I was obsessed with Easter Island as a teenager.
I read every book about it in my small town public library, and every English-language book at my university.
They all said roughly the same thing: a small, isolated group of people living on the world’s most remote inhabited island couldn’t have sculpted, moved and erected the enormous statues that are Easter Island’s most famous feature.
Or if they had, they must have been consumed by a monument building obsession that led them to cut down all the trees, causing mass starvation and warfare, and destroying their own civilization in the process.
Archaeologist Mike Pitts tells a very different and far more compelling story.
He draws on a forgotten archive of interviews and excavations by a woman who spent sixteen months there between 1914-15, a time when there were still people old enough to remember a functioning island society before slavers and missionaries.
Pitts also draws on the latest research to build a picture of a remarkable cultural flourishing in a remote and unforgiving environment, by people with a highly sophisticated system of agriculture and a rich tapestry of myths, religion, political stratification and artistry.
It’s one of my top reads of the year, and I couldn’t wait to talk to him about it.
Mike Pitts is the author of Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island. He’s written for The Times, Telegraph, Sunday Times, Observer and Guardian, and magazines including New Scientist and BBC History. He edited British Archaeology magazine for twenty years, and continues to conduct original archaeological research.
You can read more about him on his website, and follow him on X.
We spoke about the small group of settlers who discovered the island, the genesis of the famous ecocide myth, and what those massive stone statues really mean.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
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