Easter Island

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Rapa Nui Easter Island/Isla de Pascua
Easter Island map showing Terevaka, Poike, Rano Kau, Motu Nui, Orongo, and Mataveri; major Ahus are marked with Moai
Capital		Hanga Roa 27°9′S 109°25.5′W / -27.15, -109.425
Official languages		Spanish, Rapa Nui
Ethnic groups (2002)		Rapanui 60%, Chilean 39%, Amerindian 1%
Demonym		Rapa Nui or Pascuense
Government		Special territory of Chile[1]
-	Provincial governor	Melania Carolina Hotu Hey (2006-)
-	Mayor of Hanga Roa	Pedro Pablo Edmunds Paoa
Annexation		to Chile
-	Treaty signed	September 9, 1888
Area
-	Total	163.6 km²  63.1 sq mi
Population
-	2002 census	3,791
-	Density	23.17/km²  60.08/sq mi
Time zone		Central Time Zone (UTC-6)
Calling code		+56 32

Easter Island (Rapa Nui in the Rapa Nui language, Isla de Pascua in Spanish language), is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian triangle. The island is an overseas territory of Chile. Easter Island is famous for its monumental statues, called moai (IPA: /ˈmoʊаɪ/), created by the Rapanui people. It is a world heritage site with much of the island protected within the Rapa Nui National Park.

Contents 1 Name 2 Location and physical geography 3 Geology 4 History 5 Ecology 5.1 Destruction of the ecosystem 6 Culture 6.1 Mythology 6.2 Stone work 6.2.1 Moai (statues) 6.2.2 Ahu 6.2.3 Stone walls 6.2.4 Stone houses 6.2.5 Petroglyphs 6.2.6 Caves 6.3 Rongorongo 6.4 Wood carving 6.5 Contemporary culture 6.6 2002 census 6.7 Demographic history 7 Administration 7.1 Region 7.2 Local Council 8 Famous people 9 See also 10 References 11 Selected bibliography 12 External links

[edit] Name

The name "Easter Island" was given by the island's first recorded European visitor, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered Easter Island on Easter Sunday 1722, while searching for Davis or David's island.^[2] The island's official Spanish name, Isla de Pascua, is Spanish for "Easter Island".

The current Polynesian name of the island, "Rapa Nui" or "Big Rapa", was coined by labor immigrants from Rapa in the Bass Islands, who likened it to their home island in the aftermath of the Peruvian slave deportations in the 1870s.^[3] However, Thor Heyerdahl has claimed that the naming would have been the opposite, Rapa being the original name of Easter Island, and Rapa Iti was named by its refugees.^[4]

There are several hypotheses about the "original" Polynesian name for Easter Island, including Te pito o te henua, or "The Navel of the World" due to its isolation. Legends claim that the island was first named as Te pito o te kainga a Hau Maka, or the "Little piece of land of Hau Maka".^[5] Another name, Mata-ki-Te-rangi, means "Eyes that talk to the sky."^[6]

[edit] Location and physical geography

Easter Island is one of the world's most isolated inhabited islands. It is 3,600 km (2,237 mi) west of continental Chile and 2,075 km (1,290 mi) east of Pitcairn (Sala y Gómez, 415 kilometres to the east, is closer but uninhabited).

It has a latitude close to that of Caldera, Chile, an area of 163.6 km² (63 sq mi), and a maximum altitude of 507 metres. There are three Rano (freshwater crater lakes), at Rano Kau, Rano Raraku and Rano Aroi, near the summit of Terevaka, but no permanent streams or rivers.

[edit] Geology

Easter Island is a volcanic high island, consisting of three extinct volcanoes: Terevaka (altitude 507 metres) forms the bulk of the island. Two other volcanoes, Poike and Rano Kau, form the eastern and southern headlands and give the island its approximately triangular shape. There are numerous lesser cones and other volcanic features, including the crater Rano Raraku, the cinder cone Puna Pau and many volcanic caves including lava tubes.

