“Our research shows that statue platform construction and use did not end prior to European arrival in 1722,” says Robert DiNapoli, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Oregon, who led the study. This evidence suggests that the people of the island continued to thrive, as indicated by the continued construction of the stone platforms, called ahu, on which the iconic statues stand, even after the 1600s. Now new evidence from Hunt, Lipo, and their colleagues, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, lends credence to their ideas. For example, anthropologist Terry Hunt and archaeologist Carl Lipo, who have studied the island’s archaeology and cultural history for many years, have suggested an alternative hypothesis that the Rapanui did not succumb to a downward spiral of self-destruction but instead practiced resiliency, cooperation, and perhaps even a degree of environmental stewardship. In recent years, researchers working on the island have questioned this long-accepted story. These catastrophes, the collapse narrative explains, resulted in the destruction of the social and political structures that were in place during precolonial times, though the people of Rapa Nui survive and persist on the island to the present day. In this story, made popular by geographer Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Collapse, the Indigenous people of the island, the Rapanui, so destroyed their environment that, by around 1600, their society fell into a downward spiral of warfare, cannibalism, and population decline. Rapa Nui is often seen as a cautionary example of societal collapse. But the island, called Rapa Nui by its Indigenous people, has also captured the world’s imagination for an entirely different reason. The statues have inspired widespread speculation, awe, and wonder for centuries. The massive heads and torsos dot the landscape like stone sentinels, standing guard over the isle’s treeless, grassy expanse. Easter Island’s colossal statues loom large-both literally and figuratively-in the popular imagination.

Collapse jared