1/5/2016 Hannah Bloch

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/17/467069847/war-may-not-have-led-to-easter-islands-ancient-collapse 1/3

Hannah Bloch

What caused the collapse of Easter Island, widely believed to be the world's most isolated inhabited place,hundreds of years ago? The question is a matter of hot debate.

Conventional wisdom holds that environmental destruction and internecine warfare led to societal andeconomic collapse on this tiny island located some 2,150 miles off the coast of Chile. For years, theisland's demise has been presented as a cautionary tale for our own violent and environmentallydestructive times.

But in the past decade or so, the common understanding of Easter Island's collapse has been challengedby archaeologists whose fieldwork and research on the island, also known as Rapa Nui, point to a differentstory — in which disease and slavery, introduced by Europeans, are more to blame than ecocide and self-destruction.

1/5/2016 Hannah Bloch

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/17/467069847/war-may-not-have-led-to-easter-islands-ancient-collapse 2/3

The Statues That WalkedA study published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity adds further evidence to this line of thinking.

Scattered across the island are thousands of small, sharp objects carved from obsidian, a rock made ofvolcanic glass. For centuries, it's been assumed that these implements, roughly triangular and known in theindigenous Rapanui language as mata'a, were spear points — they were referred to as spears byEuropean explorers, who began reaching the island in 1722.

But after analyzing 423 mata'a, a team of scientists has concluded that they "were not specifically designedfor interpersonal violence but were general purpose tools that may have been used for peaceful tasks"such as agriculture, ritual scarification, even tattooing.

Although warfare has long been posited as a likely cause of Easter Island's collapse, there is no evidenceof defensive structures on the island, some archaeologists say. And the sharp obsidian objects longassumed to be spear points may in fact have been used for farming.

"They found that the pieces of glass would have made very poor weapons and bore little resemblance to

1/5/2016 Hannah Bloch

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/17/467069847/war-may-not-have-led-to-easter-islands-ancient-collapse 3/3

other types of spears from similar civilizations," says The Washington Post.

"It's assumed that these are the WMDs that led to the collapse of people," the study's lead author, CarlLipo, an anthropologist and director of Binghamton University's environmental studies program, told theBBC. "And what we found was there was no evidence, in fact, to support that these were used in asystematic, lethal fashion, and that they're best explained as cultivation tools and things used in dailyhousehold activities."

How do they know?

Usually, Lipo tells NPR via email, "when we see lethal weapons used in combat, they are long, narrow,symmetric, pointed — best suited for piercing one's internal organs. Those kinds of shapes are bestperforming when you are in hand-to-hand combat and you need to dispatch your enemy as quickly aspossible (lest they kill you)."

But in the case of the Easter Island mata'a, Lipo notes, "We find anything but long, thin, narrow, pointed —we find any range of shapes, lack of symmetry, non-pointedness, thick objects that had sharp edges (asvolcanic glass) but were nearly useless in the 'lethal spear' sense. When we compare the mata'a shapeswith other Polynesian weapons that seemed to be used as actual spears ... they are completely different.What they most closely resemble are objects that are used in a general fashion as scrapers [or] cuttingimplements."

Still, even if the mata'a "weren't arrow-shaped or perfect stabbing weapons ... that might not matter," saysthe Christian Science Monitor. "Attached to the end of a stick, the glassy objects could do some gruesomedamage as a slashing weapon."

Lipo points out there is no evidence of defensive structures on the island. "On other islands where we seelethal, inter-group warfare, we see clear evidence of hilltop fortresses," he writes. "The hilltops are the bestplace to defend whenever weapons are thrown."

But on Easter Island, "none of the tops of the hills have any evidence of such features," he says. "Nothing."

In fact, Lipo and his co-authors note in their study:

"Rock throwing from high points was the primary way in which native Rapanui fought Europeans andwould have more probably been used as a mode of lethal force than mata'a. This conclusion does notimply that prehistoric islanders did not experience violence, only that mata'a do not appear to be relatedto systemic warfare where performance as lethal weapons would be paramount."