Mike Pitts, "Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network—Mike Pitts, "Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island"
Aired: March 11, 2026; Host: Sydney; Guest: Mike Pitts

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Episode Overview

In this rich and insightful conversation, host Sydney speaks with archaeologist, writer, and broadcaster Mike Pitts about his new book, Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island (Bloomsbury, 2025). The episode explores the misconceptions, erased histories, and extraordinary achievements of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), directly challenging the so-called "ecocide" narrative and tracing both the archaeological record and the colonial interventions that shaped modern perceptions of the island and its people.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mike Pitts’ Connection to Rapa Nui (02:34–03:46)

• Pitts recalls first being captivated by Easter Island as a child, reading Thor Heyerdahl's adventure stories.
• His first, unplanned visit to the island in 1994 became a life-defining experience, leading to decades of research and ultimately this book.

"I kind of fell in love with the place when I was at school from reading a book by Thor Heyerdahl, which was a great adventure story... and eventually I got to the point where I felt I could write a book about Easter island."
—Mike Pitts (02:38–03:37)

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2. Debunking the “Ecocide” Thesis: Correcting the Record (04:14–10:53)

• Pitts’s research-driven books combine academic rigor and storytelling, here taking issue with the popular "ecocide" theory: the idea that islanders caused their own societal collapse through overexploitation before outsiders arrived.
• He traces the persistence of this myth to traumatic historical events: slave raids and disease in the 1860s reduced the population from ~5,000 to just over 100, fundamentally altering culture and leaving later Western observers unable to comprehend the island’s monuments.
• Pitts argues these calamities were the result of colonial violence, not an internal ecological disaster.

"What they missed, of course, is... it was actually the Europeans who caused this destruction."
—Mike Pitts (09:07–09:10)

• The myth of self-inflicted ruin has occluded the extraordinary ingenuity and resilience of Polynesian society on Rapa Nui.

"...what's been concealed by this eco science theory is the extraordinary achievement... They developed ways of coping with this so successfully that they turned the entire island into this monumental, creative model of their cosmogeny."
—Mike Pitts (09:51–10:47)

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3. The Routledges and the Lost Archive: Early Modern Fieldwork (11:42–25:01)

• The book centers on Katherine and Scoresby Routledge, an English couple who, in the early 20th century, conducted pioneering and systematic research on Rapa Nui.
• Their fieldwork was unique for its time: ethnographic interviews, archaeological excavations, and photographic documentation.

"As a married couple, this is my experience, it's unique... in this case I think it was very much a joint project."
—Mike Pitts (13:13–13:36)

• The Routledges arrived expecting a destroyed, cultureless island but were persuaded otherwise by collectors and contacts who revealed living memory of pre-slavery raid times.
• During their stay (1914–1915), they became enmeshed in a local uprising against Chilean colonial authority, deepening Katherine’s engagement with the islanders and challenging her preconceptions.

"This relationship that Catherine had with the leader of the revolt introduced her to islanders as individuals, as people, as people who were in control of their world and their lives, people with agency and history and culture."
—Mike Pitts (21:27–21:53)

• The First World War further extended and complicated their time on the island, leading to extensive documentation (much of it never published) that could have transformed subsequent archaeological understanding, had it not been lost.

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4. The Tragic Fate of the Routledge Archive and Its Consequences (26:10–34:44)

• Overwhelmed on their return to Britain, the Routledges failed to publish most of their data.
• Katherine’s later mental illness (and conflict with Scoresby) led to the dispersal, neglect, and partial loss of their archive.
• Only in the late 20th century was much of it rediscovered at the Royal Geographical Society.

"...if that research had been fully analyzed and published at the time, it would have changed the direction of understanding of Rapa Nui."
—Mike Pitts (25:21–25:27)

• In the Routledges’ absence, pseudo-historical theories and adventurers like Thor Heyerdahl dominated public imagination.

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5. Heyerdahl, the Kon-Tiki, and the Persistent Myth of South American Origins (34:56–38:30)

• Thor Heyerdahl, famous for his Kon-Tiki raft voyage, claimed (falsely) to be the first scientific excavator on Rapa Nui and asserted that the island’s culture stemmed from South America.
• Although Heyerdahl’s expedition produced detailed site reports, his racist, anti-Polynesian interpretations undermined his credibility.

"...whatever some of his archaeologists decided... Thor Heyerdahl went with an agenda which was that he believed it was South Americans who discovered Rapa Nui and who raised all the statutes....And that was a racist attitude, racist inspired attitude in the sense that...he explicitly sometimes dismisses people with brown skin as being incapable..."
—Mike Pitts (37:08–38:14)

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6. The Polynesian Story: Who Were the First Rapa Nui? (38:54–44:40)

• Today’s evidence is clear: Rapa Nui was settled by Polynesian navigators (~1200 CE), the world’s greatest ocean explorers, who likely also made direct voyages to South America (as evidenced by sweet potatoes and minute genetic traces).
• Pitts details their double-hulled ships, navigation by stars and waves, and agricultural strategies necessary for survival on the ecologically fragile island.

"Polynesians were, bar none, the world's greatest ocean navigators and explorers... They discovered Hawaii to the far north... Aotearoa, New Zealand... and in the far southeast, they discovered Rapa Nui..."
—Mike Pitts (40:22–41:22)

• He highlights the sophistication of pre-contact agriculture on Rapa Nui, as observed by 18th-century French agronomists—contradicting claims of environmental collapse.

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7. Why the Statues? Cosmology, Stone, and Community (49:09–61:13)

• Pitts addresses the big question: why did such a small and resource-challenged community build so many massive stone statues (moai)?
• He grounds his explanation in Polynesian cosmology: ancestors, birth, death, and a worldview made material in the island’s layout, with the statue quarry (east) as a symbolic birthplace and the far-west caldera as a realm of the afterlife. The statues, carved from uniquely workable volcanic stone, offered a local solution to the absence of traditional wood-carving materials.

"If we're to look for explanations...the first place we would go is to other Polynesian islands..."
—Mike Pitts (50:36–51:10)

"I think what's going on is on the one hand you've got this volcanic...outcrop on the East island where the statues are created as the kind of birthplace...the far side of the island, you got this caldera which is the kind of where the souls disappear. But in between, along the coast, they're raising all these smaller statues..."
—Mike Pitts (59:45–60:26)

• The scope of the statue-building served both spiritual and social-political purposes (ancestor veneration, community prestige, inter-group competition without endemic warfare).

