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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In addition to what others have said, slavers took a ton of people from the island, and these included all the high-ranking royals and priests who were literate. Easter Island had [a writing system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo) and Eugène Eyraud saw hundreds of wooden tablets with writing on them as late as 1866, but the remaining islanders had no way to read them, no use for them and a desperate need for firewood on their deforested island. So, all but a few were burned, and what has survived isn’t enough to decipher *rongorongo* with.
Christianity has been around for about 2000 years yet people can’t say for certain most things about its beginning
Information gets lost to time. Either it stops being carried entirely, someone messes up the game of telephone, or the story was never told correctly to begin with. And we can’t recover the truth
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Because they didn’t maintain archived written history. This has happened in all regions throughout history but basically oral tradition is bad in reliably archiving a lot of information. Many things are lost to history because no one wrote them down.
If you need another source for your paper, this is discussed in a section of Sea People: the Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson. Like the other commenters have noted, catastrophic population collapse interrupted oral history.
Check out the author Thor Heyerdahl. His book *Aku-Aku* (1957) covers the Easter Island ‘mystery’. Most of the ‘mysteries’ turn out to be tin-foil-hatters chomping at the bit to yell “ALIENS!!!!” at almost anything.
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