Easter Island is most famous for two things: firstly, a series of monolithic statues, sculptured by ancestral Indigenous inhabitants, numbering in the many hundreds and dotted across the island; and, secondly, the island’s enigmatic and controversial history of ecological destruction and consequential human demise.
Many theorists have surmised the possible reasons for the demise of Easter Island (see, for example, Englert 1936, 1948 & 1970, Diamond 2005, Bahn and Flenley 2011), however, scholars are yet to come to a conclusive agreement as to why the Easter Island culture and language collapsed. The intense, and often contentious, discourses surrounding the human and ecological demise on Easter Island has, in recent times, focused on the actions of the Easter Island Indigenous population and less on the devastating effect that European contact has had on the island and its people.
This research reflects the cultural history of Easter Island and its people in the context of writing a fictional novella called The last statue (Beckton 2016), in order to emphasise the positive aspects such as the physical and emotional resilience of Easter Island people, and their ability, as a culture, to adapt to external challenges and changes (see McCall 1994, Van Tilburg 2003, Bahn and Flenley 2011) . In particular, this paper identifies the physical, political, social and ecological aspects of Easter Island history that are needed to effectively imitate a cultural microcosm – in this case, a historical snapshot of the Easter Island culture within a creative work.