Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world. It sits in the South Pacific Ocean 2,300 miles west of South America, 2,500 miles southeast of Tahiti, 4,300 miles south of Hawaii, 3,700 miles north of Antarctica. The closest other inhabited island is 1,260 miles away - tiny Pitcairn Island where the mutineers of the H.M.S. Bounty settled in 1790.

There is very little (if any) written history of Easter Island and very few (if any) descendents of the original settlers. I have read a couple of different "histories" of Easter Island and I certainly don't know what is accurate so I'll give a brief summary of what I thought was interesting. Approximately 1200-1600 years ago people (from far away!) settled on Easter Island and they called themselves the Rapa Nui. The Rapa Nui began carving giant statues, known as moai, out of volcanic rock. (The moai remind me of Stonehenge because they are pretty incredible ancient relics and no one really knows why they were made.) The moai were carved with hard stone tools in the side of mountains made of volcanic rock. You can look at the mountain and see where they were carved out. The moai may represent the chief that is buried under where the moai is standing. This is not known for sure.

It is believed that once the moai was carved the Rapa Nui used trees to roll it to the water and built rafts out of trees to float it around the island. The moai were erected on stone built ahu's (platforms) by/for each different clan. Appx 1,000 moai were built and most of the moai face inland to watch over the village. (Only about a quarter of the moai that were carved were ever erected.) It is said that all of the Moai were toppled over about 250 years ago in tribal wars after the deforestation.

Core samples taken have shown that E.I. was once heavily forested and now it is treeless. The depletion of the natural resources caused the population to diminish from a high of 10k people(?) to 100 people(?). It's really a guess. The histories I read also said they were cannibals, the island people died out because slave traders stole all of the islanders (over 5,000 taken to Peru), the European's that showed up in the 1800's brought diseases that wiped out the rest of the Rapa Nui. It's all very interesting and a google search brings up lots of information if you want to know more.