Despite the tranquil beauty of Rapa Iti's bay and surrounding mountains, this landscape was the setting for violent confrontations between groups competing for resources in a degraded and overstretched environment. Photo courtesy of Doug Kennett.

One of the most fascinating stories about the Peopling of the Pacific I encountered while helping to develop the magazine article on that topic this month (see Pioneers of the Pacific) is the story of Rapa Iti. It was told to me early on by Doug Kennett, an archaeologist whom National Geographic had funded to study the island back in 2001.

Rapa Iti is a tiny island in French Polynesia (in the middle of the Pacific Ocean). It takes a lot of effort to get there. At last report, a supply ship visits every other month and that's pretty much it. The reason why it is so interesting is that because it was so difficult to access, it was only colonized once—around 1200 A.D.—and was never contacted again until Europeans stumbled across it in 1791.

Rapa Iti can be seen as a sort of controlled experiment, or as Kennett called it, a "well-bounded microcosm," to see what happens if you deposit a few souls on an small island  (35 square kilometers) and leave them there for a few hundred years.

I'm not going to go into the details here, but when Europeans arrived they encountered about 1500 people living in "heavily fortified hilltop communities." What seems to have occurred prior to this is that the island's first colonists rapidly altered the swamp forest and  surrounding environs and replaced it with taro agriculture. This led to rapid and extensive soil erosion from hill slopes. This in turn led to pond agriculture, since nutrients had been flushed from slopes into the valley bottoms. Soon after this, folks were competing for land and dividing into opposing groups. They built hilltop fortresses, complete with pallisades and defensive ditches, that overlooked their fields. By the 1700s there were as many as 15 of these forts in operation. That's not much more that a couple square kilometers per group.

If anyone ever questioned whether environmental health has anything to do with war, well here's an experiment that provides strong evidence. Conservation is not just about protecting the birds and the bees, it is about protecting us from each other. Thanks, Doug, for bringing this to our attention.

For video interviews from experts on the Peopling of the Pacific, see this link and for some great maps that tell the story, see this link.

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