Mānoa: Research reveals Rapa Nui people cultivated and managed crops

UH News

University of Hawaiʻi at MānoaContact:Posted: Jul 12, 2017Moai (statues) on Rapa Nui. Credit: Terry Hunt.A rock mulch garden on Rapa Nui with taro (Colocasia esculenta) growing. Credit: Terry Hunt.Research by an international team, including University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Geology Professor Brian Popp, has shed new light on the fate of the ancient people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island).“It's been proposed that vast forests of giant palm trees were cut down by the people of Rapa Nui leaving them, among other things, without canoes. With no canoes, they could no longer fish so they ate chickens, rats and agricultural crops. However, Rapa Nui is not a tropical paradise with fertile soils so crop productivity decreased. This ‘ecocide’ hypothesis attributes societal collapse on Rapa Nui to human overexploitation of natural resources. That’s the traditional narrative,” said Terry Hunt, Dean of the Clark Honors College and professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon and co-author of the study.This new study challenges that interpretation, and instead shows that the ancient population ate roughly equal amounts of seafood and terrestrial resources.“We also discovered that agricultural crops consumed must have been planted in soils that were deliberately managed and manipulated to provide better yields,” said Catrine Jarman, lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of Bristol. “Previous work has shown that plants of Rapa Nui were grown in rock mulch gardens and planting enclosures known as manavai. These had been carefully constructed and deliberately managed, and our study showed that the islanders may have added fertilizers.”The research team analyzed archaeological material dating from 1400AD to the historic period from the Kon Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway. These included some material from excavations led by the famous Norwegian explorer and anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl in the 1950s and 1980s. Other ...

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