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 refer to it as Easter Island after because the Dutch accidentally encountered it on Easter Sunday, 1722, the day of first European contact.
Easter Island is triangular and in 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.