Easter Island and surrounding islets such as Motu Nui, Motu Iti are the summit of a large volcanic mountain which rises over two thousand metres from the sea bed. It is part of the Sala y Gómez Ridge, a (mostly submarine) mountain range with dozens of seamounts starting with Pukao and then Moai, two seamounts to the west of Easter Island, and extending 2,700 km (1,700 mi) east to the Nazca Seamount.^[7]

Pukao, Moai and Easter Island were formed in the last 750,000 years, with the most recent eruption a little over a hundred thousand years ago. They are the youngest mountains of the Sala y Gómez Ridge, which has been formed by the Nazca Plate floating over the Easter hotspot.^[8] Only at Easter Island, its surrounding islets and Sala y Gómez does the Sala y Gómez Ridge form dry land.

In the first half of the 20th century, steam came out of the Rano Kau crater wall. This was photographed by the island's manager, Mr Edmunds.[1]

[edit] History

Rapa Nui National Park*
UNESCO World Heritage Site
State Party	Chile
Type	Cultural
Criteria	i, iii, v
Reference	715
Region†	Oceanic Continent
Inscription history
Inscription	1995  (19th Session)
* Name as inscribed on World Heritage List. † Region as classified by UNESCO.

Main article: History of Easter Island

The history of Easter Island is incredibly rich and highly controversial. Its inhabitants have endured famines, epidemics, civil war, slave raids and colonialism, and the crash of their ecosystem; their population has declined precipitously more than once. They have left a cultural legacy that has brought them fame out of all proportion to their numbers.

Contemporary to the arrival of the first settlers of Hawaii, 300-400 CE was published as a date for initial settlement of Easter Island. Although some scholars argue for initial settlement of 700-800 CE, there is an on-going study by archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo that states: “Radiocarbon dates for the earliest stratigraphic layers at Anakena, Easter Island, and analysis of previous radiocarbon dates imply that the island was colonized late, about 1200 CE. Significant ecological impacts and major cultural investments in monumental architecture and statuary thus began soon after initial settlement.”^[9]

There are many theories about the cultural composition and history of Easter Island. No two seem to agree. Most scholars consider the island's culture Polynesian. However, Thor Heyerdahl claimed that locals say the original culture consisted of two different races: the Hanau epe, or long-ears, the original settlers of the island with red hair and fair skin, and the Hanau momoko, or short ears, the Polynesian peoples generally associated with the Pacific.

Pedro Atan, an eleventh generation descendant of Ororoina told Thor Heyerdahl in 1955: "There were handsome people among our ancestors. There were two kinds of people on this island: some were dark (Polynesian) and some were quite fair skinned like you from the mainland, and with light hair. Real white people. But they were genuine Easter Islanders, quite genuine. In our family there were many of the fair type, who were called oho-tea, or the light-haired. My own mother and aunt had [red] hair. ... There were many of that type in our family, all the way back. We brothers are not like that. But my daughter who was drowned had milk-white skin and completely red hair, and so has my grown up son, Juan. He makes the twelfth generation after Ororoina."

That the population consisted of two distinct races was also noted by the first European to visit the island, Jacob Roggeveen, on Easter Sunday, 1722:

"Among the first who came aboard was a white man. He was ornamented with a crown of feathers on his head, which was close shaven." The islander was presented with several gifts including "two strings of blue pearls, a small mirror, and a pair of scissors." Particularly striking were the man's artificially lengthened ears which contained "round white pegs as large as his fist." The lobes hung down to his shoulders. Roggeveen later noted that "masses of the islanders had their ears lengthened in this [same] manner." If their long ears got in the way when working, they removed the pegs and lifted the long flap up and over the upper edge of the ear.

"They are a tall, well built people," he continues, "who, so far as can be judged, are fair skinned [Polynesains] such as we know them in Tahiti, Hawaii and other eastern islands of the south seas. But the population is mixed, some are conspicuous by their darker skins, while others are quite white, like Europeans. A few are also of a reddish tint as if somewhat severely tanned by the sun. Many had beards."

"Many islanders went about stark naked, but with their entire body artistically tattooed in one continuous pattern of birds and strange figures. Others ware cloaks of bark cloth colored red and yellow. Some have waving crowns of feathers on their heads, and others [wear] queer reed hats. All are friendly, and we saw no weapons of any kind. Curiously there were hardly women to be seen, although the place was swarming with men. But the few women who showed themselves are more than cordial to us, without the men showing the slightest sign of jealousy."