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8. Unresolved Mysteries & Looking Forward (61:17–63:36)

• Many questions remain about Rapa Nui’s complex society and political structure. Pitts shares he’s working on three new peer-reviewed articles, including discoveries made after his book went to press.

"One of them is a discovery I made after the book had just gone to press...and the third one is about this idea...of the island as a map of Polynesian, the Polynesian universe."
—Mike Pitts (61:58–62:11)

• He recently uncovered a rare photograph of the removal of a moai statue to the British Museum—a story with contemporary resonance.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• "What they missed...was actually the Europeans who caused this destruction." (09:07)
• "As a married couple, this is my experience, it's unique...in this case...it was very much a joint project." (13:13–13:36)
• "This relationship that Catherine had with the leader of the revolt introduced her to islanders as individuals, as people, as people who were in control of their world and their lives..." (21:27–21:53)
• "Polynesians were, bar none, the world's greatest ocean navigators and explorers." (40:22)
• "If we're to look for explanations...the first place we would go is to other Polynesian islands." (50:36–51:10)
• "They carried from this central core...this culture outwards and it remained Polynesian." (51:10)
• "There must have been an element of competition between different communities, I think, across the island, but ultimately all working together..." (61:10–61:13)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:34 – Pitts’ first encounter with Easter Island, origins of the book
• 04:14 – The ecocide thesis, colonial trauma, and misread history
• 11:42 – The Routledges: researchers and their forgotten archive
• 16:13 – Local uprising, the Routledges’ immersion in island life
• 26:10 – Tragedy of the Routledge archive, loss to scholarship
• 34:56 – Thor Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki, and pseudo-historical legacies
• 38:54 – Evidence for Polynesian, not South American, origins
• 49:09 – Why build statues? Cosmology, materials, and monuments
• 61:49 – What’s next for Mike Pitts’ research

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Episode Takeaways

• Pitts’s book offers both new research and a powerful revision of familiar stories about Rapa Nui, championing the scientific and cultural achievements of its Polynesian inhabitants.
• The episode is characterized by engaging narrative, evidence-based myth-breaking, and profound respect for indigenous knowledge.
• The fate of the Routledge archives stands as a cautionary tale about how easily history can be distorted by lost or neglected sources.

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For further reading:
Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island by Mike Pitts (Bloomsbury, 2025)

End of Content Summary

Transcript

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[Fox News Announcer]

Welcome to the New Books Network

[Mike Pitts]

hello

[Sydney (Host)]

and welcome to New Books Network. I'm Sydney, a host on the Channel and today I have with me Mike Pitts his new book, island at the Edge of the World, which is about Easter island or, as he's going to explain, Rapa Nui. Before we begin, Mike Pitts is a writer, broadcaster, archaeologist and former museum curator. His books include A Fair Weather, Excavations at Boxgrove, Digging for Richard iii, Digging Out Britain and How to Build Stowagehenge. He's written for almost all the most important newspapers in Britain, including the Guardian, the Observer, the Times, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the New Scientists, BBC History Museum, Spectator, and several others, as well as conducting original research and publishing in peer reviewed journals. He, of course, also is the former editor of British Archaeology and is a fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries. Mike welcome to the New Books Network. Maybe begin by just sort of telling us why you decided to write this

[Mike Pitts]

book okay, thank you, Sidney.

In some respects, it's a book I

wanted to write for a very, very

long time because I kind of fell in love with the place when I

was at school from reading a book by Thor Heyerdahl, which was a great adventure story.

And eventually I never imagined this would happen, but one day I actually ended

up on the island.

And it's a strange thing to say,

but it was actually not planned.

I'd been in the Pacific, in the Marquesas and in Tahiti, and I was kind of backpacking and we had a mountain bike and things didn't really work out.

It was much more expensive than we'd expected to be in French Polynesia.

And so we had to find somewhere

else that was cheaper.

We had a kind of month left

this trip, and bizarrely, the cheapest place was several thousand miles away was Easter Island.

So we flew there and I spent a month there. And that was in 1994. And between then and now I did

a lot of stuff.

I wrote my first book and I wrote other books. And eventually I got to the point

where I felt I could write a book about Easter island. And I had a new agent who found publishers who were interested. And so then the book came to be.

[Sydney (Host)]

But it was always good to get the sort of like actual biographical story about how you came to be connected to this. However, the book also explicitly sets out to correct the record. And some of our listeners might just be curious about sort of Rapa Nui. Could you maybe just tell us what the sort of prevailing wisdom is that sort of brought you to this book? Maybe talk about the ecocide thesis that the book is writing explicitly against and just sort of set the scene that you're intervening in.

[Mike Pitts]

Well, as a kind of independent researcher who began their career in university very early on, I write through a sort of strange perspective in that on the one hand, I need to earn a living, so I work as a freelance journalist and I write books that end

up on the marketplace.

But also I'm very keen on research. And so my books tend to spin

off one or two peer reviewed articles.

I mean, at the moment with East Ramond, I'm writing a couple of. In fact, there'll probably be three peer

reviewed articles, if they get accepted, that have come out of the process of writing about Rapa Nui. And all my books, to a greater

or lesser extent, are a bit more

than just journalism in the sense that they're not just telling stories by going to other books, but there's original research behind all of them.

And so, for example, with this Rapa

new book, there's a huge number of footnotes and references, academic references, which are,

to a large extent, I think some

of those are for other academics, if you like, you know, the justification for the research that I've unearthed.

And in the process, then, they're all books that are trying to tell new

stories using this research.

And that's particularly true of this Rapa Nui book. And it began when I was on

the island in 1994.

I learned about an Edwardian English couple

who'd visited there and done what I was told was this extraordinary, unrepeatable research. But all their records had been destroyed

and nobody knew about it, and I

didn't know about them, which was surprising to me because I'd always had a long interest in the history of British archaeology, and it seemed like, why didn't

I know about this couple? So it began with me wanting to

tell the story of this couple and the research they'd done. And as I got deeper into that,

I realized that actually this was a

much bigger story and that it wasn't just about them, but it was also about the whole Western understanding and appreciation of the island's history. And ultimately, I found that was embedded

in a very brief period of just

a few years in the 1860s, when

an island population of around 5,000 was

reduced to 110 through a combination of slave raids and emigration, disease, the usual sort of colonial stuff.

And it was at that precise moment when the first visiting scientific expeditions arrived

on the island, and there were six of them, of which the first was the British.

And they established a kind of baseline for understanding, outsider understanding of what had

happened on the island in previous centuries.

