Nonetheless, in 2024, Columbia archaeologist Dylan Davis launched a study difficult the long-held narrative, displaying that the Rapa Nui did not overpopulate the island however maintained a steady surroundings till the arrival of European settlers within the early 18th century. Davis and his staff’s complete examine of the island’s farmland revealed that the residents solely grew sufficient crops to feed 4 thousand people at any given time. He defined, “This reveals that the inhabitants may by no means have been as huge as a few of the earlier estimates urged.”
The Rapa Nui had a specific methodology of farming known as “rock gardening,” the place farmers would scatter damaged rocks in fields to guard the budding crops from the weather. For a few years, scientists merely mapped these “gardens” to calculate the yield of the traditional islanders’ crops. Nonetheless, Davis and his staff carried out totally different analysis utilizing satellite tv for pc imagery; their findings revealed that “There are pure rock outcrops all over that had been misidentified as rock gardens previously.”
This examine, in essence, disproves the speculation that the Rapa Nui have been frivolous individuals, as Davis’s examine identified that the Rapa Nui’s “rock gardening” was an especially environment friendly manner to attract crucial minerals and vitamins out from Easter Island’s nutrient-deficient volcanic soil.
“The lesson is the other of the collapse idea,” says Davis. “Folks have been capable of be very resilient within the face of restricted assets by modifying the surroundings in a manner that helped.”
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