Easter Island defined by cooperation, not collapse, study suggests

Analysis of stone tools collected from Easter Island archaeological sites suggests a significant level of cooperation among Rapa Nui culture.

Historians and archaeologists have previously blamed conflict and the mismanagement of natural resources on the decline of Rapa Nui society. But several studies suggest Easter Island society was sophisticated and resilient.

"The idea of competition and collapse on Easter Island might be overstated," lead researcher Dale Simpson, an archaeologist from the University of Queensland, said in a news release. "To me, the stone carving industry is solid evidence that there was cooperation among families and craft groups."

Easter Island is most famous for its maoi, the more a thousand massive stone statues scattered across the Pacific island. The stones -- the largest measuring more than 70 feet in height -- were carved using basalt stone tools.

To better understand the cooperation and coordination that allowed for the island's prolific statue construction, researchers analyzed the chemical composition of 20 stone tools. The findings showed craftspeople preferred the stone from a single quarry.

That a sophisticated statue construction industry shared a common resource suggests significant level of cooperation.

"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."

The latest findings -- detailed in this week in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology -- are only the latest to alter the narrative of Rapa Nui society's rise and fall. Previous studies have come to similar conclusions, suggesting Easter Island's society wasn't war-torn and shortsighted, but defined by peaceful cooperation and ecological ingenuity.

The Rapa Nui was not a society of failure, scientists argue, but one defined by the ability to do more with less.

Authors of the latest study, however, acknowledged that it's possible the level of organization revealed by their analysis could have occurred under duress.

"The near exclusive use of one quarry to produce these seventeen tools supports a view of craft specialization based on information exchange, but we can't know at this stage if the interaction was collaborative. It may also have been coercive in some way," said Jo Anne Van Tilburg, researcher at UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Human. "This study encourages further mapping and stone sourcing, and our excavations continue to shed new light on moai carving."

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