On Easter Island, long-held beliefs regarding the decline of the island’s civilization have been disproven by a team of researchers, and this team includes a faculty member of Binghamton University.

Carl Lipo, associate dean for research and programs and a professor of anthropology and environmental studies at BU, has been studying the famous statues, or “moai,” and the platforms, “ahu,” located around the island with his team. The moai statues are teaching the researchers about the history of the island and the people who inhabited it. Lipo said the mystery behind these statues is what drives him in his research.

“Figuring out why these monuments made complete sense to the people who made them has been a great and exciting challenge,” Lipo wrote in an email.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is located off the coast of Chile and is well known for its large statues. The island contains over 1,000 of these statues, but long-held narratives, most likely by Europeans, say the construction stopped and the island was in decline by the time the Europeans made contact in 1722. However, the team’s research indicates that the building of the statues continued after contact with the Europeans.

The team’s research found that construction of the ahu began after human colonization of the island and increased between the 14th and 15th centuries, with construction being steady after the Europeans arrived. These results support a new model that shows a continuation of traditions in spite of European contact.

The research team used radiocarbon dating, architectural stratigraphy and ethnohistoric accounts to find when the statues were constructed.

In 2018, Lipo and his team conducted research involving petroglyphs, or rock carvings found on the pukao, the hat-like structure on top of the statues’ heads. The carvings showed that they were built by the people of Rapa Nui to help deal with the issue of scarce resources and to help bring communities together.

Since then, the team has also conducted research mapping the locations of the statues to find any potential relationships between the locations of the ahu and resources on the island, such as fresh water, marine resources and rock mulch agricultural gardens. Their results indicated that the locations of the statues can be explained by freshwater sources on the island, which was a coveted resource.

According to Lipo, all of this research is providing evidence to answer a much larger question regarding the statues.

“Why did people on this island, of all islands, decide to spend too much of their time on the construction of massive monuments?” Lipo wrote. “We certainly know that these monuments were part of the Rapa Nui culture, traditions passed on from the earliest colonists to the present. But that fact doesn’t explain why this island and why the immense investments for over 500 years.”

The research into the building of these statues and their locations shows that the small island society was capable of building these monuments, and it did not cause the downfall of the island. For a long time, there has been an assumption by Europeans that the society on Rapa Nui “collapsed” and that this explains how they were able to build these monuments with a smaller workforce. It was assumed that, at one point, there had been more people to help build these monuments. However, Lipo explained the evidence shows that building continued long after the Europeans arrived, and this could be done through cooperation between people and groups.

“Generally speaking, the findings on Rapa Nui are demonstrating, as is the case elsewhere, that relatively small numbers of people living in so-called ‘simple’ societies are capable of extraordinary things,” Lipo wrote.