Easter Island society was more sophisticated than thought: Study

Easter Island may have harboured a highly sophisticated society, where the people shared information and collaborated, according to a study.The remote island 3,700 kilometres off the coast of Chile is known as "the place with the giant stone heads."It has has long been seen as a place where Polynesian seafarers set up camp, built giant statues, and then destroyed their own society through in-fighting and over-exploitation of natural resources."For a long time, people wondered about the culture behind these very important statues," said Laure Dussubieux, a scientist at Field Museum in the US."This study shows how people were interacting, it's helping to revise the theory," Dussubieux said.The study, published in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology, analysed the chemical makeup of the tools used to create the big stone sculptures, hinting at a more complex story."The idea of competition and collapse on Easter Island might be overstated," said Dale Simpson, an archaeologist from the University of Queensland in Australia."To me, the stone carving industry is solid evidence that there was cooperation among families and craft," Simpson said.The first people arrived on Easter Island (or Rapa Nui in the local language) about 900 years ago."The founding population, according to oral tradition, was two canoes led by the island's first chief, Hotu Matu'a," said Simpson.Over the years, the population rose to the thousands, forming the complex society that carved the statues Easter Island is known for today.These statues, or moai, often referred to as "Easter Island heads," are actually full-body figures that became partially buried over time.The moai, which represent important Rapa Nui ancestors, number nearly a thousand, and the largest one is over seventy feet tall.According to Simpson, the size and number of the moai hint at a complex society."Ancient Rapa Nui had chiefs, priests, and guilds of workers who fished, farmed, and made the moai."There was a certain level of sociopolitical organization that was needed to carve almost a thousand statues," said Simpson.Recent excavations of four statues in the inner region of Rano Raraku, the statue quarry, were conducted by researchers at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the US.The researchers took a detailed look at twenty one of about 1,600 stone tools made of volcanic stone called basalt that had been recovered in recent excavations.About half of the tools, called toki, recovered were fragments that suggested how they were used."The majority of the toki came from one quarry complex - once the people found the quarry they liked, they stayed with it," said Simpson."For everyone to be using one type of stone, I believe they had to collaborate. That's why they were so successful - they were working together," he said.To Simpson, this level of large-scale cooperation contradicts the popular narrative that Easter Island's inhabitants ran out of resources and warred themselves into extinction.

Easter Island society was more sophisticated than thought: Study

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