BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA—CNN reports that Dale Simpson, Jr., of the University of Queensland and colleagues think the idea that Easter Island’s Rapa Nui culture collapsed due to overuse of resources and competition to build the stone carvings known as moai may be overstated. Jo Anne Van Tilburg of the Easter Island Statue Project led a team that recently excavated four of Easter Island’s moai and uncovered more than 1,500 volcanic stone basalt carving tools. Chemical analysis of 17 of the recovered tools, which are known as toki, found that most of them came from one of three quarry complexes on the island. Simpson says this focused effort in one quarry points to craft specialization, information exchange, and cooperation among the Rapa Nui to produce the nearly one thousand statues, thought to represent important Rapa Nui ancestors. Van Tilburg cautions, however, that such focused labor may have been coerced, and more study is needed. To read about archaeological evidence of collaboration in Mesoamerica, go to “Kings of Cooperation.”