And what that meant was that North American European understanding of Rapa Nui was based on an island that had a few hundred people on it who had no real engagement with their past because

their culture had been severely, traumatically damaged and their population substantially reduced.

So that the visitors saw this island

and couldn't compute how the people they saw could either culturally or numerically, have created these hundreds and hundreds of huge statues.

So there was a disconnect between the islanders that Europeans saw and the culture,

the civilization that had been on the island before the Europeans arrived. And that continued throughout the 20th century in various forms. I mean, it took a racist. A racist light quite strongly with Torhandal in the middle 20th century, but then it kind of morphed into this ecocide theory that you named, and this is

still very popular even among scientists.

But particularly among non archaeologists and non scientists.

So if you like economists and bloggers

and podcasters and so on and journalists, and indeed one of our former prime ministers has espoused this theory, Boris Johnson.

And the idea there is is that the explanation for this disconnect between what

Europeans first saw in the 19th century

and the earlier history, this glorious civilization

that created all these statues, is that the islanders themselves destroyed their society and their communities by overexploitation of this fragile, tiny island.

And as a result of hunger, the

society collapsed in a state of war and cannibalism.

And they pushed over all the statues, having abandoned their faith in the religion to save them.

And when Europeans first arrived, they saw this kind of devastated island with all the statues flat on the ground and everything destroyed.

And what they missed, of course, is, and this is what a large part of my book is about what they missed.

It was actually the Europeans who caused this destruction.

And so for me, it's a really

important story to tell because it's an unusual story in the sense that it's such a tiny little place with such a vast reputation because of the statutes and the level of destruction was extreme, from a population of 5,000 to barely more than 100.

But it's also a representative story in

many respects of the impact of colonial European interventions around the world. And so it has a lot of resonance and I think. But it's also very significant for Polynesians, not least, of course, people living on the island today, but also in the

wider Pacific, because what's been concealed by

this eco science theory is the extraordinary achievement. Excuse me, the extraordinary achievement.

The Polynesians who discovered this really remote

island, managed to create a successful society

on this island, which was right from the start was very small. And that in itself was a problem for sustaining a long term community, was

ecologically fragile, was further south than most

of Polynesian islands, and it was. Most of the weather was coming from

the south, ultimately from the South Pole.

And so ecologically and climatically, it was a challenging place.

But they developed ways of coping with this so successfully that they were able to turn the entire island into this monumental, creative model of their cosmogeny.

And there's really nothing else like it,

not just in the Pacific, but I think anywhere in the world.

[Sydney (Host)]

Yeah, no, that's a. It is truly a fascinating story. You do really from. I mean, I don't know the story firsthand, but it does really come through that is both a piece of research, but also like a way of sort of taking what has Effectively become a morality tale about the human condition sort of projected onto an island and telling like a story that is actually rooted in the evidence of the island's history. However, before we get to that, and I will get to that for all of our listeners, maybe tell us a little bit about the actual sources that you end up working with. That allows us to do this because you spend about half the book tracing the story of the. This couple called the Routledges, have any connection to the modern academic publisher. But could you basically just start by just telling us a little bit about who they are and why they ended up wanting to go to Rapa Nui?

[Mike Pitts]

Okay, you're right. I mean, the book uses a wide

range of resources, some of which are scientific and technical, archaeological, the historic archives going back into the, into the 18th century. The Ravitlidges, Catherine Scoresby Routledges, as you say, nothing to do with the publisher,

were very wealthy English couple.

And particularly Catherine, she came from a wealthy sort of industrial banking family from the north of England.

And they were unusual in many respects. And they were interested in not just

traveling, which was quite a common thing for wealthy individuals of the time, but

also researching and significantly and really unusually

putting that research on record.

So their first expedition, within almost weeks of their marriage, they went out to

Africa and they spent some months with the Kikuyi people.

And when they came back, they wrote

up their research and published it as

a book that was, for example, it

was very well reviewed in Nature Journal.

It would, you know, it was basically

a decent piece of ethnographic research and it included some extraordinary things. One of the things they did was they recorded wax cylinders. This is in very early 20th century

of people singing and playing music which clearly have survived. And as a married couple, this is

my experience, it's unique.

I haven't come across anything quite like it. You tend to get adventurous, ego driven

men going out on their own or at least portraying their research and their field work as their own.

And you get occasionally married couples going

out and it's the man who takes

the credit for the work and so on.

But in this case I think it was very much a joint project.

And recently Catherine's been discovered and she's portrayed as this woman basically who did

all work and her husband didn't really help her.

And I actually think one of the,

oddly, one of the corrective things I've tried to make in the book, although I don't make a big issue of

it, is that I think her husband

actually played a more significant role in the research than he's given credit.

And I think it was genuinely a

joint project between the two of them.

So after that African expedition and they

got that published and again Scoresby wrote

a couple of what we would today

call peer reviewed articles as well as this joint book that they did.

They wanted to go on another adventure and this time they went to the

British Museum and asked for advice, where can we go that would be useful.

And this curator said, why don't you

go to Easter Island?

And their immediate response to that was,

well, we don't want to go there because there's nothing left.

So they already had bought into this

idea that the island had been destroyed by islanders and all that was left were sort of missionaries in a modern community.

And I think particularly for Catherine there was. Well, first, for both of them there was this sense that if they'd gone out there, it would have been little

different from staying in London and going to clubs and things where they'd be talking to other colonials. But there was a collector, a lawyer,

who in his private, in his spare time, was a.

A very assiduous, energetic collector of artifacts in the Pacific. He never went out there, but he built up a great network of contacts and compiled a huge collection, most of which is now in the Field Museum in Chicago, incidentally.

And he had contacts out in Rapa

Nui who told him that this wasn't

actually true, that there were islanders who

had memories that went back before these slave raids, before the damage that occurred and so on, that it really was worth going out. There was stuff you could learn, there was good research you could do, and they were persuaded.

And so they went out and spent

about 17, 16, 17 months on the island and had the most extraordinary time and came back with this wealth of research and information.

[Sydney (Host)]

Yeah, no, it's a fascinating story and there's much more detail in the book. Maybe could you tell us sort of a little bit about what actually happens on Rapa Nui? Because they're not planning on spending as they end up doing, and as they're there there's actually an uprising. And so they end up in some sense embroiled in local politics that they came not even really believing existed. Can you just tell us a little bit about that story and kind of how they end up being accidentally witnesses to something that otherwise might not have been written down.

