Der Osterinsel droht der Untergang
HANGA ROA, Easter Island — The human bones lay baking in the sun. It wasn’t the first time Hetereki Huke had stumbled upon an open grave. For years, the swelling waves had broken open platforms containing ancient remains. Inside the tombs were obsidian spearheads, pieces of cremated bone and, sometimes, parts of the statues that have made this island famous. But this was different. The crumbling site was where generations of Mr. Huke’s ancestors had been buried. “Those bones were related to my family,” said Mr. Huke, an architect, recalling that day last year.
Centuries ago, Easter Island’s civilization collapsed, but the statues left behind here are a reminder of how powerful it must have been. And now, many of the remains of that civilization may be erased, the United Nations warns, by the rising sea levels rapidly eroding Easter Island’s coasts. Many of the moai statues and nearly all of the ahu, the platforms that in many cases also serve as tombs for the dead, ring the island. With some climate models predicting that sea levels will rise by nearly two meters by 2100, residents and scientists fear that storms and waves now pose a threat like never before.
“You feel an impotency in this, to not be able to protect the bones of your own ancestors,” said Camilo Rapu, the head of Ma’u Henua, the indigenous organization
that controls Rapa Nui National Park, which covers most of the island, and its archaeological sites. “It hurts immensely.”
Similar fates are faced by islanders throughout the Pacific Ocean and along its margins, in places like the tiny Marshall Islands that are disappearing under the sea and the sinking megacity of Jakarta, where streets become rivers after storms hit. Kiribati, a republic of coral atolls north of Fiji, may be uninhabitable in a generation. Their residents may become refugees.
On this island, much of which has been recognized as a Unesco world heritage site, both the future and the past are threatened. The archaeological sites are the backbone of the main industry: tourism. Last year, this island with 6,000 residents attracted more than 100,000 visitors. Easter Island’s hotels, restaurants and tour businesses take in more than $70 million every year.
Tourists usually begin their days in Tongariki, where they gather to watch the sunrise from behind a line of monoliths facing inland. Groups split off to Anakena, the island’s one sandy beach, or to the ancient platforms at Akahanga, a sprawling site of former villages on the shore where, tradition holds, the island’s mythical founder, Hotu Matu’a, is buried. All three sites now stand to be eroded by rising waters, scientists say. “We don’t want people seeing these places through old photos,” Mr. Rapu said.
Archaeologists fear the rising waves could erase clues to what caused the collapse of the civilization that built the stone statues. Perhaps a thousand years ago, Polynesians discovered this island. They created a civilization that constructed more than 1,100 moai statues, many of which were raised kilometers from their quarries. As the population grew, the island went from forested to barren. Europeans arrived with new diseases. Dozens of moai were left unfinished. By the 1870s, the population was just over a hundred, down from thousands at its peak.
Archaeologists debate whether it was resource depletion, disease, civil war, or perhaps rats that came with the islanders and ravaged forests, that was ultimately to blame. And the clues may lie inside the funeral platforms, which hold some of the remains that can be dated to establish a timeline.
Those remains “could add more data to show it’s not a simple or straightforward answer to what happened,” said Jane Downes, a professor of archaeology at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland, who has spent many summers in Easter Island working to document the damage.
The highway circuit that runs much of the triangular island shows a landscape that is changing. The damage has been swift on Ovahe Beach, near where Mr. Huke came across bones in the sun. For generations, there had been a sandy beach here. Nearby, a number of unmarked burial sites were covered with stones. Now the waves have carried off most of the sand. The burial sites have been damaged. “I once swam in Ovahe and the sand seemed to go on for miles,” said Pedro Pablo Edmunds, the Hanga Roa mayor. “Now, it’s all stone.”
At a site called Ura Uranga Te Mahina on the island’s southern coast, park officials were alarmed last year when blocks of a stone wall perched about three meters above a rocky coast collapsed after being battered by waves. “Now, all of this will fall next,” said Rafael Rapu Rapu, the chief archaeologist of Ma’u Henua, pointing to a map showing the platforms behind the wall.
He has experimented with measures to mitigate the damage. Using part of a $ 400,000 grant from the Japanese government, officials built a sea wall. But it is unclear whether the wall will be enough, or if island leaders will have to consider moving platforms and statues away from the coast.
The volcanic crater at Orongo, which was the center of the civilization’s activity around 1600, the last years before European contact, presents a tougher challenge. Islanders gathered for an annual swimming competition in which young men raced to a nearby island, Motu Nui, to fetch bird eggs. The winner de- termined which clan would rule the following year. The stories of those races are told in large petroglyphs carved in stone perched over the caldera, vulnerable to storms and gravity.
Park officials say they are exploring the possibility of anchoring the carvings onto more stable stone, or even moving them into a museum. “Can we take them somewhere else?” Mr. Rapu said. “Yes, but you lose their context, you lose their history when doing that.”
Mr. Rapu, who grew up on the island, said he regretted the environmental changes that had befallen the area. Few birds nest on Motu Nui anymore, a consequence of what he suspects is changing weather patterns. He recalled his father’s stories of big migrations that used to arrive regularly, much like during the competitions. “He would tell me you could see dark clouds of them and you could hear the birds everywhere,” he said.
Sebastián Paoa, the head of planning at Ma’u Henua, said he was sure that the island’s inhabitants would find their way through the challenge of the rising sea levels just as they had survived the collapse in ancient times. “They knew their environment was coming apart, but that didn’t stop them from persisting here,” he said.
Mr. Huke said he feels the same way. Finding the bones of his ancestors on the beach wasn’t cause for despair, he said, but a call to action. In recent months, he’s been gathering information for a climate change assessment to be presented to officials tallying everything from erosion to the groundwater supply.
“Islands like us are always the first to face climate change,” he said. “We have been here 1,000 years. We have gotten through things like this. The world isn’t ending. And believe me, we’ve suffered through an ecological disaster before.”
Time is running out to uncover an ancient society’s secrets.