According to tradition, the first oho-tea, (light-skinned) Hotu Matua, landed on the island's North-Eastern shore at Anakena Bay sometime around 300 CE. (The remains of his stone house and fireplace are still in evidence there with carbon 14 dating of the ashes providing the date.) The two vessels in Hotu Matua's party were so large they carried several hundred men, and Oroi, Matua's worst enemy made passage as a stowaway.

A single moai or statue (representing Hotu Matua?) stands on the platform, or ahu, at the beach. It was the first of the ancient stone sculptures to be re-erected under the urging of Thor Heyerdahl during his 1955 expedition to the island.

[edit] Ecology

Easter Island, together with its closest neighbour, the tiny island of Isla Sala y Gómez 415 km further east, is recognized by ecologists as a distinct ecoregion, the Rapa Nui subtropical broadleaf forests. Having relatively little rainfall contributed to eventual deforestation. The original subtropical moist broadleaf forests are now gone, but paleobotanical studies of fossil pollen and tree moulds left by lava flows indicate that the island was formerly forested, with a range of trees, shrubs, ferns, and grasses. A large palm, Paschalococos disperta, related to the Chilean wine palm (Jubaea chilensis), was one of the dominant trees, as was the toromiro tree (Sophora toromiro). The palm is now extinct, and the toromiro is extinct in the wild. However, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Göteborg Botanical Garden are jointly leading a scientific program to reintroduce the toromiro to Easter Island. The island is, and has been for at least the last three centuries, mainly covered in grassland with nga'atu or bulrush in the crater lakes of Rano Raraku and Rano Kau. Presence of these reeds (which are called totora in the Andes) was used to support the argument of a South American origin of the statue builders, but pollen analysis of lake sediments shows these reeds have grown on the island for over 30,000 years. Before the arrival of humans, Easter Island had vast seabird colonies, no longer found on the main island, and several species of landbirds, which have become extinct.

[edit] Destruction of the ecosystem

"The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct."^[10]

Trees are sparse on modern Easter Island, rarely forming small groves. The island once had a forest of palms, and it has generally been thought that native Easter Islanders deforested the island in the process of erecting their statues.^{[citation needed]} Experimental archaeology has clearly demonstrated that some statues certainly could have been placed on "Y" shaped wooden frames called miro manga erua and then pulled to their final destinations on ceremonial sites. Rapanui traditions metaphorically refer to spiritual power (mana) as the means by which the moai were "walked" from the quarry. But, given the island's southern latitude, the climatic effects of the Little Ice Age (about 1650 to 1850) may have contributed to deforestation and other changes, though such speculation is unproven.

Jared Diamond disregards the influence of climate but still gives an extensive look into the collapse of the ancient Easter Islanders in his book Collapse. The disappearance of the island's trees seems to coincide with a decline of its civilization around the 17th and 18th century. Midden contents show a sudden drop in quantities of fish and bird bones as the islanders lost the means to construct fishing vessels and the birds lost their nesting sites. Soil erosion due to lack of trees is apparent in some places. Sediment samples document that up to half of the native plants had become extinct and that the vegetation of the island was drastically altered. Chickens and rats became leading items of diet and there are contested hints that cannibalism occurred, based on human remains associated with cooking sites, especially in caves.

In his article "From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui", Benny Peiser notes evidence of self-sufficiency on Easter Island when Europeans first arrived. Although stressed, the island may still have had some (small) trees, mainly toromiro. Cornelis Bouman, Jakob Roggeveen's captain, stated in his log book, "... of yams, bananas and small coconut palms we saw little and no other trees or crops." According to Carl Friedrich Behrens, Roggeveen's officer, "The natives presented palm branches as peace offerings. Their houses were set up on wooden stakes, daubed over with luting and covered with palm leaves," (presumably from banana plants as the island was by then deforested). The stakes indicate that either driftwood or living trees were still available, though the reliability of Behrens as a source is questionable^{[citation needed]}. By contrast, Peiser considers these reports to indicate that considerable numbers of large trees still existed at that time, which is explicitly contradicted by the Bouman quote above.

