I’m writing a paper and I’m so confused; if the people of the island are still around, how is the island such a mystery? Is it that the Rapa Nui alive were mostly the descendants of slaves or immigrants from the island? I hope this isn’t too stupid of a question but I just can’t find anything addressing it. Thanks!
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Mystery in what sense? There’s pretty decent archaeological record of the island and the history (it’s not very long) of human habitation is reasonably well documented. Of note is that the population was decimated by the ecological devastation the first inhabitants unleashed on the island, and then the European colonization/slave raids so by the end of XIX century only about a 100 or so Polynesian people were left on the island.
Most of the island died and not a lot remained.
but mostly the mysteries are fake, people just made some good big statues on an island but the island was too small to support a large population long term so the population crashed. The mysteries are mostly fake alien stuff and nonsense
The Rapa Nui went through an apocalypse of environmental decline thru deforestation followed by disease, then the slave trade and diaspora to other islands. By the late 1800’s the population was down to just above 100 habitants over the previous several thousand and above population. So there isn’t much oral history that survived that.
The “Fall of Civilizations” podcast did a wonderful episode on Easter Island, which examines the different theories:
https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/fall-of-civilizations-podcast/id1449884495?i=1000443157865
Don’t they also have that beautiful hieroglyphic that hasn’t be translated? We only got lucky with the Rosetta stone for Egypt.
It isn’t, there is a fairly good idea of the history and archaeology of the island. It is pseudoscience/conspiracy theory bullshit they we don’t understand what happened there.
I mean just ask a random villager a couple hundred years ago about the history of whatever part of Europe they are in. They won’t Be able to tell you.
Only the educated higher classes had access to such knowledge.
And when a civilisation collapses, factual histories for centuries ago kinda go out the window. Much more so if you got no paper to write on.
It’s really just like the typical apocalypse movie: people rapidly declined due to local climate change, no time to memorise/record further out histories and tons of knowledge lost.
There are still people in Egypt yet we don’t know how the pyramids were built. Cultural knowledge gets lost in a couple of generations unless recorded and preserved.
I can’t speak about Rapa Nui, but lots of cultures don’t have records or oral history of stuff that happened in their own culture a long time ago. Remember that the first people to do archaeology on ancient Egypt were people we would call “ancient Egyptians” today.
Go sit at a loom and spin a tapestry. Don’t know how? Why? It’s part of your cultural history, how can you not know how to use it?
Remember that knoweldge is something that has to be carefully maintained from generation to generation–it’s very common to lose information unless it’s necessary to daily life.
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