Easter Island historical timeline

Rapa Nui’s history is one of extraordinary achievement in isolation, followed by catastrophe from outside.

Settlement

Polynesian voyagers arrived by double-hulled canoe, most probably between about 1100 and 1200 AD on current radiocarbon evidence, navigating by star, swell and bird. Oral tradition names the founding chief Hotu Matu’a and the landing place as Anakena.

The moai era

Over the following centuries the island was divided among clans, and each carved ancestor figures and raised them on ahu platforms facing inland, watching over their descendants. Nearly 900 were made, the largest raised one weighing around 80 tonnes.

What happened next

Statue building stopped and many moai were pulled down. The old explanation was self-inflicted ecological collapse through deforestation, popularised as a parable. That account is now heavily disputed: the Polynesian rat, introduced with the settlers, ate palm seeds and probably drove the deforestation, and recent work on land use suggests the population was smaller and more sustainably organised than the collapse story assumed.

Contact and catastrophe

A Dutch expedition arrived on Easter Sunday 1722 and gave the island its European name. Peruvian slave raiders in 1862-63 took perhaps 1,500 people, and smallpox and tuberculosis followed the few survivors home. By 1877 the population was 111.

Rebuilding the statues

Every moai standing on a platform today was re-erected in the twentieth century; the islanders themselves pulled them all down at some point after the statue era ended, and early European visitors recorded them progressively toppling. The archaeologist William Mulloy raised the first in 1960, and Ahu Tongariki’s fifteen were put back in the 1990s with Japanese funding after a 1960 tsunami had scattered them inland.

Chile

Annexed in 1888, leased to a sheep company, islanders confined to Hanga Roa. Citizenship came in 1966, and self-determination remains contested.