History of Easter Island

Geologically one of the youngest inhabited territories on Earth, Easter Island (also called Rapa Nui), located in the mid-Pacific Ocean, was, for most of its history, one of the most isolated.

Its inhabitants, the Rapa Nui, have endured famines, epidemics of disease, civil war, environmental collapse, slave raids, various colonial contacts,[1][2] and have seen their population crash on more than one occasion.

[14] Despite these claims, DNA sequence analysis of Easter Island's current inhabitants indicates that the 36 people living on Rapa Nui who survived the devastating internecine wars, slave raids and epidemics of the 19th century and had any offspring,[15] were Polynesian.

The Dutch officer, Karl Friedrich Barons, wrote of the encounter[citation needed]: During the morning [the captain] brought an Easter Islander onboard with his craft.

They spent five days on the island, performing a very thorough survey of its coast, and named it Isla de San Carlos, taking possession on behalf of King Charles III of Spain, and ceremoniously erected three wooden crosses on top of three small hills on Poike.

[25] Cook also noted that, unlike before, the islanders carried weapons when approaching foreign visitors – "spears, six or eight feet long, which are pointed at one end with pieces of black flint".

On 10 April 1786, the French explorer Jean François de Galaup La Pérouse visited and made a detailed map of Easter Island.

As word of the activities of the slavers spread, public opinion in Peru became hostile to this trade in human beings; newspapers wrote angry editorials.

Convinced that the entire "immigration scheme" was damaging the reputation of Peru in the eyes of the rest of the world, the Peruvian Government announced that they would henceforth "prohibit the introduction of Polynesian settlers".

[29] The first Christian missionary, Eugène Eyraud, arrived in January 1864 and spent most of that year on the island and reported for the first time the existence of the so-called rongo-rongo tablets; but mass conversion of the Rapa Nui only came after his return in 1866 with Father Hippolyte Roussel.

[31] Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier – who had served as an artillery officer in the Crimean War, but was later arrested in Peru, accused of arms dealing and sentenced to death, to be released after intervention from the French consul – first came to Easter Island in 1866 when he transported two missionaries there, returned in 1867 to recruit laborers for coconut plantations, and then came again to stay in April 1868, burning the yacht he had arrived in.

[32][page needed] Dutrou-Bornier bought up all of the island apart from the missionaries' area around Hanga Roa and moved a couple hundred Rapa Nui to Tahiti to work for his backers.

[32][page needed] Alexander Salmon Jr., was the brother of the Queen of Tahiti, the son of an English merchant adventurer, and a member of the mercantile dynasty that had bankrolled Dutrou-Bornier.

[36] This era saw archaeological and ethnographic studies, one in 1882 by the Germans on the gunboat SMS Hyäne, and again in 1886 by the American sloop USS Mohican, whose crew excavated Ahu Vinapu with dynamite.

Despite the lack of a resident priest to celebrate mass regularly, the Rapa Nui had returned to Roman Catholicism, but there remained some tension between temporal and spiritual power as Father Roussel disapproved of Salmon because of his Jewish paternity.

In the same year of 1870, Chile had sent a commission to investigate the island, under the command of Captain Luis Ignacio Gana, although without the objective of studying a possible annexation to the country.

Policarpo, through negotiations, bought land on the island at the request of the Bishop of Valparaiso, Salvador Donoso Rodriguez, owner of 600 hectares, together with the Salmon brothers, Dutrou-Bornier and John Brander, from Tahiti.

[43] In October of the same year, the German East Asia Squadron including the Scharnhorst, Dresden, Leipzig and Gneisenau assembled off the island at Hanga Roa before sailing on to Coronel and the Falklands.

[44] Another German warship, the commerce raider Prinz Eitel Friedrich, visited in December and released 48 British and French merchant seamen onto the island, supplying much needed labour for the archaeologists expedition.

However, the Chilean State decided to renew the lease to the Company, under the figure of the so-called "Provisional Temperament", distributing additional lands to the natives (5 ha per marriage as of 1926), allocating lands for the Chilean administration and establishing the permanent presence of the Navy, which in 1936 established a regulation according to which, with prior permission, the natives could leave Hanga Roa to fish or provide themselves with fuel.

[41][46] Monsignor Rafael Edwards sought to have the island declared a "naval jurisdiction" in order to intervene in it as military vicar and in this way support the Rapa Nui community, creating better living conditions.

Between 1965 and 1970, the United States Air Force (USAF) settled on Easter Island, radically changing the way of life of the Rapa Nui, as they became acquainted with the customs of the consumer societies of the developed world.

On 26 March 2015, local minority group Rapa Nui Parliament took control over large parts of the island, throwing out the CONAF park rangers in a non-violent revolution.

Accompanied by Henri Lavachery, an archaeologist, Metraux gathered legends, traditions, and myths along with information on the material culture; his work has become a standard reference for the island's past.

During 1934-1935, Henri Lavachery and Alfred Métraux recorded petroglyphs, made surface observations of monuments, explored caves on Motu Nui, documented rock art, and studied human burials.

In 1965, William Mulloy conducted measurements of azimuths of approximately 300 ahu facades for stellar orientation, contributing to our understanding of the island's ancient astronomical practices.

In 1968, an extensive archaeological inventory led by Mulloy, McCoy, Ayres, and Chilean Government and International Fund for Monuments surveyed Rano Kau and its environs (Quadrangles 1, 2, 4, 5, 6).

In 1975, William Mulloy led investigations and restoration efforts in the southern half of the ceremonial center, focusing on masonry conservation and preservation of stone structures.

The research encompassed bibliographic sources, critical history, conservation problems, and restoration proposals based on on-site observations conducted in October 1983.

[71][72] ”This indicates, that even though the palm vegetation had disappeared, the prehistoric population of Easter Island continued the pigment production, and on a substantial scale" said archaeobotanist Welmoed Out from Moesgaard Museum.