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01:14, March 20, 2007 Easter Island is a remote, though uncharacteristically large, island in the South Pacific 2,237 miles west of Chile in South America, to which it now belongs politically. The natives of Easter Island, a Polynesian people, refer to their island as Rapa Nui. Europeans began calling it Easter Island after the Dutch accidentally encountered it on Easter Sunday, 1722.
Easter Island is triangular and shape and roughly 64 square miles in size.
At one time Easter Island was home to as many as 7000 inhabitants. The Easter Islanders had arrived from the east through typical Polynesian technology: boats equipped with outriggers for stability. Using the massive boles of dense old growth forests to build canoes, the people lived on fish and the harvests from the gardens that gradually replaced the forests. Over time a mysterious cult (the Moai carving cult) arose that led to the construction of many iconic statues of elongated, abstract human heads made of stone and weighing many tons. More trees were felled to serve as levers and rollers to move these stones to various sites and erect them.
Eventually (circa 1700 AD), the Easter Islander exhausted their forests, could build no more canoes, and overshot the food growing capacity of their garden plots. A famine and war broke out, and the population crashed to a couple thousand people at most. This happened sometime between the first and second contact with Europeans. Warfare had led to the deliberate toppling of all the statues by the time of second European contact.
In modern times, Easter Island is deforested and depends on support for Chile as well as tourism for its local economy.