Mike Pitts

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archaeological scholar Mike Pitts—a book that rewrites the popular yet flawed history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and uses newly unearthed findings and documents to challenge the long-standing historical assumptions about the manmade ecological disaster that caused the island’s collapse.

Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source show more of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island’s history as it’s been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world.

For too long, people have imposed their own theories on this extraordinary place and its inhabitants. Thor Heyerdahl, after his famous Kon-Tiki expedition, claimed the island had been discovered by light-skinned people from South America, believing only they could have been capable of travelling there and building the statues. Erich von Däniken took it to greater extremes, saying the statues had been carved by aliens. More recently, Jared Diamond's theory of ecocide—that Islanders destroyed their world by cutting down all the trees—has become popular as a vital message about the need to conserve our planet's resources.

But what if that history is wrong?

In The Island at the Edge of the World, archaeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers.

A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: An archaeologist with access to twenty-first century morals and mores and technology is not going to write with kindness towards the previous generations' conclusions. They're rooted in outdated assumptions, using techniques that feel shockingly cursory to modern sensibilities; most shocking is the unquestioning racism of so very much of the analysis made by earlier generations.

A third, the first third, of the book relays those earlier analyses with what felt to me as condign levels of condemnation or disagreement, couched in evocative language. If you're offering a different light on past data with newer data and previously unavailable technology, casting shade is inevitable. Why not begin with tendentious tones? Many cavil at this. I do not.

After bringing attention to, in the second third, an underknown and too-little celebrated Katherine Routledge and her astute observations and contextualizations of the society and culture of the island, Pitts goes into the modern archaeology and emerging understanding of Rapa Nui. It's a paradigm shift, and we're seeing it in its earliest days.

I found the book as a whole fascinating, creating a gestalt of scholarly opinion's mechanisms of change as evidence...and society's changing mores...demand. It is not a simple bowing to the winds of fashion as the reactionaries and recidivists with political axes to grind insist. It is the scientific method at work, correcting its data to account for developments across all fronts of scholarship. No "Truth" is immutable, scary as many people find that fact. Fixing thoughts into cages of ideology is never permanent. Examining data, analyzing orthodoxy's tenets, is how Einstein blew open the ideas of physics...out came cell phones, computers, the entire internet.

I won't pretend I was completely fascinated during the whole read. It was a slog to read the archaeology jargon but it yielded a really fascinating new understanding of a place most of us are intrigued by. More than that, though, this is a perfect example of how science works: take a data set, examine it, add to it, and analyze both the before and after data sets. Present conclusions as "this new data refutes/supports previous data; the current, amended data set supports/refutes the following conclusions."

It's a message I like, I support, and I choose to amplify. show less

I read Thor Heyerdahl as a teen, and also Chariots of the Gods by van Daniken, and even Jared Diamond’s Collapse, all with their ideas about Easter Island, who erected those statues and what happened to the native society. Island at the Edge of the World proves their assertions are ridiculous. Sure, even as a teen I knew that space aliens didn’t erect all of Earth’s early monuments. Still, it was fun to read. But Diamond’s argument seems interesting, that the Easter Islanders caused show more their own ecological collapse. I mean, we see this happening today across the world.

Mike Pitts argues that all of the false narratives would have been avoided had Katherine Routledge’s research been public. In the early 20th c, Routledge was one of the first anthropologists to study Easter Island and record oral histories.

By this time, Europeans had been plundering the island for over a hundred years, taking slaves and bringing disease. The colonizers dismissed farming traditions that had supported thousands for generations, including the use of rocks to preserve ground moisture. The removed stone heads and artifacts.

Katherine and her husband spent three years on the island, unable to leave during WWI. She published a book in 1919, “half ethnography and archaeology, half travelogue,” but the bulk of her research was never released. Instead, her marriage in trouble, her husband forcible incarcerated Katherine in a lunatic asylum for the rest of her life.

Then one day, for some forgotten reason, people looked at a small, roughly carved stone figure, and wondered. What if it was big? really big? from Island at the End of the World

From the first settlers to Easter Island as a tourist attraction, this history answers some questions while others remain a mystery.

Fascinating reading.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley. show less

A pretty well done popular archaeology book, covering several years excavating at the Pleistocene Boxgrove site in Sussex. The authors adopt an interesting approach, alternating technical details – reconstructions of the site, description of the paleoclimate, faunal lists, etc. – with more personal information about the lives of the archaeologists and the politics involved in funding and publicizing the dig. This doesn’t quite work – frankly, archaeologist’s lives aren’t all that show more interesting and there’s too many names to keep track of – but the site descriptions more than make up for it.


The people involved were Homo heidelbergensis; (at least, that’s what they were called in 1998 when the book was published; hominid taxonomy changes remarkably fast) and the site is about 500K years old. Although there are lots of stone tools and animal fossils, the extent of human fossils from the site is one humerus with the ends chewed off and two teeth. It’s fascinating what can be determined from just this; the leg bone belonged to a robust male, probably about 6 feet tall, and both teeth came from the same individual and were originally side by side in the jaw. (The teeth had a continuous cut mark, similar to those found on modern humans that hold things in their teeth, stretch them out with one hand, and cut with the other).


