Island at the End of the World: The Turbulent History of Easter Island.

ISLAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD: The Turbulent History of Easter Island. By Steven Roger Fischer. London (UK): Reaktion Books (distributed by the University of Chicago Press). 2005. 304 pp. (B & W photos.) US$24.95, cloth. ISBN-86189-245-4.

Seeking a readable history of Rapanui? Save your money instead of buying this book: an authoritative, more readable and better-illustrated effort is available by anthropologist G. McCall (Rapanui, Tradition and Survival on Easter Island, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). Coming a decade after McCall's study, Island at the End of the World (IEW) includes recent information on island politics and more historic details, but its broad scope reveals the author's inexperience with science, detracting from its value as a work of scholarship. In particular, Fischer fails to explicate the cultural ecological issues raised by Rapanui's case, relying for ideas upon popular works of a human catastrophist bent, such as Easter Island, Earth Island (by P. Bahn and J. Flenley, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). While the views in such works resonate with many concerned with the Earth's biological integrity, their assumptions about past cultural behaviour and its consequences at Rapanui are not uncontested by experts.

IEW contains an introduction, followed by five chapters: "The Polynesian Frontier," "White Men and Birdmen," "Pirates and Priests," "Rancho Isla de Pascua," and "Museum Island"; a guide to Rapanui-language writing conventions and a useful index are also provided. The later chapters are based upon events and attitudes gleaned from the works of Rapanui specialists such as Grant McCall and J. Douglas Porteous, as well as from numerous diaries and letters, many revealing an appalling disregard for the humanity and cultural integrity of the islanders. Cumulatively, this modern history is a powerful indictment of private enterprise, the church and government, and provides insight into the frustrations of many present-day Rapanui. Of course, similar conclusions could be drawn from reading McCall, Porteous and others directly.

In earlier chapters, however, the author's depiction of Rapanui's cultural past misleads readers. There is no access to primary scientific documents and to the complexities involved. Here one finds untutored notions of cultural change directed by individuals, of rapid human population growth and territorial expansion never observed in nature, and even a discussion on climatology, with the suggestion that the disappearance of Rapanui's palms has caused the rains to diminish, exacerbating the islanders' self-made problems.

The long chronology of prehistoric occupation proposed in IEW fits Fischer's theory of Rapanui's language origins and development, namely, that the parent language, "Proto-South-Eastern Polynesian," was spoken by the first Rapanui in the early centuries C.E. But the archaeological record suggests the island was most likely settled in the early second millennium C.E. (M Spriggs and A. Anderson, Antiquity 67(255): 200-217, 1993 and T. Hunt and C. Lipo, Science (311): 1603-1606, 2006). Evidently, this theory has led Fischer to ignore data that undermine his claims--ironic, because the theory is dependent, as all branching models in historical linguistics are, upon archaeological findings and datings. These data include thousands of fragments of charred wood at archaeological sites occupied between 1300 and 1600 C.E., attesting to the presence of a wide variety of trees, including the Rapanui palm (Paschalococos disperta), during the centuries when people had already supposedly deforested the island. My own theoretical orientation as a cultural ecologist precludes an easy acceptance of demographic isolation of Rapanui for two centuries prior to initial European contact in 1722, as Fischer envisions. Small islands are best viewed as "population sinks," where human densities are a function of immigration rates, which undoubtedly fluctuated throughout Rapanui's human past.

Lay readers of IEW can hardly be expected to confront these problems head-on, and this is not the place for a full rebuttal. Suffice it to say that the fanciful story of prehistoric islanders transforming their lushly forested island into a droughty, eroded wasteland over the course of a few "turbulent" centuries should be viewed with skepticism, if not amusement. It is more noteworthy for or what it reveals about its tellers.

ROSALIND L. HUNTER-ANDERSON

Micronesian Archaeological Research

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