Kind: captions
Language: en
Rapanui, also known as Easter Island.
This tiny little island in the South
Pacific is world famous for one thing,
the Moai. The Moai building has often
been portrayed as some kind of frenzy,
as some kind of competition between uh
different clan groups where lots of
trees were cut down in order to
construct and to transport the moai.
According to this view, Moai building
deforested the island. The soil was
starved of nutrients, leaving a barren
rockstwn land. Then, this theory
goes things got worse. The scarcity of
resources resulted in a societal
collapse. The island erupted into
intertribal warfare and led to a very
impoverished population living on a
barren island. The true story of Rapanui
is one of survival against the odds by
an ingenious and resilient people who
came to a bad land and made it good.
Looking at all the archaeological
evidence, it seems more likely that
rather than a self-inflicted egoside,
the true collapse of Rapanui society was
caused by outside influences.
As time went on and the evidence
accumulated, we realized that a lot of
what people thought was collapse was
something that actually happened after
Europeans arrived and it had an entirely
different cause and that was the
introduction of old world disease.
There was the small pox, there was the
Spanish flu, leprosy, slave trading. It
was difficult to live here. And it was
more difficult to keep the social
structures and the life as the way that
we knew it. Over time, we see people
sort of abandoning AU and Moai. It's a
loss of population. There just fewer
people because of the effects of
diseases. So, people are not attending
to the AU uh and rebuilding them in the
way that they did in the past.
Things got even worse in the 1860s.
Peruvian slave traders captured about a
third of the population on the island
and forced them onto their ships to work
in Peru.
There were protests. Even the Vatican
got involved and consequently the
companies were forced to return the
inhabitants to the islands.
However, these people had contracted
small pox on the American continent.
Only 15 people made it home, and this
was enough for an epidemic of small pox
to break out
there. By the time it was over, there
were less than 200 rapanoui left
alive. Thanks for sticking around. Don't
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