This remote island 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile has long been seen as mysterious--a place where Polynesian seafarers set up camp, built giant statues, and then destroyed their own society through in-fighting and over-exploitation of natural resources. "The idea of competition and collapse on Easter Island might be overstated," said lead study author Dale Simpson Jr., an archaeologist at the University of Queensland, in a statement. "To me, the stone carving industry is solid evidence that there was cooperation among families and craft groups." Many aspects of the island, the statues and the Polynesian seafarers who arrived there 900 years ago have been studied over the years. "The founding population, according to oral tradition, was two canoes led by the island's first chief, Hotu Matu?a," says Simpson, who is currently on the faculty of the College of DuPage. (CNN) For decades, mystery has swirled around what happened to the founding population of the remote Easter Island, known for its towering stone statues depicting large carved heads. These statues, or moai, often referred to as "Easter Island heads," are actually full-body figures that became partially buried over time. The population soared to include thousands of people, and they carved full-body figures, called moai, to represent important Rapa Nui ancestors. Their sheer size and number is indicative of a complex, sophisticated society, according to the researchers. "Ancient Rapa Nui had chiefs, priests, and guilds of workers who fished, farmed, and made the moai. There was a certain level of sociopolitical organization that was needed to carve almost a thousand statues," says Simpson. Recent excavations of four statues in the inner region of Rano Raraku, the statue quarry, were conducted by Jo Anne Van Tilburg of Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA and director of the Easter Island Statue Project, along with her Rapa Nui excavation team. They did a close chemical and mass spectrometer analysis of fragments from 17 of the tools, called toki. "We wanted to figure out where the raw materials used to manufacture the artifacts came from," said Laure Dussubieux, a study co-author and Field Museum scientist, in a statement. "We wanted to know if people were taking material from close to where they lived." What they learned from excavating four of the statues and the volcanic stone basalt tools used to carve them painted a different picture: a sophisticated and collaborative society. The basalt quarries cover twelve thousand square meters, an area the size of two football fields. Basalt samples reveal their sources through their chemical elements, which link back to the geology of the site. So the researchers used an unlikely method to study the society and discern what might have happened: a chemical analysis of stone tools used on the statues. "The majority of the toki came from one quarry complex -- once the people found the quarry they liked, they stayed with it," Simpson said. "For everyone to be using one type of stone, I believe they had to collaborate. That's why they were so successful -- they were working together." "There's so much mystery around Easter Island, because it's so isolated, but on the island, people were, and still are, interacting in huge amounts," says Simpson. But later on, it is believed that the arrival of colonists and the institution of slavery decimated the population. "There are thousands of Rapa Nui people alive today--the society isn't gone," Simpson explains. But the researchers also urge caution and believe that this study is just the beginning, laying the groundwork for more research. "The near exclusive use of one quarry to produce these seventeen tools supports a view of craft specialization based on information exchange, but we can't know at this stage if the interaction was collaborative," Van Tilburg said. "It may also have been coercive in some way. Human behavior is complex. This study encourages further mapping and stone sourcing, and our excavations continue to shed new light on moai carving."
– The tale of the demise of Easter Island's people may have to be rewritten. The story has long held that infighting as resources ran out was one of the main drivers of the collapse, but a new study published in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology suggests a different scenario. CNN reports on the "unlikely method" of examining the society via of some of the stone tools used to carve the island's famous stone figures: Researchers performed a chemical analysis on four of the statues and fragments from 17 of the roughly 1,600 basalt tools, called toki, that had been excavated. The goal was to determine where the basalt had come from. There were three quarries on the island that were potential sources of the volcanic rock; the key discovery is that there was "near exclusive" use of a single quarry to make the toki. Here's the jump researchers are making from there, per a press release: Lead study author Dale Simpson Jr. sees that as "solid evidence that there was cooperation among families and craft groups. ... The idea of competition and collapse on Easter Island might be overstated." But Jo Anne Van Tilburg, who led the excavations, cautions against coming to an overstated conclusion in this case. She says the findings bolster the view "of craft specialization based on information exchange, but we can't know at this stage if the interaction was collaborative. It may also have been coercive in some way. Human behavior is complex." (This separate study pushes the same theory but based on different evidence: obsidian.)