[Mike Pitts]

I think if you're an academic researcher,

you can identify with having to adjust your project to suit the, the political and social context of which you're working. And often you end up with a completely different project while you're still trying

to hang on to the possibility of

actually getting grant funding.

And it ends Dream Tries. That's what happened to the Routledges. I mean, they planned to spend six months on East Rhinos as they knew it, and then another six months elsewhere

in Polynesia, where they hope to trace the origins of the islanders who were discovered Easter Island.

And their reading had convinced them before

they even set out that Easter island was a Polynesian island. And that was not what everybody at the time was saying. There were all sorts of crackpot ideas about where the people who built the statues had come from, but they were pretty convinced they were just Polynesian islanders. And so they planned to spend six months on Easter island and then another six months elsewhere in the Pacific trying to track down where the Easter Islanders had first come from. Now, when they arrived on Rapa Nui, very shortly after they started field work there, there was an uprising on the island. And I think partly it was stimulated by their presence. You know, they were quite prominent on the island because they were hiring locals to help them with the field work. They brought a hell of a lot

of equipment with them, and they had

this fantastic ship, and not many people

came to visit the island, and they had wealth. And I think it stimulated some of

the islanders to rebel. And it just brought to the surface simmering resentment about Chile, which had.

Had seized the island, had claimed the

island as its own in the 19th century. And the way the island was being administered, which was then being run as a sheep ranch. And islanders, I mean, it's hard to credit this, but islanders had. Had been rounded up, surviving islands had been rounded up and settled in the

one sort of village town that missionaries

had created on the island, on one side of the island and walled in. And the purpose of that was to release the rest of the island where Polynesians had lived for centuries, with their monuments and their houses and their fields, to release that for sheep ranching and cattle.

So there were good reasons why islanders would be unhappy and would rebel. And quite a violent episode broke out.

There were guns involved, and they slaughtered hundreds of cattle and sheep.

And this missionary town was running with

blood from slaughtered animals and extraordinary thing. And they had good reason to be scared.

And after a few weeks, Scoresby and

Catherine decided to move away from the town to the far side of the island and set up camp.

And they did that, and they got

messages every so often that the ranch manager was in danger and so on.

And then out of the blue, a

ship arrived from Chile, a military ship, and just put an end to the whole thing. And so that was over.

But in the process, Catherine bonded with

the leader of this uprising, who was

another woman, and she was a Polynesian

islander and she was well known on the island. And she'd been appointed a catechist by the missionaries, so in effect a priest.

And she had considerable

sway on the island.

She, you know, she had great respect

from islanders and she was able to manage this revolt.

And curiously, she and Catherine, I think,

had a certain identity. Catherine herself had rebelled against a male dominated society back in England. She'd written for suffragette articles, she'd been on marches and given lectures and stuff about the rights of women.

And I think this woman on Easter

island was in a similar position. Polynesian society is male dominated. She herself had been badly abused by an early husband who was subsequently murdered

by members of her family. And what that meant for Catherine was that it achieved something that not only

she hadn't anticipated, but was completely contrary to what she'd had in her mind when she set out.

She came from an upper class, very

wealthy, high status situation in Britain in which for her, the great majority of the population of Britain were almost another form of life.

You know, the working class were people who behaved and thought differently from her own people. And she carried, as did so many colonials, she carried that attitude with her

out into the Pacific. And so she arrived on Easter and thinking, these islanders are not like us. She called them her children. And of course they use words like primitive and the missionaries would use terms like savages. You know, it's just ridiculous stuff that we look at now, but at the

time, you know, common.

And there were reports from the island, constant reports from the island that they could, the islanders couldn't be trusted. They thieved all the time and they were lazy and they were dirty and so on. This relationship that Catherine had with the leader of the revolt introduced her to islanders as individuals, as people, as people who were in control of their world and their lives, people with agency and history and culture.

And I think that was a profound thing for her. And that might not have mattered if

they'd left after six months.

But then they thought, right, we'll stay

a bit longer, because this had interfered with their research. And so they continued a bit longer, but barely had they started. Then another thing happened, which was the First World War.

And unknown to them while they were

there, the First World War had broken out in Europe.

And the first they knew about it

was when the German Eastern Pacific Fleet anchored Auch island. And about a dozen ships, including some major warships, appeared over the horizon and stayed there for about a week.

And it was only after they left

that they learned what was actually going on.

And this then endangered themselves.

They were understandably, absolutely terrified. And the reports they were getting from visiting Germans were that Paris was in flames, there were German warships sailing up

the Thames into London, and all Canada was republican state being taken over by journey.

All sorts of bizarre stories.

And of course, they had no idea

what was going on. They had no way of checking any of this.

So Scoresby, who was a sailor, took

the first opportunity to get over to Chile, where their ship was. They had their own boat, where their ship was stuck in harbor, couldn't get out because of the military activity.

So then Catherine was left alone on the island with only one other member

of their original crew. And she was there for some months on her own. And again, she engaged with islanders. You know, by then she'd picked up

enough, taught herself enough Polynesian to be

able to interview people in Polynesian, and she interviewed a lot of people.

So she kind of veered off the

original plan, which was more Scoresby's gig, which was to record physical remains, to record statues. And they excavated at various ruined sites on the island.

And she was less interested in the

stones and more interested in the people.

And in the process, she recorded all these legends and names and stories and beliefs and compiled. She just. You could see, looking at her, much

of her stuff survives in now in the Archives, the Royal Geographical Site in London.

And you could see what one of

the things that was happening is. She's increasingly sort of using every scrap of paper and cardboard she can find on the island to record this stuff on. You know, there's stuff written on pieces of card, on the backs of letters and things, and they took a lot of diaries and notebooks with them. But she ran out. Clearly she was recording more than she'd expected to do. And there is this huge trove of stuff.

I think there was three or four

tin trunk fulls of documents and photographs when they left.

And they had a camera, they took

a lot of photographs, fantastic photographs.

And the sad thing is that for

reasons which we can go into, if you're interested, this stuff was never published

in the way that they had previously

published their African research.

And she had all sorts of plans

to do so, but it didn't happen.

And then the archive disappeared, and a

lot of it resurfaced recently.

But because of the timing of the

disappearance and the recovery, then the 20th

century basically did without their research. And I think that had a fundamental negative impact in the sense that if

that research had been fully analyzed and published at the time, it would have changed the direction of understanding of Rapa Nui.

