Fire on Rapa Nui (Easter Island

Fire on Rapa Nui

Jo Anne Van Tilburg1

Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) has more than 30,000 archaeological sites and features both within Rapa Nui National Park and outside. These have been cataloged by at least 10 international survey teams. A large part of that collective survey data is archived and curated by the Easter Island Statue Project2 and included in a volume currently in preparation as an illustrated atlas to be submitted to the Cotsen Institute Press. The most impressive sites on the island include megalithic mortuary temples (ahu), monolithic stone statues (moai), and the Rano Raraku statue quarry. A profound personal history links the Rapanui people and their ancient built environment with their ancestral lands.

I arrived on the island for the first time in 1981, when the resident population was about 2,500. Only two decades earlier, the Rapanui people had wrenched power from colonial Chilean leadership. Today, all major political institutions are headed by locally elected officials of Rapanui ancestry. My last visit was in 2018, when there were 7,750 residents, including mainland Chileans. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the island was closed to all visitors. Over time, social and economic pressures apparently built up within the community, which has a long Indigenous history with fire. Eventually there emerged long-buried conflicts with roots deep in the dismal colonial history of the region.

I arrived on the island for the first time in 1981

1. Director of the UCLA Rock Art Archive and director and principal investigator of the Easter Island Statue Project. 2. http://www.eisp.org.

Figure 1. The Rano Raraku statue quarry, Rapa Nui. (EISP Archives and Database, 1983.)

The PasT Before human settlement, Rapa Nui was lushly forested. Although the full spectrum of natural and anthropogenic causes is debated, there is no question that the original Polynesian settlers, the ancestors of the current population, cleared huge swaths of land for agriculture by a process inelegantly known as slash and burn. The resultant grasslands encouraged early Chilean colonists to establish a sheep ranch and to import horses, cattle, and oxen. The consequent damage to the archaeological sites is visible but not yet fully quantified. The ranch years eventually ended, but the Rapanui community was left with the destructive legacy of free-ranging stock and a practice of setting uncontrolled grass fires to encourage the growth of new forage. During our Rano Raraku mapping forays (Van Tilburg et al. 2005, 2016), we struggled with overgrown brush and shrubbery on the slopes and watched horses running wild.

Before human settlement, Rapa Nui was forested

from the field

Figure 2. The inner region ecosystem and quarries at Rano Raraku. (EISP Archives and Database, 2012.)

FiRe!

Today, the entire island of Rapa Nui is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has a long conservation relationship with the World Monuments Fund. Rano Raraku, the monolithic statue quarry, is the gem of Rapa Nui National Park and the most visited of the many tourist sites on the island (Figure 1). The inner region is a unique ecosystem hosting nesting tropical birds (tavake) and a rain-fed lake with surrounding wetlands (Figure 2). Fire has swept through the interior of Rano Raraku multiple times; one of the most serious events took place in 1996. Beginning in 2005, and while my Easter Island Statue Project (EISP) team conducted multiple seasons of mapping and excavations in Rano Raraku, four grass fires raged uncontrolled over the statue-strewn slopes and quarries. In every known case, these fires were deliberately set.

Rapa Nui is a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Figure 3. Archaeological map of Rano Raraku (1981) superimposed on the fire sector in Rano Raraku with combined survey points. (Illustration by Lya and Tahira Edmunds, October 6, 2022. Courtesy of Sonia Haoa Cardinali.)

from the field

On October 4, 2022, Rano Raraku endured perhaps its worst fire in modern times (Figure 3). It created its own windstorm within the bowl-shaped interior region. Lake water evaporated, and organic matter in and around the lake burned for days (Figure 4). All the statues, including those lying on the slopes, and quarries were subjected to flames and intense heat (Figure 5). Island authorities described the surface damage as “irreparable.” My colleagues and I were heartbroken, the Rapanui community was devastated, and UNESCO sent an evaluation team.

aRchaeology aNd humaN BehavioR

Statue conservation is a major focus, and horses are always a problem because they enter Rano Raraku through an artificially created gap and range uncontrolled among the statues (Van Tilburg 1990). One of the first steps local agencies took toward damage assessment in preparation for statue conservation was to consult the comprehensive mapping of Rano Raraku created by the Universidad de Chile (Cristino Ferrando et al. 1981) and the many

We struggled with overgrown brush and shrubbery

reports of my team. At the end of our last full field season, in 2015, EISP provided complete documentation to the Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales and multiple other agencies (Oficina Provincial de Isla de Pascua 2022). That included numerous copies of supplemental reports as well as illustrated maps (Figure 6), excavation and conservation reports, drawings (Figure 7), and “biographical” histories of 339 statues and archaeological features in Rano Raraku. Island agencies would likely agree with Beaudet and Elie (1991) that archaeology is not “fundamentally destructive.” Considering it so “constitutes . . . a denial of the multiple dangers faced by archaeological sites in the real world” and minimizes “contributions of archaeological research to the understanding of past lifeways, material culture, and other related aspects of history and human behavior.”

from the field

Figure 7. Statue head 185. (Drawing by Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, EISP Archives and Database, 2008.)

