This is a little outside my wheelhouse, but I visited the island a few years ago and became really interested in its history. I was recently reading Inventing Easter Island by Beverley Haun, in which she argues that much of what we know about Easter Island was/is constructed by outsiders starting in the Age of Exploration and even into the 20th century. She explains that “it is the very instability of the invented Easter Island that allows it to be transformed into different versions to suit the zeitgeist of the time” (254), including the mystery, isolation, and ecocide that Easter Island is commonly known for. The post-contact history of the island is usually overlooked, which ignores the indigenous peoples’ historical experience and cultural developments. Though it has changed a lot over the last few centuries, indigenous culture still lives on, despite the incredibly tragic legacy of Rapa Nui’s post-contact history. Its cultural experience in the last few hundred years is one of change and resilience.

Though it may have had a population of about 10,000 people, by the time Europeans showed up, there may have been as few as 5,000 people living on Easter Island (Haun 8). Like the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Rapa Nui was ravaged by Old World diseases introduced by Europeans. Rapa Nui society convulsed from the immediate contact. I’ve read in numerous sources that the post-contact period became known for its internecine warfare between various groups over power, prestige, and religious motivations. There are a number of oral accounts that survive of this infighting, though many of them relate contradictory stories. It was during the post-contact period that many of the caves on the islands became hideouts and food storage areas for survivors.

More importantly during this time, there was a shift toward new political and religious beliefs. The importance of the moai was replaced by the birdman cult, with many of the moai being toppled after 1770 (see the article “Te Miro o’one: the archaeology of contact on Rapa Nui (Easter Island),” 564-565). Haun explains that “during the period of birdman rule, cultural production shifted from large-scale moai to concentrate on other materials and forms of cultural expression: stuffed barkcloth-wrapped sculptures, petroglyphs, wooden carvings, and small portable stone carvings” (8-9). There are thousands of petroglyphs all over the island, but outsiders know virtually nothing about these cultural productions. Most famously at Orongo, there are over 400 petroglyphs alone of the birdman motif (not including the hundreds of other petroglyphs). During the birdman era, there was a yearly competition at the site in which “the object of the ceremony was the find a new birdman for the year, who became Makemake’s representative on earth. Each of the [political] candidates...had a young man to represent him. Each September (i.e. in springtime), these unfortunate ‘stunt-men’ had to make their way down the sheer 300 m (1,000 ft) cliff to the shore, and then swim 2 km (1.25 miles) on a bunch of reeds through shark-infested swells and strong currents to the largest and outermost islet, Motu Nui...where they awaited---sometimes for weeks---the arrival of a migratory seabird, the sooty tern. The aim was to find its first, elusive brown-speckled egg. The winner would allegedly shout the news to his employer on the clifftop at Orongo...and then swim back with the egg securely held in a headband. The master now became the the new sacred birdman…” (quoted from Enigmas of Easter Island, 175-177). The birdman era continued into the late 1870s to determine political supremacy and the distribution of goods on the island.

According to Grant McCall, who wrote a number of works on the post-contact cultural adaptations of the Rapa Nui people, another post-contact change was the development of a trading economy. As more and more ships stopped at the island in the late 1700s and early to middle 1800s to resupply, “the Islanders created a local demand around items at first merely fortuitously given to them: metal ornaments, coins, empty bottles, but especially wood, items of clothing (particularly hats and caps) and fishhooks...yet sex was perhaps even more frequently trafficked. If a crew were denied shore leave, women and young girls were frequently brought on board where they earned trade items…” (Steven Roger Fischer, *Island at the End of the World, 75). In fact, whenever outsiders would visit, sexual encounters were a crucial generator of trade, which lasted well into the 1800s (McCall, “European Impact on Easter Island,” Journal of Pacific History, 90-91).

There is some evidence that other post-contact cultural productions developed following contact, including the carving of dozens of ship petroglyphs. Additionally as Joshua Pollard, Alistair Paterson, and Kate Welham present in their article “Te Miro o’one” published in World Archaeology, “ during fieldwork on the island in 1914–15, Katherine Routledge recorded the oral testimony of a popular religious performance. She also discovered archaeological evidence for the ritual in the form of a 42m-long platform of rounded pebbles upon which a thatched house had stood. When Routledge enquired of its significance among her local guides she was told that it was a hare a te atua (house of the god or deified ancestor), and that the beings praised during ceremonies here were ‘the men who came from far away in ships’ (Routledge 1919: 239). She goes on to describe simpler forms of celebration on long earth mounds known as miro o’one (boats of sand)” (574).

The last cultural element to mention here about the immediate cultural consequences of contact are the famous rongorongo carvings. These are inscriptions carved into driftwood that included thousands of individual glyphs. Unfortunately, most of the carvings were either destroyed or intentionally burned during the 1860s-1890s (there are only 25ish such tablets remaining anywhere in the world). The meaning of the inscriptions was also lost due to disease and slavery of the late nineteenth century. So far, the best guesses about their content are that they are either describing fertility rituals, which became an important theme in the late birdman era; preserving chants done by important leaders on the island; or maybe maintaining genealogy chants (Enigmas of Easter Island, 188-190).

Much of these cultural changes happened away from outside eyes. Although ships anchored off the coast during the late 1700s and early 1800s, such visits were rare, only a few per decade. Therefore, we mostly rely on glimpses by outsiders, archaeological evidence, and ethnographies taken in the early 1900s to piece together the changes that occurred during this chaotic period.