History of Easter Island
Although many imaginative theories have been offered for the origins of the Easter Island population and statues, archaeologists and historians believe they now have a reliable outline of most of the island's history.
Easter Island's human history began with the settlement of the island by Polynesians around 400 AD, who are likely to have arrived from the islands of Mangareva or Pitcairn to the west. These Polynesian settlers brought bananas, taro, sweet potato, sugarcane, paper mulberry and chickens. The island at one time supported a relatively advanced and complex civilization.
The European discovery of the island, by the Dutch navigator Jakob Roggeveen, occurred in 1722 on Easter Sunday. Roggeveen found about 2,000-3,000 inhabitants on the island, but it appears that there were as many as 10,000-15,000 of them in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The civilization of Easter Island had degenerated drastically during the 100 years before the arrival of the Dutch, owing to the overpopulation, deforestation and exploitation of the extremely isolated island with its limited natural resources.
Modern Easter Island has few trees. The island once possessed a forest of palms, but it is thought that the native Easter Islanders completely deforested the island in the process of erecting their statues, as well as constructing fishing boats and buildings. There is evidence that the disappearance of the island's trees coincided with the collapse of the Easter Island civilization. Midden contents from that time period show a sudden drop in quantity of fish and bird bones as the islanders lost the means to construct fishing vessels and the birds lost their nesting sites. Chickens and rats became leading items of diet. There is also some evidence of cannibalism, from human remains.
The small surviving population of Easter Island eventually developed new traditions to allot the few remaining resources. In the cult of the birdman (manutara), a competition was established in which every year a representative of each tribe, chosen by the leaders, would dive into the sea and swim across to Motu Nui, a nearby islet, to search for the first egg laid by a Sooty Tern during the season. The first swimmer to return with an egg would secure control of the island's resources for his tribe for the rest of the year. This tradition was still in existence at the time of first contact by Europeans.
However, by the mid-19th century the population had recovered to about 4,000 inhabitants. Then in a mere 20 years, deportation to Peru and Chile and diseases brought by Westerners almost exterminated the whole population, with only 111 inhabitants left on the island in 1877. The island was annexed by Chile in 1888 (by Policarpo Toro). The native Rapanui have gradually recovered from their low of 111 inhabitants.
Note that the name "Rapa Nui" is not the Rapanui's original name for the island. It was coined by labor immigrants from the original Rapa in the Bass Islands who likened it to their home island. The Rapanui name of Rapa Nui is Te pito o te henua ("Navel of the World") due to its isolation, but this too seems to be derived from another location, possibly a Marquesan landmark.
Today, the tremendous increase of tourism on the island coupled with a large inflow of people from mainland Chile are threatening to alter the Polynesian identity of the island. The possession of the land has created political tensions in the past 20 years, with part of the native Rapanui opposed to private property and in favor of the traditional communal property of the land.