http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/57732718

Giants of Easter Island

Ever since Easter Island was discovered by Europeans, this tiny speck of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean has baffled scientists. It's only eleven miles long by seven miles wide, and it's the most remote inhabited place on the planet. How did the ancients who peopled this place even find it? Carbon dating tells us that Polynesians settled this tiny paradise in the fifth century A. D. By the 14th century, their numbers had grown to almost twenty thousand -- but then something went wrong. When Dutch voyagers found the island in 1722, the population was decimated and the island deforested and almost desertified. Josh learns how the prehistoric Polynesians navigated and colonized the Pacific and how the giant, haunting stone heads of Easter Island may have contributed to their downfall. He learns that the statues all came from a single quarry, the islanders using Stone Age methods to create nearly a thousand of them before, for tragic reasons, they simply stopped, leaving many scattered and unfinished. Around the sixteenth century, many islanders began living underground in lava tube caves. How does this change relate to the ecological degradation and the abandonment of the statues? Josh discovers that place-names indicate the fall of the society into warfare and cannibalism, and that the bizarre Cult of the Birdman, based on worship of the sooty tern, arose to bring an end to the chaos.

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