In his book A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright speculates that for a generation or so, "there was enough old lumber to haul the great stones and still keep a few canoes seaworthy for deep water". When the day came the last boat was gone, wars broke out over "ancient planks and wormeaten bits of jetsam". But this statement is flawed since the sea going craft the islanders used were not made of wood, but of bundles of freshwater reeds planted in the Rano Kao crater which, according to Wright, were planted by one of the first "long-ear" settlers. A one-man craft of bound Scirpus totora reeds was called a pora. There were larger reed ships, some containting three masts with reed sails and capable of holding over 400 individuals, and are depicted in petroglyphs, roof paintings and sculptures.

By the end of the third epoch in the island's history, with only one "long-ear" surviving, there were more than a thousand moai (stone statues), which was one for every ten islanders (Wright, 2004). When the Europeans arrived in the 18th century, the worst was over and they only found one or two living souls per statue.

Easter Island has suffered from heavy soil erosion in recent centuries, perhaps aggravated by agriculture and massive deforestation. This process seems to have been gradual and may have been aggravated by extensive sheep farming throughout most of the 20th century. Jakob Roggeveen reported that Easter Island was exceptionally fertile. "Fowls are the only animals they keep. They cultivate bananas, sugar cane, and above all sweet potatoes." In 1786 M. de La Pérouse visited Easter Island and his gardener declared that "three days' work a year" would be enough to support the population.

Rollin, a major in the Perouse expedition of 1786, wrote, "Instead of meeting with men exhausted by famine... I found, on the contrary, a considerable population, with more beauty and grace than I afterwards met in any other island; and a soil, which, with very little labour, furnished excellent provisions, and in an abundance more than sufficient for the consumption of the inhabitants."^[11]

That oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism is sometimes taken as evidence supporting a rapid collapse. For example, to severely insult an enemy one would say, "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth." Diamond suggests that this means the food supply of the people ultimately ran out^[12]; however, cannibalism was widespread across Polynesian cultures, rendering his conclusion speculative.^[13]

[edit] Culture

[edit] Mythology

This section does not cite any references or sources. (June 2008) Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Main article: Rapa Nui mythology

The most important myths are:

• Tangata manu, the Birdman cult which was practiced until the 1860s.
• Make-make, an important god.
• Aku-aku, the guardians of the sacred family caves.
• Moai-kava-kava a ghost man of the Hanau epe (long-ears.)
• Hekai ite umu pare haonga takapu Hanau epe kai noruego sacred chant to apease the aku-aku before entering a family cave.

[edit] Stone work

Rapa Nui is a volcanic island consisting of geologically recent igneous rock. The Rapa Nui people had a Stone Age civilisation and made extensive use of several different types of indigenous stone:

• Basalt, a hard, dense stone used for toki and at least one of the moai.
• Obsidian, a volcanic glass with sharp edges used for sharp-edged implements such as Mataa and also for the black pupils of the eyes of the moai.
• Red Scoria from Puna Pau, a very light red stone used for the pukao and a few moai.
• Tuff from Rano Raraku, a much more easily worked rock than basalt, and was used for most of the moai.

[edit] Moai (statues)

Main article: Moai

The large stone statues, or moai, for which Easter Island is world-famous, were carved during a relatively short and intense burst of creative and productive megalithic activity. A total of 887 monolithic stone statues have been inventoried on the island and in museum collections. Although often identified as "Easter Island heads", the statues are actually complete torsos, the figures kneeling on bent knees with their hands over their stomach. Some upright moai have become buried up to their necks by shifting soils.

The period when the statues were produced remains disputed, with estimates ranging from 400 CE to 1500–1700 CE. Almost all (95%) moais were carved out of distinctive, compressed, easily worked volcanic ash or tuff found at a single site inside the extinct volcano Rano Raraku. The native islanders who carved them used only stone hand chisels, mainly basalt toki, which still lie in place all over the quarry. The stone chisels were re-sharpened by chipping off a new edge when dulled. The volcanic stone the moai were carved from was first wetted to soften it before sculpting began, then again periodically during the process. While many teams worked on different statues at the same time, a single moai would take a team of five or six men approximately one year to complete. Each statue represents a deceased long-ear chief or important person, their body interred within the ahu, or coastal platforms, the moai stand upon.

