Change and Resilience in Rapa Nui and the Pacific

This book is due to be published in January 2026 and is now available for backorder

This edited volume reflects the latest research on Rapa Nui and the Pacific in the fields of archaeology, education, history, Indigenous studies and museology. Archaeologists show the relationship between value judgments, archaeological data and mapping; economic, ideological and socio-political interactions and stone quarrying; rock art and voyaging histories and Rapa Nui astronomy. The book pays attention to European views including those of the explorer Jacob Roggeveen, the expedition leader Walter Knoche, nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts, the ethnologist Alfred Métraux, and Professor John Macmillan Brown. The representation of Rapa Nui in popular culture is discussed. Contributions show that Rapa Nui identity is expressed through ancestral medicine, finding ways to self-determination in relation to Chile, barkcloth traditions and body art, and architectural space and place. The violence of western education systems is unpacked in the context of Rapa Nui. Contributions also discuss how museum collections, be they photographs, stone and obsidian artefacts reveal new dimensions of Rapa Nui history. Concerns about the restitution of Rapa Nui objects and ancestral remains are explored. Authors discuss the still undeciphered Roŋoroŋo script from a historical, science and linguistic perspective and reminisce on 1970s life on Rapa Nui and ethno-archaeological experiments. Two contributions take the reader outside of Rapa Nui to Palau and the Marquesas.

Fanny Wonu Veys is curator Oceania at the Wereldmuseum and holds the chair Art and Material Culture of Oceania at Leiden University. She has curated Treasures from the depot: Easter Island (2022-2027) and is particularly interested in the significance of historical objects in a contemporary setting.

Jan J. Boersema holds the chair Principles of Environmental Sciences at Leiden University. In his inaugural address in 2002, he was the first to challenge the collapse theory of Rapa Nui. He elaborated his ideas in The Survival of Easter Island (CUP, Cambridge, 2015).

Gerard A. Persoon is Professor Environment and Development (em.) at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. He has specialized in environmental anthropology, indigenous peoples’ rights, and island studies. Most of his work is focused on Southeast Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines in particular.