Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island

Popular histories point to Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, as a cautionary tale of environmental collapse: the original inhabitants “let their population outgrow their home’s capacity to support them” and the Europeans who first happened upon the island found “a devastated land.” The problem with this story, according to this striking account from archaeologist Pitts (How to Build Stonehenge), is that it’s not only “profoundly wrong” but belies a “shocking history of European cultural destruction... slavery and brutal exploitation.” Consulting records of European contact, Pitts points to evidence that the island was densely populated in the 1700s, and that it was catastrophic slave raids in the 1860s that reduced the population to a mere 110 people. To tell the true history of Rapa Nui, Pitts combines the latest archeological evidence with the long-overlooked early-20th-century field notes of anthropologist Katherine Routledge, the first Westerner to consult Rapa Nui’s elders and record their own account of their history. Her groundbreaking work forms a second mystery within the narrative, as Pitts investigates how “the lifework of this woman, who seemed to have understood the place like no other outsider,” had vanished from both academic and popular history. The twists and turns of Routledge’s story—a saga of strange rivalries and suppressed research—culminate in her being “kidnapped and incarcerated” in a “lunatic asylum, where, against her will... she was to spend the rest of her life.” It’s a stunning unraveling of many layers of hidden history. (Jan.)