A New Study Has Upended One of Easter Island’s Greatest Myths

AxelSci/Tech2025-07-094410

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A new study suggests that the island of Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island, didn’t develop in the extreme manner of isolation that we thought.

By comparing archeological data and radiocarbon dating, professors from Uppsala University were able to break down the development of ritual practices throughout Rapa Nui and the rest of East Polynesia into three distinct phases.

These phases suggested a greater interconnected network between the islands than had been previously identified, and challenges the idea that the transfer of cultural developments occurred only in a west-to-east pattern, and only at a singular time.

For centuries, the hundreds of mysterious monuments on the small island of Rapa Nui—including the iconic monolithic statues known as the moai—have offered a glimpse into a past we still don’t fully understand. While researchers generally agree that Polynesians first settled the island by migrating from west to east, a new study suggests that what happened next may not have been as isolated as once thought.

As Phys.org notes, it’s hard to believe these islands all developed independently after the initial wave of eastward expansion—especially given the striking similarities in their monuments and the evidence of shared ritual practices.

To determine how, exactly, these similar practices came to be, Paul Wallin and Helene Martinsson-Wallin of Uppsala University analyzed and compared radiocarbon dating and archaeological data from ritual spaces and other monument sites throughout East Polynesia.

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Their findings, published by Cambridge University Press, categorize the development of ritual practices in East Polynesia into three distinct periods of activity that challenge the traditional view of a one-time, west-to-east colonization and the idea that Rapa Nui developed in complete isolation.

The first phase, which the scientists say occurred between 1000–1300 A.D., stems from that initial west-to-east expansion. In this period, they summarize, “we see that ritual space is expressed through actions, such as burials and feasting, and these spaces are marked by a stone upright.” As each new area was settled, they demonstrated similarities in “structure and organisation of settlement, ritual space and language-use.”

But, crucially, Wallin and Martinsson-Wallin found that “during the initial settlement expansion, interaction networks were established in East Polynesia that in many cases maintained continuous contact with their homeland population.”

In the second phase, dated approximately 1300–1600 A.D., “ritual actions materialised into clearly visible and more complex ahu/marae structures.” Wallin and Martinsson-Wallin suggest this evolution in ritual practices was done with an eye toward memorializing not just various deities, but lost loved ones as well.

“Ideas surrounding the materialisation of ideology expanded through established networks in the south-eastern Pacific, from the Pitcairn Islands in the east to the Society Islands,” they note. “Genetic studies also indicate contact between the Central Pacific area and Rapa Nui in the fourteenth century.”

That means that, during these initial two phases, Rapa Nui had contact with others “at least twice,” and that “connections to islands west of Rapa Nui are apparent.”

The third phase is where the interconnectedness of these islands apparently diminished in favor of “internal vertical hierarchies” and the power struggles therein. The scientists note that while these internal hierarchies had already begun to manifest in some islands in the second phase (placing Rapa Nui’s hierarchical expressions emerging around 1350–1450 A.D.), in this phase, hierarchies “developed independently and rapidly in large fertile island groups such as the Society Islands, c. 1600–1767, and Hawai’i, c. AD 1580–1640.”

In this phase, island ritual sites expanded into megalithic structures, as local power expanded throughout the individual islands.

“While a shared ideology spread between islands with initial settlers,” the study authors conclude, “the development of ritual places was affected by external input in the second phase, and in the third they materialised into highly visible, monumental ritual places of stone due to social hierarchisation in local settings.”