Talk:Easter Island

Illustrations

The very same picture is attributed to Roggeveen 1722 (left side) and to La Pérouse 1786 (right side). According to Heyerdahl it is La Pérouse. On the left side, the hat-thief has been removed. Best regards Steen Thomsen.

Sweet potatoes

The sweet potato is an american plant, this article leans to the theory that it spread to Polynesia in a natural way. The article about sweet potato has another view: Transported home by polynesians visiting South America. Read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato#Dispersal Best regards Steen Thomsen.

Rename to Rapa Nui

The BBC is now using Rapa Nui as canonical, with Easter Island as an 'also called'. Example link. This appears to be relatively recent, with the reverse being true in 2021. Please give your !vote to rename or keep . Of course, this would go vise versa with the current redirect from Rapa Nui. Chumpih ^t 15:47, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

The official governmental name of the island is "Isla de Pascua" but the local language is also official (with Spanish) on the island, so "Rapa Nui" seems to be just as legitimate. Pascalulu88 (talk) 17:05, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

@Chumpih Seven-month necropost but Ngrams [1] seems to show quite monolithic dominance of the English name over the indigenous one. I think it's safe to say it'll be called Easter Island for a great while longer, much like it's still strongly Isla de Pascua in Spanish. Kyoto Grand (talk) 03:56, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

South American contact

Recent plant DNA research indicates pre-Columbian contact with South America: https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/obsidian-blades-with-food-traces-reveal-1st-settlers-of-rapa-nui-had-regular-contact-with-south-americans-1000-years-ago. this should probably be added. 2605:A601:F300:700:0:0:0:1349 (talk) 22:57, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

We cover this in Pre-Columbian_transoceanic_contact_theories#Sweet_potato. If Rapa Nui was settled in the 12th century then sweet potatoes had been in Polynesia for centuries beforehand. If settlement was very early, then it could have been before the sweet Potato reached polynesia, but in that case which is more credible, sporadic contact with the rest of Polynesia in the early settlement period, or that Easter island far from being isolated was in contact with both South America and Polynesia? So it is part of the wider Polynesian story - not specifically Rapa Nui. As for that source, it is a big jump from someone brought Sweet Potatoes from South America to Polynesia to regular contact between the two. Not sure how they justify that claim unless they are assuming that evidence for sweet potatoes is evidence that cargoes of sweet potatoes were regularly shipped from South america as opposed to there was at least one contact that involved bringing sweet potatoes to Polynesia and planting them there in the 1st millennia CE. ϢereSpielChequers 07:39, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

Mayor / Alcalde

The mayor of Rapa Nui is now Elizabeth Arévalo Pakarati, not Pedro Edmunds Paoa (source: https://www.rapanui.net/index.php/actividades/noticias/19545 ). Yot.il (talk) 12:38, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

Multiple Edits (mea culpa)

Apologies for the numerous edits (four) that I made that I could have achieved in a single edit. Please allow me to explain how I came to such an inefficient approach. I was looking for specific information regarding the island's ecology and how it had arrived at that state. I remember reading that its indigenous population had expended much of their economic energy and activity in producing the famous moari statues and how that pursuit had caused major ecological changes causing the islanders' economy to become unsustainable. I didn't know to what extent that theory was true, so I wanted to check. Consequently, I was skimming the article, not wanting to read it in full (it is quite long). While reading the Introduction, the second paragraph referred to an ‘ahu’ without any explanation as to what that was. Initially I thought to add an explanation/description after the word, but first I had to find out what it was/meant. Searching Wikipedia for ‘ahu’ led me to a disambiguation page, which included a link to “Ahu (Easter Island)”. I followed that link only to find that it's a redirect to this article. So I searched the article and the first occurrence of ‘ahu’ was also a link. I followed that only to find that it took me back to this article. Looking at the link in edit mode I discovered that it was identical to the one on the disambiguation page, so I resolved to edit it, initially by just removing it (as all it did was cause the article to reload), but I still wasn't any the wiser as to what an ahu was. Further searching in the article eventually led me to the section “Ahu (stone platforms)”. At last! I now knew what an ahu was (the heading was enough!). The various searches had led me to discover that ‘ahu’ occurred 40 times in the article. I thought editing them all would be overkill and many of them were references to place names (e.g. “Ahu Tongariki”). The first thing I did was to correct the internal link, but now that I'd found a relevant section, rather than just remove it I replaced it with a self-link to that section (“#Ahu (stone platforms)| ahu”). I then wanted to add the same link to the second paragraph of the Introduction, where is first encountered it. To do that I used the ‘edit here’ option once I'd found it. That option limits edits to the current section, a perfectly sensible restriction given the difficulty of finding the relevant occurrence of a word in a long article. In the process of all these searches I came across one other isolated incidence of the word that I thought would greatly benefit from adding the link. Having done that I then wondered whether I shouldn't add it to at least some of the other occurrences. I was in two minds about doing that, but I dislike inconsistency in Wikipedia articles, so I resolved to do so. Clearly it would be pointless to add a link to both occurrences of the word in the same sentence or even paragraph, so in the end I decided it would be sufficient to add it to the first occurrence in each section. I reasoned this would be the most likely circumstance in which someone would come across an isolated case. Regrettably, it wasn't until I'd reached this point that I thought that a series of individual edits could be irksome to anyone reviewing them, so it wasn't until that edit (the fourth) that it occurred to me to use ‘edit article’ rather than ‘edit here’. I added a further three links and corrected a self-link that read “#Ahu| ahu” (I didn't check whether it worked despite not giving the full section name, for the sake of consistency I just went ahead). Considering I only added another three links you may wonder why I didn't edit any of the others (my first search revealed 40 occurrences, but each edit adds one as ‘ahu’ occurs twice in each link). I didn't edit any place names beginning with ‘Ahu’, many of which were already links, and a lot of the other occurrences were in the ‘Ahu (stone platforms)’ section (no point in adding a link to where the link points to). That left only one or two and they were all subsequent references within a section in which I'd already added a link. Sorry for such a long and detailed explanation. I hope that my approach (first occurrence per section only) is satisfactory. If anyone really objects to my multiple edits I'd be prepared to go back, undo them and then redo them in a single edit, but I hope no one will find that necessary. That's actually why my explanation is so long and detailed: I wanted to show why I think my choices weren't unreasonable at that stage. Thank you for your perseverance and patience. SaintIX (talk) 05:28, 17 February 2025 (UTC)