[Sydney (Host)]

Yeah, no, it's, it's quite clear from the book that the Routledge is while imperfect again, there's an anecdote where they learn that a corpse belongs to a European and finally decide to bury it. They're. They're not, they're not perfect sources, but they are scientists, as you point out. Like they are actually in some way trying to engage with the underlying source material and the way that we can, that you were now able to go back and use their material. And after that there's sort of like a right turn into things that don't appear to have a huge amount of value. Maybe just briefly, kind of tell us what happens to Catherine's archive, What does? Like what happens to Rapindui archaeology afterwards? It really just spirals out of control.

[Mike Pitts]

I think they were, when they got back to Britain, I think they were

overwhelmed with the amount of information they acquired during this time. They had to abandon this idea that they go and look at other islands because they ran out of time and resources. And so they came more or less, they came straight back to Britain. Took them about half a year to do that.

And they started off by giving a

lot of lectures to scientific organizations. Catherine wrote a number of what again we would call peer reviewed articles.

But when she gave lectures, her basic

thesis was that the statues had been carved and erected by Polynesian islanders was rejected by the scientific community. They wanted to argue that it was Melanesians, people from the far west of the Pacific, who had come to Rapinery,

and that there might have been Polynesians

already on the island or possibly Polynesians arrived after the Melanesians.

But you had these two, what they

referred to explicitly as two different races on the island and that it was Melanesians who'd done the work. And Catherine was convinced this was wrong,

but she didn't have the kind of

scientific confidence and authority, I think, to stand up explicitly against these, these Oxford scholars.

So given that they'd had to abandon

their original project to explore other islands

in the Pacific, they thought they would

go back out again.

And they mounted a second expedition to Polynesia.

And this time they spent a lot of time on other islands.

And when they got back, Catherine, it

seems, was beginning to show signs of mental illness.

And that research, almost none of it

was ever published The Easter island stuff. Catherine wrote a fantastic book and her husband Scoresby helped with it and wrote a few chapters at the end as well. And there's a huge amount of very clever, very wise thinking and information in that book. And she did, as I mentioned, she managed to publish a few peer reviewed articles as well, although leaving most of the records unpublished. And she promised several times that she

had material both for another book, a

more academic, more scholarly book about Easter

island, but also a book about their

second expedition, about what she'd learned interviewing islanders on other Pacific islanders. And she was convinced that basically she'd found the island from which Easter island had been discovered.

And she believed that she even had

stories being told to her by islanders that might have actually represented the original expedition that went out to Easter Islands. And this is not impossible.

Stories like that on Rabinoo are, I

think, barely credible because of the cultural damage that occurred in the 19th century and the disruptions that occurred. But there are plenty of islands in Polynesia where that kind of effect did not happen.

You know, where you can think you've

got, you have generally got traditions and law going back centuries that may contain elements of truth. However, it didn't take long before Catherine's illness began to interfere both with her ability to write up her research and also importantly with her relationship with her husband. She bought this incredibly beautiful, wonderful, monumentally expensive, I mean, house in London that overlooks Hyde park, an incredibly prestigious location today as much as it was then.

And very shortly she booted Scoresby out.

She put all his possessions into store, into rental storage and left him out on the street.

And he tried to regain possession of

his stuff and entry to his house over a period of about a year. But eventually he gave up as Catherine's state of health seemed to be deteriorating. And she was putting out posters, you know, she locked, she bolted herself into the house and closed, boarded up all

the windows, wouldn't let anybody in, posted

notices outside saying people were trying to poison her.

And, you know, I think it's no

doubt that she was not well. Now, of course today things would have been very different, but what happened then was that scores be arranged for her to be effectively kidnapped and taken to a mental asylum. And there she spent the rest of her life. And during that time, despite her request, she was unable to gain access to any of her records. And Scoresby, her husband, gave the Easter island records to the Royal Geographical Society.

And when she died, her will showed

that she had left a significant sum. She died in 1935, had left a significant sum for her or their joint research and fieldwork to be analyzed and published. And it had to be done within three years. Her death, it's the financial equivalent today of what would be needed to fully fund three PhDs. You know, so we're talking about a decent sum of money. And of course, the actual research, the field work, as it were, had already been done. You know, the records were all there, they just needed to be analyzed and so on.

And she recommended that somebody at the

British Museum should be consulted over who should. Where this should be done, how it should be done, and when it was finished, the records will be given to the British Museum or to the Royal Anthropological Institute. In practice, what happened was that Scoresby took control of the will, this subpart

of the will, and he didn't reveal to anybody the extent of that archive.

So he never mentioned the fact that a couple of trunk fulls of records have been loaned, as he was. He didn't actually give them. He loaned them to the Royal Geographical Society with a load of photographs.

And he didn't work with the British

Museum, he actually worked with the Royal Anthropological Institute, which, among all the many organizations that were named by the media, by the press during their expeditions, was the one that was never mentioned. So their expedition to Easter island was very often portrayed as a British Museum expedition, which it wasn't, it was a private one. But they had strong links with the Museum.

So it's interesting that when it came

to negotiate over her will and what would happen to these records, Scoresby avoided the British Museum and took it to the Royal Anthropological Institute, which had no reason to know that it was anything other than three notebooks that he showed them. And I think what happened is that in his loss of his relationship with his wife, whatever it was, and we

don't know what really, how they got

on, you know, how that worked. But in the loss and the frustration over her illness, the cost, I suppose, as well, you know, financial cost, was quite strong trying to sort this out, that he just lost patience. He didn't want to lose control of these records, these fieldwork records that Catherine and he had compiled over many years together.

And he couldn't bring himself to let

the British Museum have them.

And the result was that he, shortly,

not long after that, he himself died. And nobody knew that the Royal Geographical Society had all these Easter island records. Nobody knew that there were other records that were still in Scoresby's possession when he died and that were in various

houses that he owned.

And it was only in the 1970s that archaeologists came across the Royal Geographical Society records fields and the other stuff which largely relates to their second expedition has surfaced in the past decade or so in auction houses and has been bought and then disappeared again. And so, you know, there's a huge loss there. The Royal Geographical thankfully, you know, we got most, not all, but we got most of the Easter island stuff at the Royal Geographical Statute.

But there's so much of it and

it's so disorganized and chaotic and this is a feature of the record keeping and you know, for handwriting, it's not always easy to read and so on.

It hasn't been fully researched at all.

And I'm absolutely convinced and what I have been able to get out of this stuff myself, I'm convinced there's a terrific amount of really valuable information still resting in those archives that's yet to be, to be exposed.

