there. Apparently, however, there is going to be a total
eclipse sometime in September that will reachlandfall almost nowhere except on Easter Island.

(01:06:26):
So you know that part of thatsubculture of the planet of people who are
you know, trapesing around looking toexperience that, that would be an amazing
place to experience that. But thenyou don't have to question myself, you
know, should I be going toa place like this. I mean,
maybe it should be left for thepeople who are there a little bit more,

(01:06:46):
and maybe my presence there is notgoing to be that helpful. But
having said that, it is aplace that I can understand people would want
to travel to because I think itwould be experiencing something pretty rare to visit
a place like that. You know, we we have we have an episode
coming out not next week, butin a few weeks at some point somewhere

(01:07:09):
on our calendar about you know,basically about your summer vacation. I think
this is going to be a topicthat we we sort of have to address.
Is like, tourism brings a lotof economic benefits for a lot of
different people, but there's also alarge costs there, and there's there's always
that argument to be made of,you know, should I or or should

(01:07:30):
we collectively be visiting this place orthat place? And I think Easter Island
is definitely one of those places thatprobably deserves a more critical eye of Is
that someplace that there should be atourism industry for now? Obviously that's beyond
the scope of sort of what wecan control, but it's just it's a
it's definitely an argument to be madeor a conversation to be had of,
you know, what's the what's thebenefit here and what's actually being lost here?

(01:07:54):
That I look forward to our conversationabout that because we can expand upon
this idea that, yeah, thereare many places, there's very rich places,
very poor places, very in themiddle type of places that are dependent
on tourism now, but that comesat a great cost, and the cost
is usually disproportionately felt by local people. And although there may be some benefits
there. But yeah, that's whatwe can say today about Roba Nui.

(01:08:16):
On our podcast, Great Hunter,tell us where people can find you.
I'm Hunter Showby. I'm a professorof geography at Portland State University. I'm
co author of Portland It's a Culturalatlass and Upper Left Cities, a cultural
atlas of San Francisco, Portland,and Seattle. My co author is David
Bannis. And with you, Jeff, I'm co host of this podcast,
Geography Is Everything. Yeah, myname is Jeff Gibson. You can find

(01:08:41):
me as the co host of thispodcast, but also over on YouTube at
Geography by Jeff, and you cangoogle that. You can go into whatever
you'll find it. If you likedwhat you heard today, please rate and
review us on Apple, podcast,Spotify, x y Z, any other
podcast app, or like and subscribeto us on YouTube. We really appreciate
that. It's really fun to seesort of, you know, those reviews
come in and numbers go up,and it's always good fun stuff. You

(01:09:03):
can also go over to substack Geographyas Everything dot substack dot com to get
this deliver straight into your email box. It's totally free. You just go
over there putting your email and itcomes once a week, and that's basically
all there is to it. Nextweek, Hunter, we are not doing
summer vacation. Okay, that's that'scoming later. But next week we are

(01:09:23):
doing World War One, which willbe very different from this episode. We've
talked about wars and conflicts a loton the podcast, but we haven't focused
exclusively on one before, so thatwill be sort of a new tact.
And you know, it's called aworld war, so there's some serious geographical

(01:09:44):
aspects to that situation, absolutely,and that's what we're gonna focus on.
Obviously, there's gonna be there's there'sa whole history, and there's a lot
of stories get wrapped up into thesereally huge events. But what we're gonna
do is we're gonna try and focuson the geography of it and really sort
of talk about sort of the wherethings are happening at what locations and how
that impacts sort of you know,everybody else. So I think it's gonna
be a really fascinating episode. I'mnot sure if a lot of people I've

(01:10:08):
ever critically looked at the geography andthe way that I'm going to try and
do it. Maybe some people havethrough books and stuff, but I'm going
to try and bring it to youin podcast form anyways. And then I
mean, world War One is fadingfrom memory, World War Two is fading
from memory. So it's important torevisit these sort of cataclysmic events so that

(01:10:30):
we can learn from history and geography. Absolutely not repeat some of the stuff
that we did before. Absolutely socome back next week learn all about the
geography of World War One. Itshould be a lot of fun. And
I guess until then, well,we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.