ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island, new data and modern analysis change the game

ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island
MIKE PITTS
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archaeological scholar Mike Pitts—a book that rewrites the popular yet flawed history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and uses newly unearthed findings and documents to challenge the long-standing historical assumptions about the manmade ecological disaster that caused the island’s collapse.

Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island’s history as it’s been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world.

For too long, people have imposed their own theories on this extraordinary place and its inhabitants. Thor Heyerdahl, after his famous Kon-Tiki expedition, claimed the island had been discovered by light-skinned people from South America, believing only they could have been capable of travelling there and building the statues. Erich von Däniken took it to greater extremes, saying the statues had been carved by aliens. More recently, Jared Diamond's theory of ecocide—that Islanders destroyed their world by cutting down all the trees—has become popular as a vital message about the need to conserve our planet's resources.

But what if that history is wrong?

In The Island at the Edge of the World, archaeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers.

A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: An archaeologist with access to twenty-first century morals and mores and technology is not going to write with kindness towards the previous generations' conclusions. They're rooted in outdated assumptions, using techniques that feel shockingly cursory to modern sensibilities; most shocking is the unquestioning racism of so very much of the analysis made by earlier generations.

A third, the first third, of the book relays those earlier analyses with what felt to me as condign levels of condemnation or disagreement, couched in evocative language. If you're offering a different light on past data with newer data and previously unavailable technology, casting shade is inevitable. Why not begin with tendentious tones? Many cavil at this. I do not.

After bringing attention to, in the second third, an underknown and too-little celebrated Katherine Routledge and her astute observations and contextualizations of the society and culture of the island, Pitts goes into the modern archaeology and emerging understanding of Rapa Nui. It's a paradigm shift, and we're seeing it in its earliest days.

I found the book as a whole fascinating, creating a gestalt of scholarly opinion's mechanisms of change as evidence...and society's changing mores...demand. It is not a simple bowing to the winds of fashion as the reactionaries and recidivists with political axes to grind insist. It is the scientific method at work, correcting its data to account for developments across all fronts of scholarship. No "Truth" is immutable, scary as many people find that fact. Fixing thoughts into cages of ideology is never permanent. Examining data, analyzing orthodoxy's tenets, is how Einstein blew open the ideas of physics...out came cell phones, computers, the entire internet.

I won't pretend I was completely fascinated during the whole read. It was a slog to read the archaeology jargon but it yielded a really fascinating new understanding of a place most of us are intrigued by. More than that, though, this is a perfect example of how science works: take a data set, examine it, add to it, and analyze both the before and after data sets. Present conclusions as "this new data refutes/supports previous data; the current, amended data set supports/refutes the following conclusions."

It's a message I like, I support, and I choose to amplify.