It is now imperative to work together

The FuTuRe Multiple local agencies are led today by a younger, welleducated generation charged with the enormous task of assessing damage to the archaeological record and coordinating local and international mitigation efforts (Figure 8). They must also meet the more intimate challenge of public education and encourage behavioral changes with firmness and compassion. My experience with California rock art sites reminds me of methods used by Indigenous California peoples in their traditional management of fire. They teach that fire can refresh the landscape for principled reuse but that burning to “revitalize the land” demands respect for the power of fire and skill in its control.3 The unknown person or persons who unwittingly caused the Rano Raraku catastrophe tried to refresh the land for reuse but lacked the experiential resources needed to control the fire. It is now imperative to work together toward new responses to such old, ineffective behaviors. Armed with the comprehensive archaeological data that we and others have amassed, the community as a whole has an opportunity to meet the challenge that this recent fire posed for the natural and cultural wonders of the island.

ackNowledgmeNTs

I sincerely thank Sonia Haoa Cardinali, Lilian González Nualart, Jimena Ramírez, Ninoska Hucke, and other heads of Rapa Nui and Chilean conservation agencies; EISP team members Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, Alice Hom, Matthew Bates, and Shannon Billimore; Charlie Steinmetz and our colleagues at the Archaeological Institute of America; and Jonathan Bell and his team at the World Monuments Fund.

3. Kat Kerlin, “How Indigenous Practices Can Help Forests Thrive: New UC Feature Illuminates Cultural Burning,” UC Davis, April 7, 2022, https:// www.ucdavis.edu/news/cultural-burning-illuminated.

Figure 8. Rapa Nui conservation agency heads in Rano Raraku after the fire of 2022. Left to right: Nicolas Rojas Inostroza (cultural consultant, UNESCO), Tito Hotus (councilor, Rapa Nui), Jimena Ramírez (STP-CMN, Rapa Nui), Claudia Uribe (director, Regional Office of Education for Latin America and the Caribbean, OREALC/UNESCO); behind (with hat): Armando Tuki (president, Comunidad Indígena Ma’u Henua); in front of him: Jean Pakarati (director, Comunidad Indígena Ma’u Henua); in back, next to Tuki: Nancy Rivera Chávez (Comunidad Indígena Ma’u Henua); in front: Paula Valenzuela (with hat; director, MAPSE), Joaquín Soler (Ma’u Henua), and Lorenzo Teao (Ma’u Henua); standing: Moana Gorman Edmunds (archaeologist, Ma’u Henua). (Photograph courtesy of Jimena Ramírez.)

from the field

ReFeReNces ciTed

Beaudet, Pierre, and Monique Elie. 1991. Is Archaeology Destructive or Are Archaeologists Self-Destructive? Northeast Historical Archaeology 20, https://doi.org/10.22191/neha/vol20/iss1/1. Cristino Ferrando, Claudio, Patricia Vargas Casanova, and Roberto Izaurieta San Juan. 1981. Atlas Arqueológico de Isla de Pascua. Santiago de Chile: Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Centro de Estudios Isla de Pascua, Corporación Toesca. Oficina Provincial de Isla de Pascua. 2022. Informe preliminar afectación sitio patrimonial arqueológi;co por incendio 04.10.2022: En sitio de Rano Raraku y alrededores. Rapa Nui, 23 Octubre 2022. Internal report; copy on file at EISP Archives and Database.

Van Tilburg, Jo Anne. 1990. Respect for Rapa Nui: Exhibition and Conservation of Easter Island Stone Statues. Antiquity 64(243):249–58. Van Tilburg, Jo Anne, Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, Peter Boniface, and Alice Hom. 2005. “The Easter Island Statue Project (EISP), GPS Mapping of Rano Raraku Interior and Moai Conservation.” In The Reñaca Papers: VI International Conference on Rapa Nui and the Pacific, edited by J. M. Ramírez-Aliaga, F. J. Morin, and N. Barbacci, pp. 483–92. Los Osos, CA: Easter Island Foundation.

Van Tilburg, Jo Anne, Christian H. Fischer, Mónica Bahamondez Prieto, and Cristián Arévalo Pakarati. 2016. Seeking Solutions: An Archaeological Approach to Conservation of a Threatened Heritage on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). In Finding Solutions for Protecting and Sharing Archaeological Heritage Resources, edited by Anne P. Underhill and Lucy C. Salazar, pp. 65–77. Cham: Springer, https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-20255-6-5.