Easter Island: Archaeology, Ecology and Culture

Jo Anne Van Tilburg's Easter Island: Archaeology, Ecology and Culture, published by British Museum Press in 1994, is a standard archaeological account of Rapa Nui, its ahu platforms and moai statues, by a specialist who has directed long-running fieldwork on the island. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed academic account grounded in direct archaeological survey. Its limit is that scholarship on Rapa Nui's population history and the causes of its ecological and social transformation has continued to develop since 1994, so a claim about the island's precise chronology should be checked against more recent work, and any claim about the island's meaning to its own community should draw on the Rapa Nui community's own administration of the park alongside this outside archaeological account, not in place of it.