Easter Island, accidentally discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday in 1722, is the most remote island in the world. Now known as Rapa Nui, this tiny speck in the Pacific Ocean is famous for its 887 enigmatic stone statues that stand with their backs to the sea, gazing forlornly upon the barren island. Called moai by the islanders, they are giants, standing as high as 32 feet and weighing as much as 80 tons each. The islanders carved these giants in a stone quarry and moved them – without wheels or animals – to their final placements all around the island. Why were they created? How were they moved? As the story goes, the early Rapanui (as the islanders are now known) were a statue-making cult that felled the island's once-luxurious palm forest to construct devices for moving more and more stone statues that became progressively larger and larger. As a result, this tropical paradise was transformed into an ecological disaster area, and without trees to construct new boats, the people were effectively marooned there. Hence, Rapa Nui is also famous as an example of ecological suicide.

But is this story about the decline and fall of Easter Island's culture really written in stone, as it would seem? Not everyone in the scientific community agrees that the popular story is the true story. Two anthropologists – Terry Hunt, a professor at the University of Hawai'i, and Carl Lipo, a professor at California State University – set out to correct the record with their book, The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island [Amazon UK; Amazon US]. In this book, Hunt and Lipo, who conduct research on Rapa Nui, take a fresh look at the scientific evidence and argue that instead of an example of "eco-cide", Rapa Nui is a monument celebrating the triumph of a small group of people who persevered together under challenging circumstances.

The book opens when Hunt and Lipo first began their archaeological studies on Rapa Nui in 2003. They were actually conducting a field school and general survey along with a few excavations on the island for a few grad students, expecting they would uncover a few minor details on the early history of this intensely-studied culture. But after Hunt and Lipo determine that the human settlers arrived in AD 1200 -- much later than the previously accepted dates of AD 400 -- they became curious. If the date of the original settlement was so far off, what else may be wrong? Then the authors found compelling evidence that the island's deforestation was not a gradual process as the human population grew, but it began almost immediately after humans arrived and progressed rapidly. Why? Perplexed, they dug deeper.

As Hunt and Lipo tell us about their growing insights into the early Rapanui, they show how scientific questions can be answered with a high degree of certainty. Along the way, the authors find that, contrary to the popular view that the early Rapanui were irresponsible eco-cidal maniacs, they were clever and caring environmental managers, who devised ingenious methods for enhancing the island's limited agricultural potential. Hunt and Lipo also found that the early Rapanui did not devastate the palm forest, and their culture did not descend into violence and cannibalism. But I was most surprised to learn that making and moving the enormous moai statutes did not require many people at all, nor did it monopolize the islanders' precious limited resources. In fact, statue construction was intimately tied to the long-term success of their society.

Those statues are the central theme of the book, which shows how evolutionary theory explains moai construction as a typical feature of Polynesian society that became enhanced by the island's isolation. Hunt and Lipo show that creating moai supported a peaceful and cooperative agrarian society that functioned well on the island. Further, the authors find compelling evidence for how the statues really did "walk" to their final locations.

The quality of the writing, combined with the authors' meticulous research, show how exciting scientific research can be. This book shares Hunt and Lipo's fascinating findings and re-evaluates previous archaeological data. Also interesting were the stories told to the authors by Rapanui who still live on the island as well as quotes from the writings of the early European explorers. All of these clues are woven together into an interesting story as Hunt and Lipo come to their original and startling conclusion about the mystery of what really happened on this remote island.

I highly recommend this engaging and readable story for those who are interested to learn the truth about Easter Island; for those who are curious about "how science is done" and for those who love to read a skillfully written true detective story. I think this book is a brilliant example of how an ancient people can speak to us across the chasm of time and space, and how they still have valuable lessons to teach us today.

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Terry Hunt is a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i, where his research interests focus on the archaeological history of the Pacific Islands. He uses a number of ways to investigate this history, including population history, social interaction, and evolutionary divergence. The Statues that Walked is his first popular book.

Carl Lipo is a professor of archaeology at California State University Long Beach, where he conducts research into evolutionary archaeology of Easter Island, the Mississippi Valley, California and Guatemala. He uses a number of techniques, including remote sensing, GIS, luminescence dating, quantitative methods. He is an avid surfer and occasionally finds time to write the blog, Evolution Beach. The Statues that Walked is his first popular book.

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