Easter Island Mystery - The Easter Island has long been a fascinating place. For years researchers have marveled about the distant Pacific Island, which is famous for its huge monolithic statues.
The question of how the Rapa Nui natives arrived at the faraway island has been a subject of great debate. But more importantly the question of how they disappeared remains a mystery that never seems to go away.
Over the years, there have been many schools of thoughts about how the indigenous Polynesian culture of the island became extinct. One theory holds that European diseases, which they brought with them upon arriving on the Easter Island in 1722, wiped out the local population. Others speculate that overpopulation and civil conflict led to the extinction of the natives of Easter Island.
However, a new study conducted by an international team of researchers has gathered new evidence to scientifically solve the Easter Island mystery. Researchers believe that the truth may lie somewhere in the middle.
"In the current Easter Island debate, one side says the Rapa Nui decimated their environment and killed themselves off," said Chadwick, a professor in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program, who took part in the study.
"The other side says it had nothing to do with cultural behavior, that it was the Europeans who brought disease that killed the Rapa Nui. Our results show that there is some of both on, but the important point is that we show evidence of some communities being abandoned prior to European contact."
In order to solve the Easter Island Mystery, researchers examined three different sites used by inhabitants of the 63-square-mile island, located about 2,300 miles off the west coast of Chile.
"When we evaluate the length of time that the land was used based on the age distribution of each site's obsidian flakes, which we used as an index of human habitation, we find that the very dry area and the very wet area were abandoned before European contact," Chadwick said.
"The area that had relatively high nutrients and intermediate rainfall maintained a robust population well after European contact."
The findings suggest that the Rapa Nui were resilient and continued to gather food to sustain their culture even after European-imported diseases like small pox, syphilis and tuberculosis struck the island.
"The pullback from the marginal areas suggest that the Rapa Nui couldn't continue to maintain the food resources necessary to keep the statue builders in business," Chadwick said. "So we see the story as one of pushing against constraints and having to pull back rather than one of violent collapse.
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