[Sydney (Host)]

Yes. And because the archive was not known about, instead of an archaeological tradition that could build on the Routledge's work, what we got was something closer to what Thor Heyerdahl was doing with his sort of famous Kon Tiki expedition. So this question is for my father, who really did love telling me about the Kon Tiki book. I've actually seen the Kon Tiki Museum in Norway. However, Thar Heyerdahl was not what you would call a science. Could you tell us a little bit about his expedition and the broader theory of South American origins of Rapa Nui that we get along with him?

[Mike Pitts]

Fohardog claimed to be the first person

to excavate on East Rand.

Now partly that's understandable for reasons that I've explained. You know, the Routledges were, and they

did a lot of excavation. The Routledge's work was not well known because of the way this archive had disappeared. But partly that was because of the way he invented his own story. And he did actually know better than that.

And the Contigu expedition first of all

set out in his mind to show that South Americans could have discovered Easter Island.

And it's a fantastic story.

And they sailed in this raft which basically just was picked up by the Pacific currents and they ended up wrecked on a small island in Polynesia, French Polynesia.

And then after that having to his

mind prove that it was possible for South Americans to have discovered Easter island,

he then went to Easter island in

a very well organized expedition.

And in many ways I think the

best archaeological expedition there's been in the sense that he recruited some first rate archaeologists, mostly from North America to his team, and they wonderful to see. They published their research very shortly after the expedition was over in a couple of absolutely enormous monographs and other articles as well. But the research in the excavations was really well published. So it was, I think, a triumph of research. The difficulty was that whatever some of

his archaeologists decided on the basis of

the evidence they had was a combination of ethnography and particularly of archaeology, excavation, an understanding of Polynesia elsewhere, Polynesian island elsewhere.

Despite whatever they might have said, Thor

Heyerdahl went with an agenda which was that he believed that it was South

Americans who discovered Rapa Nui and who

raised all the statutes. And some of his experts might have

said that that wasn't true.

But he continued with his belief and

wrapped his research in this previous understanding

that it was South Americans who had discovered Rapa Nui.

And that was a racist attitude, racist

inspired attitude in the sense that these

South Americans who discovered Israel were themselves

ultimately descended from people from the Old World, from the Middle East.

And he explicitly sometimes dismisses people with

brown skin as being incapable of creating the monuments on Rapa Nui.

So there's difficulties with Hardahl's work where

you have a combination of some decent fieldwork and really well published stuff on the one hand, but on the other hand, some pretty dreadful ideas behind the interpretation of this fieldwork.

[Sydney (Host)]

And so I want to sort of, towards the end of the interview, ask you to tell us a little bit more about the book does about Rapa Nui itself. And so could you tell us a little bit more about where today the evidence stands on how people ended up in Rapa Nui and how this fits into the broader story of Polynesian history as they, at the time of the Routledges, and I believe today, all understood that they were Polynesian. This was sort of something that outsiders were confused.

[Mike Pitts]

I mean, there's absolutely no reason to

think that the people who discovered and settled Rapa Nui were anything other than Polynesia.

There's not a trace of American from

anywhere along the whole South American continent, of any cultural elements that are so distinctive of that continent. Anywhere in French Polynesia or specifically on

Rapa Nui, there is a bit of

South American DNA, and I think that's quite convincing.

We can now see that both from

modern DNA historical analysis and from ancient DNA from human remains on the island that was there before, long before any European came near the island, bringing South American people with them.

But I think the explanation for that

has to lie in Polynesian discovery of the continent of South America.

And we've known for a long time,

indeed, going right back into the 18th century, when the first Europeans traveling the Pacific commented on it, that sweet potato were a staple part of the Polynesian diet. And it is a domestic plant native to South America, not the Pacific, this particular variety.

So we've known for some time there

was some kind of contact with South America, But I think it only makes

sense that it was Polynesians who discovered

South America and then went back out in the Pacific. Now, the reason I say that is

that Polynesians were, bar none, the world's

greatest ocean navigators and explorers. South Americans had plenty of ships, but they sailed up and down the coast. They were not ocean adventurers. They had no reason to go out into the ocean, and they didn't really have the technology or the expertise.

Now, this expertise that Polynesians had enabled them, around 1100, 1200 of the Christian era, to branch out from what we

now call French Polynesia, the Society Islands, in the center of the Pacific, in all directions in search of new land.

And they found it everywhere.

They found almost every island in the Pacific. So they go north thousands. I mean, we're talking about huge distances here. I mean, the Pacific Ocean covers a third of the planet.

You know, there's nothing comparable. They discovered Hawaii to the far north,

they discovered Aotearoa, New Zealand down to the southwest, lots of little islands in between. And in the far southeast, they discovered Rapa Nui. And ultimately, as I said, I think pretty sure they discovered the South American continent. They did this with ships that are very distinctive. They had two hulls, so they're sometimes often called double canoes. I mean, I think of them as ships rather than canoes because it gives a better impression of the type of craft they were.

And they were similar in scale to

the ships that Vikings explored Europe and North America with, or ancient Greek triremes that you see in movies, you know, with all these rowers. And they had huge crews, these ships, and they had a deck that spanned the two hulls on which they would build houses, little huts to live in and shelter. And they carried, of course, to explore these, to. To colonize these new islands that they found across the Pacific. They had to travel with live animals, with pigs and chicken and fire they took with them and so on, and whole communities on these shifts. And they were extraordinarily skilled navigators. They were able. You know, we can see this from 18th Century Records.

They were able to navigate over vast

distances without the information that European sailors had.

And they would a lot of it was just kind of maintaining a mental

three dimensional map of the world in which they were sailing. And that constructed out of a combination of observations of the sky, of waves and currents, birds the color of light and so on, all sorts of things. And they would measure distances in time, not in miles or anything else, but

they would say, so the distance between

one island and Rapa Nui in one direction was two or three times the distance of the same journey in the other direction when it was measured in time and battling winds and currents that were going different ways.

So around about 1200 in the Christian

era, Polynesians discovered Rapa Nui.

I think they would have been both

very excited because it was so far,

but also fairly rapidly.

I think they would have felt disillusioned because the island was small and the ecology was quite challenging.

Now, the size of the island is

quite significant because there are a number

of islands that were found by Europeans

in their early travels which were not occupied when nobody was there. But archaeologists later discovered, had been discovered and settled by Polynesians, but those communities had died out.

And those are almost without exception.

Those are really small islands.

