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Collapse of Easter Island

Kitsune

Kitsune

Location
Virginia
Pronouns
She/Her
I was listening to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast on Easter Island



The host argues that Easter Island did not collapse due to cutting down all the tree or that they over farmed the land. In fact that they had specially planted terraced farms using rocks for better water retention and they had groves of fruit trees and timber stands. They actually lived in comparative peace and did not have the warfare that other Pacific islands had. Instead, the initial collapse did not occur until Europeans brought diseases to the island and effectively the population was not finished off until widespread slavery and using the land for sheep farming.

Is this the state of the current scholarly consensus?
 
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I won't have time to listen to the podcast until tomorrow but my understanding was that scholarly consensus (however much that ever means anything) was leaning more towards an earlier, slower internal collapse followed by a second collapse after European arrival, albiet the initial decline was caused as much by rats damaging the environment as by the trees being cut down deliberately by people.

I'll be interested to see how this podcast presents its argument.
 
The collapse of trees by rats would have happened so early in the island's population that it is unlikely to be a cause. It did likely kill all all the old growth trees but according to the podcast they grew trees themselves. As well, walking the Moai uses far less lumber than other methods.

Would be really nice if the British Museum gave the one they stole back.
 
Kitsune said:
The collapse of trees by rats would have happened so early in the island's population that it is unlikely to be a cause. It did likely kill all all the old growth trees but according to the podcast they grew trees themselves. As well, walking the Moai uses far less lumber than other methods.

Would be really nice if the British Museum gave the one they stole back.
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It could be that just by having smaller, more fragile systems of second- and third- growth forests made it much more susceptible to effects like one year's bad storm or another's rat population bloom or yet another's over-harvest until it was brought down by a death of a thousand cuts?
 
Kitsune said:
Here is an article arguing for the no collapse model. At least no collapse until European contact
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Yeah it's a popular position because honestly it's entirely intuitive, and a lot of older stuff just came with racist assumptions about indigenous populations we know are absolutely false.

Like loosing the ability to go fishing hurt, but it's not something that would cause a total collapse like say, measles and smallpox and then slave raids are known to have done elsewhere.
 
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