The volcanoes Poike, Rano Kau and Terevaka emerged from the ocean bed between 3 million and 10 thousand years ago. The constant lava eruptions brought the volcanoes closer together, forming Easter Island.
This is the most remote inhabited place in the world. It lies 3,720 km from Chile and 4,025 km from Tahiti. This extreme isolation allowed for the development of a culture, rapanui, that has survived to the present day despite contact with the rest of the world as of the XVIII century.
One of the names given to the island, Te Pito O Te Henua, “World's Belly-Button”, seems to indicate that its primitive inhabitants believed themselves to be the only human beings on earth.
This is the key to the mysteries of Easter Island: social conflict interrupted the oral transmission of Rapanui culture. When the Europeans arrived, the society was already decadent and the few remaining Rapanui had forgotten much of their culture.
Rapanui society and politics were governed by parentage and the single line of descent, which is very common in Polynesia.
According to oral tradition, Hotu-Matu'a, the first person to colonise the island, was also its first ariki (king). His children created up to 10 mata (tribes) distributed throughout various coastal territories. Each mata was in turn divided into ure (lineages), led by the oldest male, who was directly descended from one of Hotu-Matu'a's children. The ure were set up further away from the coast, in agricultural areas.
In cultural terms, life in Rapanui society was organised around two principles: mana and tapu. The mana was the power of each person, which could remain after their death. For example, if someone had been a good fisherman, they used to use their bones as bait so that their "mana" or skill could continue. The arikis had the most powerful "mana", as did the moai. "Tapu" was a prohibition, or taboo. People, foods and places could be defined as being "tapu".
There are many petroglyphs and rupestrian paintings to be found on the island, both in caves and outdoors. Their music and dances have mostly been lost, and the ones that exist today are quite recent.
Both sexes wore the same garments, and tattoos were very common among the Rapanui. The piercing and stretching of the earlobes was a very common decorative practice, although it ceased after the arrival of the missionaries.
The "moai", monumental stone statues, are the most relevant feature of Rapanui culture. They represented the founders of the lineages, as part of the veneration of ancestors that is so common in Polynesia.
The myths, legends and traditions of Rapanui culture have been handed down from generation to generation by oral tradition. What we know now is the combination of oral tradition, tales told by sailors and the scientific research that started in the 19th century. Nowadays, one of the objectives of Rapanui society is to gather together as much textual, graphic and audiovisual documentation as possible to perpetuate its oral tradition.