And Rapa Nui is on a size of island that might well have been abandoned through failure of, you know, failure of the ability to maintain, create and

maintain a community with the ecology and the resources that the island supplied. And a big factor there was water supply.

And Rapa Nui, funnily enough, has no

rivers or streams at all, among its other challenges.

But what the people on the island

managed to do, and we can see

this most clearly from 18th century records

left by one of four expeditions that arrived then, for which we have good records from Europe. And that's the French expedition. We can see that they had developed a really sophisticated agricultural gardening regime. We can see echoes of that in the archaeological evidence as well. There's plenty of evidence to support this, but I think it's this French 18th century records that really tell us what was going on. And the reason we have such a good record is that the French expedition

uniquely brought with it a man who

was an experienced agriculturalist. He was a gardener, and he was there on the expedition specifically to report back to France, to the king, on the agricultural potential of the Pacific, of opportunities for France to grow and trade and profit from growing food. So this guy gives us a record of what was happening on the island at that time.

And we see fields planted out in rows. We see banana trees, you know, almost

like a modern farm, planted out with string in rows.

We see composting we see manuring.

We see burning weeds and scattering the ash as fertilizer.

We see what I think is green

manure in growing green crops that are

then dug in to improve the soil.

We see crop rotation. We see crops being grown in one part of the island and then after a time, the fields being left fallow to recover, the soils to recover, and so on.

We see walls being little walls being

built around particular trees that were important for fabric, trees that supply material for making bark cloth to protect the trees from wind and sea spray. We see banana trees planted in holes dug in the ground to concentrate moisture from dew and rain.

And we actually see, there's a map

that shows part of the island with these fields on it.

Very densely packed, well organized, clearly well

managed fields with a lot of trees scattered around, orchard type trees scattered around the fields.

Now, if you read some of the

other descriptions of the island in the 18th century, particularly the British records of Captain Cook, you get a very, very different picture. And this is the picture that has been used by people to argue that the islanders destroy their island. You get a picture of devastation of burnt ground and dusty soils and nothing grown. Although curiously, they were well fed by islanders.

You know, islanders never, when a European

ship arrived, they never sort of rushed up and said, God, give us some,

you know, can we have your chickens?

They never asked for food. They was able to supply food very happily, but somehow that got missed.

You know, in the, in the wider

descriptions, the island has been kind of some kind of abandoned desert with no trees and no water. The water's interesting because what happened there is that the island is small, low,

and the, the ground of the rock is very porous.

And so water, rain just soaked into

the ground, but then resurfaced the water

table just off the coast. So they actually got their fresh water from springs around the coast, coming up through seawater.

And in the early 20th century, sheep

ranchers would build walls to stop sheep going out to sea. And clearly what the sheep were doing was going to drink fresh water just off the coast.

And the ranchers thought they were mad

and so built these walls to stop them going into the sea. And in the process, destroyed monuments because they would take the stone for the walls from, you know, religious, abandoned religious monuments on the island.

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[Sydney (Host)]

Yeah, so speaking of the statues, maybe now is a good time to answer the question that I'm sure some of our listeners are asking themselves. We know, like, why did these people who set up this quite complex ecological, there's only 5000 of them. Decide to build large statues? That's not an obvious choice. Best we understand how and why did they decide to do this?

[Mike Pitts]

It's completely barking.

I mean, it's mad. Why would such a small community on such a challenging island carve these? I mean, they are truly enormous, these statues, and there are so many of them.

I mean, I. When I went to the island in

1994, I'd actually not wanted to go because I thought from my childhood reading that I would be disillusioned. You know, I had this image, this vision of this island covered in these amazing sculptures, and I thought, it's not going to be like that. It's not really going to be like that.

But it was even more impressive.

I mean, it is extraordinary place. I've never seen anything like it anywhere in the world. Why on earth would they do this?

That's such a huge question.

Of course we don't know because we can't ask them.

And in fact, of course, in a sense, were we able to ask these

people who built them, we would get a lot of different answers, probably none of which would really tell us what was going on.

And I do. In the book, I propose a theory, and I think it's important. The theory itself may be wrong, but I think what I'm doing is very important, which is I'm trying to.

To embed our understanding of the island in Polynesian culture.

And I think it's very easy to

forget that that island was not just

settled and discovered by Polynesians, but everything

that happened on that island is Polynesian.

And so if we're to look for

explanations of what they were doing there, then the first place we would go is to other Polynesian islands. And what we know about Polynesians from early historic records and from archaeology and ethnography.

And one of the things that's really

interesting about the Polynesian, if you like, the Polynesian diaspora, this huge expansion across the Pacific, is that they carried from this central core, they carried this culture

outwards and it remained Polynesian. So what's happening in Hawaii in the 18th and early 19th centuries is very

similar from a Polynesian perspective, culturally, to what's happening, say, in Aotearo New Zealand at the time.

And I think it's only sensible to assume that similar effect would apply to Rapa Nui itself. And if we start with carving figures, then human or human like carved figures

standing up at ceremonial locations are a feature of Polynesian culture. We have them in Hawaii, we have

them in Altair, New Zealand, typically of

wood

and of timber. But in islands close to Easter island,

like the Marquesas, they're carving statues out of stone as well.

The Marquesas, the records suggest they're carving

huge numbers of timber figures.

But there are a lot of stone

figures on Marquesas, and you can see them today. And some of them are really quite big and impressive and beautiful things. They don't look exactly like the statues of Nisara, but they are very much, you know, there's a family resemblance there.

So I think when we have to imagine that when Polynesians discover Rapa Nui, one of the many things they bring with them, along with the chicken and

the sweet potatoes and their yams and so on, all the foods that they need to grow, are a set of beliefs and cultural traditions that they nurture, that they're important. And we know it's a universal phenomenon that the migrants tend to kind of drill down on tradition. They exaggerate and emphasize their homeland memories and their ideas.

And it's no surprise, I think, to see statues being raised on East Rhind.

What, of course, is astonishing is the scale, both the size of the statues and the number of the statues that are raised. And I like to imagine that it began with carving in wood. But one of the interesting features of Rapa Nui is that part of the ecological fragility of the island is there are a number of plants that are not present on Rapa Nui that are found elsewhere in the Pacific. One of those is the plant that was used to make sails for voyaging canoes, which may have had an impact on how much Rapa Nui islanders were able to leave the islands and travel on further large scale expeditions. But they also did not have the plant that was used traditionally, the trunk was used for carving wooden figures. That is just not present on the island. But what was present on the island, and this is really unusual,

was volcanic rock that was really easily carved and lightweight. And not only was that rock there,

but it was present in two particular locations either side of the island, where

on one volcanic sort of outcrop, the

stone was soft and pink, and on the other it was soft and yellow

and red and yellow.