Only a quarter of the statues were installed, while nearly half still remain in the quarry at Rano Raraku and the rest elsewhere on the island, probably on their way to final locations. Moving the huge statues required a miro manga erua, a Y-shaped sledge with cross pieces, pulled with ropes made from the tough bark of the hau-hau tree^[14], and tied fast around the statue's neck. Anywhere from 180 to 250 men were required for pulling, depending on the size of the moai. Some 50 of the now standing statues have been re-erected in modern times. The first moai was re-erected on the beach of Anakena in 1958 using traditional methods during an expedition to the island by Thor Heyerdahl.

While the vast majority of moai follow a fairly standard design, a few are radically different, in most parts badly eroded and broken. These are believed to predate the better-known moai, including a kneeling statue with hands on its knees, parts of a statue with clearly carved ribs and a headless, rectangularly shaped torso. Similarities to Indian stone statues around Lake Titicaca in South America are striking, whether this is accidental or not.^[15]

[edit] Ahu

Ahu are stone platforms on which some of the moai were erected. They vary greatly in layout and many have been significantly reworked in the islands during or after the huri mo'ai or statue-toppling era; many became ossuaries; one was dynamited open; and Ahu Tongariki was swept inland by a tsunami.

The classic elements of ahu design are:

• A retaining rear wall several feet high, usually facing the sea.
• A platform behind the wall.
• Pads or cushions on the platform.
• A sloping ramp covered with evenly sized, wave-rounded boulders on the inland side of the platform rising most of, but not all, the way up the side of the platform.
• A pavement in front of the ramp.
• Inside the Ahu was a fill of rubble.

On top of many Ahu would have been:

• Moai on the pads looking out over the pavement with their backs to the rear wall.
• Pukao on the moai's heads.
• And in their eye sockets, white coral eyes with black obsidian pupils.

Ahu evolved from the traditional Polynesian marae in which the word ahu was only used for the central stone platform, though on Easter Island ahu and moai evolved to a much greater size. The biggest ahu contained 20 times as much stone as a moai; however, most of this stone was sourced very locally (apart from broken, old moai, fragments of which have also been used in the fill).^[16] Also individual stones are mostly far smaller than the moai, so less work was needed to transport the raw material.

Ahu are found mostly on the coast, where they are distributed fairly evenly except on the western slopes of Mount Terevaka and the Rano Kau and Poike^[17] headlands. These are the three areas with the least low-lying coastal land, and apart from Poike the furthest areas from Rano Raraku. One ahu with several moai was recorded on the cliffs at Rano Kau in the 1880s, but had fallen to the beach by the time of the Routledge expedition in 1914.

Of the 313 known ahu, only 125 carried a stone moai. Others perhaps had statues made of wood, now lost. The majority of the rest had just one moai, probably due to the shortness of the moai period and difficulties in transporting them. Ahu Tongariki, one kilometer from Rano Raraku, had the most and biggest moai, 15 in total. Other notable ahu with moai are Ahu Akivi, restored in 1960 by William Mulloy, Nau Nau at Anakena and Tahai.

[edit] Stone walls

One of the highest-quality examples of Easter Island stone masonry is the rear wall of the Ahu at Vinapu. Made without mortar by shaping hard basalt rocks of up to seven tons to match each other exactly, it has a superficial similarity to some Inca stone walls in South America.^[18]

[edit] Stone houses

Some 1,233 prehistoric stone "houses", called tupa in earlier times^[19] and hare moa ("chicken house") later, are more conspicuous than the remains of the prehistoric human houses which only had stone foundations (except for those at Orongo). Stone houses were up to 6 meters long, with a distinctive boat-shaped structure combined with a stick and palm leaf or thatch superstructure. The entrances were very low, and getting in required crawling.

Germans excavated some of the Hare Moa in 1882 and found human remains inside. Locals told them that they were resting places for the ariki, Easter Island kings and chiefs. Each house had two small holes—if a hostile spirit entered through one, the spirit of the deceased could escape through the other. As such and also by their old name, the stone houses are seen similar to Indian chullpas in Peru and Bolivia.^[20] Noteworthy is that the remaining numbers of the stone houses and moais are quite close to each other, possibly meaning that for each person buried in a stone house, a moai was immediately constructed. Usage of stone houses as graves seems to have ceased around the same time when production of moais ended and ancestral worship declined. During the turmoils of the late 18th century, the islanders seem to have started to bury their dead among the ruined ahus—the moai platforms—and use the stone houses as chicken shelters. There are no human remains in them any more.

