Te Miro o'one: the archaeology of contact on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Abstract

Historical accounts of European exploration and intervention in Polynesia during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries speak of the complex interpretative fields through which both Polynesians and Europeans came to understand each other. Here we employ the record of material practices on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to investigate the indigenous response to European contact from the island's ‘discovery’ by the Dutch in 1722 to the population's conversion to Christianity in 1868. Rather than seeing events on the island during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a simple trajectory of decline, we highlight how myriad new practices and social orders emerged through a creative agency that drew inventively upon the material and cosmological possibilities afforded by contact.

Keywords:

• Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
• European contact
• ships
• canoes
• rock art

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sue Grice for preparing the illustrations, Stephanie Wynne-Jones for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper and Louisa Pittman and Sue Hamilton for information. A special gratitude is owed to the two anonymous reviewers who helped correct many errors of detail and interpretation.

Joshua Pollard

Department of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Bristol

[email protected]

Alistair Paterson

Archaeology, School of Social & Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia

[email protected]

Kate Welham

Bournemouth University, Archaeology Group, School of Applied Sciences

[email protected]

Notes

Moai were also toppled through the action of tsunamis. A particularly powerful tsunami that struck the south-east coast of Rapa Nui in May 1960 washed fifteen moai up to 100m inland from the Tongariki ahu (Fischer 2005: 208).

As Van Tilburg has highlighted (2003), the conditions under which Routledge collected her oral history on pre-conversion practices were far from ideal, and so the detail should be treated with a degree of caution.

Rapa Nui was not the only place in Polynesia where indigenous ritualized appropriation and manipulation of European ships occurred. Thomas (1991: 109–10) notes the case of the Samoan Papalagi (foreigner) ship recorded by Commodore Wilkes of the US Exploring Expedition in 1839. A ‘replica’ vessel was observed in a clearing, made from a tall tree around which a wooden framework hull and rigging was created.