Are Culturally significant colors in Polynesian cosmogony.

So there was this strange coincidence, if

you like, of the absence of the timber that they would normally use to carve wooden figures to raise on the ritual ceremonial burial sites on one hand, and on the other hand, the presence of two types of rock, both of which are really soft. And particular, the rock that's used for carving statues is extraordinarily soft. I mean, you can scrape it with your fingernails.

You know, it's.

And because it weathers badly as well, which is a problem today.

But the presence of not just one

soft rock, but two soft rocks that have these ritually significant colors.

And so I think if we look

at that, then we can see this

would be the basis for developing this

culture of carving statues out of stone. And they're carved out of this yellowy brown rock, and then not all of them, but many of them are topped with a crown made out of this pink stone. So you get the pink and the

yellow together, which happens, you know, elsewhere, particularly with feathers.

We can see there are many museums around the world today that have fantastic feather headdresses and cloaks and capes from Hawaii in particular, where the colors are bright red and bright yellow and black. So then there's the germ of it all. But then the issue is then why so many.

And I think what, in effect is happening is that over the centuries, the entire island becomes a model of their worldview.

So a Polynesian vision of genesis, if you like, of creation, is one in which all forms of life and nature, even the sea and islands and rocks

and things, are created through the meeting

of two other forms.

So, you know, birds and a fish,

a bird and a fish formation and create a rock or something like this.

And these forms, they all come from

another world, often called Hawaiki.

And then when people die, the souls,

they return to that world. So there's a kind of circularity to this existence, of creativity, birth, life, death, and then back into that world where life originated.

And the way it works on the

topography of the island is that you have these statue quarries where hundreds and hundreds of these statues were carved out of. This volcanic outcrop of soft yellow rock is on the eastern side of the island, which is where the sun rises

and where in quite often elsewhere in

Polynesia, where the journey of life begins on the east and at the far west of the island of Rapa Nui is a huge volcanic caldera, a great gaping hole. It's the biggest topographic feature on the island.

That's right on the end corner of the island.

So there's a precipitous cliff, huge cliff down to the sea, the other edge of this caldera and up on that, at the top of that cliff, so you can literally stand, there's a narrow strip of land where you can stand and you stick your hand out to the right and you're looking down into the Pacific thousands of feet below, and you can stick your hand out to the left and you're looking down into a deep caldera.

And up there was a hugely significant religious location. And in the 19th century, and Catherine

Routledge records are the best of this by far, there was a ceremony there involving the first nesting, the first egg of migrating nesting birds. So the symbol of birth. And there are carvings of these half bird, half human creatures that are all

displayed as profiles of people with sort

of curled up bodies. And the position of the body is exactly that of a human fetus.

You know, there's these symbols of birth

at this location on the far west of the island.

And, and I think what we're seeing is they've created this model where life

begins at the statue quarry in the

east, souls at death, they travel across

the island and return to Hawaiki via this caldera where there are these symbols of rebirth.

And that journey from east to west

and ending up at a caldera at a cliff is actually described in some other islands in French Polynesia. We've actually got what could in effect be just lifted and taken to Rapa Nui and say this is what happened on Rapa Nui.

So I think what's going on is on the one hand you've got

this volcanic, small volcanic laden outcrop on the Easti island where the statues are created is the kind of birthplace.

And on the other hand, the far

side of the island, you got this caldera which is the kind of where the souls disappear.

But in between, along the coast, they're

raising all these smaller statues. They've got a lot of statues at the quarry standing up, which are huge, the biggest ones on the island. But around the coast they're raising smaller statues. Now don't get me wrong, these are still enormous among the communities, among the fields and villages, the people living on the island. And so there, what those smaller statues, those are kind of representatives of their,

the ancestors of important people that are kind of there, as it were, kind

of visitors, representatives from that afterworld that ultimately exists through the caldera at the far end of the island. So you've got a number of different contexts in which these Statues are existing, but politically there has to be something there that's motivating in the scale of this, that people, that individuals want, wanted to be represented or wanted to show that they were able to honour their ancestors or the gods or whatever it might be. And there must have been an element of competition between different communities, I think, across the island, but ultimately all working together because the two stone sources are different parts of the island and the

statues and the crowns are all over the island.

So they can't be in a war with each other. It just wouldn't have happened.

[Sydney (Host)]

The book both illuminates things that I would never have known and maybe genuinely new contributions. Again, I'm not personally an archaeologist, but also makes quite clear that there are things about them that we have to imagine. It's sort of like, as you say, like what type of political structure would have actually turned the island into this manifestation of a cosmology. Which is, I think, a good place to end our interview because we're right up the one hour mark and I don't want to take up too much of yours or our listeners time, but always our final question. What are you working on now?

[Mike Pitts]

Well, at the moment I'm working on

three articles which I will submit for peer review publication.

One of them is to do with statues and was an idea and information

that I was accumulating while I was writing the book.

One of them is, and I can't

say at all what it is at the moment, but one of them is a discovery I made after the book had just gone to press. I wasn't able to put into the book. And the third one is about this idea that I was just talking about, this idea of the island as a map of Polynesian, the Polynesian universe. So that's what I'm doing at the moment. I've also, incidentally, just discovered a photograph. This is not something we've mentioned, but

the first, immediately after the slave race,

there were a number of European and American scientific expeditions. Island and the first one that appeared was from Britain and it took away a large statue which is now standing in the British Museum. And we knew very little about the events surrounding that removal.

But in the course of writing the

book, I discovered what at the moment I believe to be the only eyewitness account of that event. And there's a huge amount of information. But since the book went to press just a few weeks ago, I found a photograph of the men who dug up the statue sitting and standing proudly around their spoil on the deck of the ship that took it away about a month after they left the island when they were docked in Valparaiso. And it's the most extraordinary photograph. They're standing there wielding their picks and shovels, and there's a great coil of rope and all those tools.

And the exact number of men are

described in the photograph in the eyewitnessed account.

So I'm writing a couple of long

blogs about that, but then I will be starting on another book.

[Sydney (Host)]

Awesome. Well, the book is island at the Edge of the the Forgotten History of Easter Island. Mike Pitt, thank you very much for joining us today on the New Books Network. And I hope you all have a wonderful.