[edit] Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs are pictures carved into rock, and Easter Island has one of the richest collections in all Polynesia. Around 1,000 sites with more than 4,000 petroglyphs are catalogued. Designs and images were carved out of rock for a variety of reasons: to create totems, to mark territory or to memorialize a person or event. There are distinct variations around the island in terms of the frequency of particular themes among petroglyphs, with a concentration of Birdmen at Orongo. Other subjects include sea turtles, Komari (vulvas) and Make-make, the chief god of the Tangata manu or Birdman cult. (Lee 1992)

Petroglyphs are also common in the Marquesas islands.

Makemake with two birdmen. Carved from red scoria

Fish petroglyph found near Ahu Tongariki

Petroglyphs on Basalt rocks at Orongo. A Make-make at the base and two birdmen higher up

[edit] Caves

The island and neighbouring Motu Nui are riddled with caves, many of which show signs of past human use and fortification, including narrowed entrances and crawl spaces with ambush points. Many caves feature in the myths and legends of the Rapa Nui.

[edit] Rongorongo

Main article: Rongorongo

The undeciphered Easter island script rongorongo may be one of the very few writing systems created ex nihilo, without outside influence. Alternatively, the islanders' brief but very visible exposure to Western writing during the Spanish visit in 1770 inspired the ruling class to establish rongorongo as a religious tool.^[21] Rongorongo was first reported by a French missionary, Eugène Eyraud, in 1864. At that time, several islanders still claimed to be able to understand the scripture, but all attempts to read them were unsuccessful. According to traditions, only a small part of the population was ever literate, rongorongo being a privilege of the ruling families and priests. This contributed to the total loss of knowledge of how to read rongorongo in the 1860s, when the island's elite was annihilated by slave raids and disease.

Of the hundreds of wooden tablets and staffs reportedly having rongorongo writing carved on them, only 26 survive,^[22] all in museums around the world and none remaining on Easter Island. Decades of numerous attempts to decipher proved unfruitful, and the scientific community does not agree on whether rongorongo was truly a form of writing.

Legends claim that Hotu Matu'a brought the original tablets with him when he first landed at Anakena. However, there is not a single line of rongorongo carved in stone despite thousands of Rapanui petroglyphs and other remarkable stonework, and rongorongo probably originated on Easter Island in a rather late period.

The rongorongo script has few similarities to the petroglyph corpus.^[23]

[edit] Wood carving

Wood was scarce on Easter Island during the 18th and 19th centuries, but a number of highly detailed and distinctive carvings have found their way to the world's museums. Particular forms include:^[24]

• Rei Miro, a gorget or breast ornament of crescent shape with a head at one or both tips.^[25] The same design appears on the flag of Rapa Nui. Two Rei Miru at the British Museum are inscribed with Rongorongo.
• Moko-Miro, a man with a lizard head.
• Moai-Miro, human images often emaciated and sometimes with long ears.
• Ao, a large dancing paddle.

[edit] Contemporary culture

The Rapanui have:

• An annual cultural festival, the Tapati, celebrating Rapanui culture.
• A "national" football team.
• Three diskos in the town of Hanga Roa.
• A musical tradition that combines South American and Polynesian influences (see music of Easter Island).
• A vibrant carving tradition.

[edit] 2002 census

Population at the 2002 census was 3,791 (3,304 in Hanga Roa alone). 60% were Rapanui, Chileans of mixed mestizo descent were 39% of the population, and the remaining 1% were Native Americans from mainland Chile.

Rapanui have also migrated out of the island. At the 2002 census, 2,269 Rapanui lived on Easter Island, while 2,378 lived in the mainland of Chile (half of them in the metropolitan area of Santiago)^{[citation needed]}.

Population density on Easter Island is only 23 inhabitants per km² (60 per sq mi), much lower than in the 17th century heyday of the moai building when there were possibly as many as 15,000 inhabitants, or roughly 92 inhabitants per km² (214 per sq mi).

