Moai statues, on Easter Island, Chile
A new study suggests that a large drought, and in a massive deforestation, may have been responsible for the end of the construction of statues on Chilean island.
Napa Rui Island, also known as Easter Island, belonging to Chile, is the house of the famous Moai stone sculptures. There are more than a thousand, built for hundreds of years, and are UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It is appeared that, with the arrival of the first polynesians to the island, around 1200, a quick deforestationwhich may have been made to support the construction of more statues.
The population will then have collapsed, even before the arrival of the Europeans in the eighteenth century, and the Environmental degradation It was the cause of the end of the construction of the sculptures. But now a team of scientists has another narrative, also based on climate change, but on a different phenomenon.
The new available on Earth Arxiv argues that a watery It may have been the cause of the collapse of the artistic production of the people of Easter Island.
The analysis was made based on Hydrogen isotopes in old leaf wax coating preserved in island lake sediments. This archaeological investigation shows that between 1550 and the early eighteenth century, there was a precipitation deficit (a reduction of about 900 millimeters per year).
This period of extreme dry may have greatly conditioned the life of the population of Napa Rui.
“Our hypothesis does not require violent war or demographic collapse in 1600 AD, but provides a reasonable explanation for possible intercommunity conflict factors, a need for spatial reorganization and a boost for cultural development on the island,” the authors write in the study.
“Droughts occur in Nui rapa and can be very dramatic,” admits to Daniel Mann, geologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “During all these years, I was waiting for someone to follow this study. And they did it.”
“Its tests are quite substantial,” says Dale Simpson from the University of Urbana-Champaign Illinois. But warns that “What makes me hesitant are the cultural conclusions they draw.” And recalls that this is only one of several possibilities: “We are so concentrated in this environmental collapse when they could have been other things that prevented the creation of statues.”