[edit] Demographic history

The population was 1,936 inhabitants in 1982. This increase in population is partly due to the arrival of people of European descent from the mainland of Chile. Consequently, the island is losing its native Polynesian identity. In 1982 around 70% of the population were Rapanui (the native Polynesian inhabitants). Population had already declined to only 2,000–3,000 inhabitants before the slave raids of 1862. In the 19th century, disease due to contacts with Europeans, as well as deportation of 2,000 Rapanui to work as slaves in Peru, and the forced departure of the remaining Rapanui to Chile, carried the population of Easter Island to the all-time low of 111 inhabitants in 1877. Out of these 111 Rapanui, only 36 had descendants, but all of today's Rapanui claim descent from those 36.

[edit] Administration

[edit] Region

Easter Island is a province of the Valparaíso Region of Chile.

The Provincial Governor is Melania Carolina Hotu Hey.

[edit] Local Council

Easter Island has only one municipality, the town of Hanga Roa whose Mayor is Pedro Pablo Edmunds Paoa (PDC).

Hanga Roa's Councillors are:

• Hipólito Juan Icka Nahoe — PH (Humanist Party)
• Eliana Amelia Olivares San Juan — UDI
• Nicolás Haoa Cardinali — Independent, center-right
• Marcelo Icka Paoa — PDC
• Alberto Hotus Chávez — PPD
• Marcelo Pont Hill — PPD

[edit] Famous people

• Hotu Matu'a - founder
• Fr Sebastian Englert, OFM Cap. - Missionary and Ethnologist
• William Mulloy - Archaeologist
• Melania Carolina Hotu Hey - Governor
• Sergio Rapu Haoa - Former Governor
• Pedro Pablo Edmunds Paoa - Mayor
• Juan Edmunds Rapahango - Former Mayor
• Iohan "Itto" HauMoana - Musician - Surfer

[edit] See also

• Rapa Nui language
• Rongorongo
• Orongo
• Rapa Nui mythology
• Rapa Nui National Park
• Omphalos
• Mataveri International Airport

[edit] References

[edit] Selected bibliography

• ALTMAN, Ann M. 2004. Early Visitors to Easter Island 1864-1877 (translations of the accounts of Eugène Eyraud, Hippolyte Roussel, Pierre Loti and Alphonse Pinart; with an Introduction by Georgia Lee). Los Osos, CA: Easter Island Foundation.
• BARTHEL, Thomas. 1958. Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift. Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter.
• BUTINOV, Nikolai A., & Yuri V. KNOROZOV. 1957. Preliminary Report on the Study of the Written Language of Easter Island. Journal of the Polynesian Society 66. 1.
• Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-14-303655-6.
• ENGLERT, Sebastian F. 1970. Island at the Center of the World. Translated and Edited by William Mulloy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
• FEDOROVA, Irina K. 1965. Versions of Myths and Legends in Manuscripts from Easter Island. In: Heyerdahl et al (eds.), Miscellaneous Papers: Reports of the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and East Pacific 2. 395-401. Stockholm: Forum.
• FISCHER, Steven Roger. 1995. Preliminary Evidence for Cosmogonic Texts in Rapanui’s Rongorongo Inscriptions. Journal of the Polynesian Society 104. 303-21.
• FISCHER, Steven Roger. 1997. Glyph-breaker: A Decipherer's Story. N.Y.: Copernicus/Springer-Verlag.
• FISCHER, Steven Roger. 1997. RongoRongo, the Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Texts. Oxford and N.Y.: Oxford University Press.
• GUY, Jacques B.M. 1985. On a fragment of the “Tahua” Tablet. Journal of the Polynesian Society 94. 367-87.
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• THOMSON, William J. 1891. Te Pito te Henua, or Easter Island. Report of the United States National Museum for the Year Ending June 30, 1889. Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution for 1889. 447-552. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
• VAN TILBURG, Jo Anne. 1994. Easter Island: Archaeology, Ecology and Culture. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• VARGAS, Patricia; CRISTINO, Claudio and IZAURIETA, Roberto. 2006. 1000 AÑOS EN RAPA NUI. Arqueologia del Asentamiento. Santiago, Universidad de Chile, Editorial Universitaria. ISBN 956-11-1879-3.

[edit] External links

• Easter Island travel guide from Wikitravel
• Easter Island at the Open Directory Project

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Coordinates: 27°7′S, 109°22′W