Other findings are equally intriguing, and show that archaeology is not just a matter of digging stuff up and putting it in museum trays, but a full-fledged science with experiments and hypothesis testing. One example illustrates hand axe manufacture; modern flintknappers making hand axe replicas use either a hard tool (sit cross-legged and whack one flint chunk with another) or soft tool (sit with the work piece braced against an extended leg and use a piece of bone or antler for flaking) flaking. The two methods produce different shaped flakes and different flaking patterns; hard tool flaking produces a fan shaped pattern of chipped flint, while soft tool flaking produces, essentially, half a fan – the extended leg blocks chips in that direction. Boxgrove shows soft tool flake patterns.


Every good science project should raise more questions than it answers, and Boxgrove meets this criterion. The main stone tool found at the site – in fact, essentially the only stone tool – is the hand axe, that ubiquitous emblem of the Paleolithic. Archaeologists professional and amateur have debated for years over just what hand axes were used for. The name implies a chopping tool – but hand axes are sharp all the way around and there’s no evidence that they were ever hafted. Since it’s virtually the only tool found in the Paleolithic, it’s been claimed as an “all purpose” tool, but once again the circumferential razor-sharp edge militates against that. There’s been a serious suggestion that it was a projectile; thrown like a killer Frisbee. This does explain why so many isolated and apparently unused hand axes have been discovered – they were lost on throwing – but it doesn’t explain how you Frisbee something with an all-around edge. Finally comes the ideas that the hand axe was not a tool all, but what was left over after the knapper made a bunch of flake tools; or that it was simply a demonstration of the knappers skill and was never intended to be used for anything.


The combination of micro-wear analysis and an invitation to a professional butcher to try one out leads the authors to conclude that the hand axe was a butchering tool. The butcher was presented with a roe deer carcass and a wide selection of hand axes and flint flakes to try; although initially surprised at how sharp everything was, he quickly settled on using a hand axe with a swinging, relatively gentle cutting motion, rotating the axe slightly between cuts, and skillfully took the deer apart. This, of course, only proves that a hand axe could be used this way, not that it was, but it’s fairly convincing to me at least.


The authors also address the issue of hand axe typology (although the evidence does not come directly from Boxgrove). For years, archaeologists have tried to associate hand axe styles with cultural variants, or to use them for sequence stratigraphy (like later stone tools or pottery). The best evidence now suggests hand axe shape is explained best by the source material; high quality stone produces hand axes that are almost circular; poor quality makes deltoid hand axes.


Mysteries always remain; there were hundreds of hand axes at Boxgrove and only a few showed even slight wear. Why? The authors suggest that since the Boxgrove people had no pockets, or any other carrying equipment, they had to make new hand axes every time they needed one (rather than carrying around razor-sharp chunks of flint). Although not unreasonable, that still doesn’t explain why there are so many apparently unused ones. Did they make them in preparation for a butchering task that didn’t happen, and then discard them because they couldn’t carry them? Was there perhaps some sort of ritual involved? 500kya is pretty early for any sort of religious belief. At this point, nobody knows.


I don’t want to give the impression Fairweather Eden is only about hand axes; there’s lots of other details of chronology, paleoclimate, topography, and fauna. The intermittent accounts of archaeological politics don’t detract that much. Recommended. show less

This is a very interesting account of the finding and identification of the body of Richard III, which was discovered under a car park in Leicester.

The book moves along nicely most of the time, although it is sometimes rather drawn out, in particular the early chapter in which we are given an over-detailed account of who was who in the warring late-medieval Yorkist and Lancastrian feudal gangster families.

The most interesting thing is how the dig came to take place. In my view it was a case show more of getting the right result for the wrong reason. The dig took place because of campaigning and financing by Philippa Langley and the Richard III Society. The actual archaeologists involved thought that there was no chance of finding Richard III’s body, but they hoped to learn something about the medieval friary on the site.

Philippa Langley had got a “feeling” that Richard was buried under the car park when she visited the place. I’m not a believer in the paranormal, so I’d put this down to the imaginative workings of her brain and wishful thinking. The “R” painted on the car park was just a coincidental reserved parking place, not a “sign”!

The Richard III Society wanted to find his body because he is their hero. They spend their time trying to prove that he didn’t actually have the “Princes in the Tower” murdered, and that he was a “good” king whose reputation was destroyed by Tudor propaganda (and by Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard as a villain).

For me, Richard is no hero. He is just a typical feudal gangster-lord. Even if he didn’t have the two young princes killed (and he probably did), and even if he was no worse than any other medieval monarch, he was still – like all the others – a tyrant at the head of a (squabbling) ruling class who all lived on the backs of the peasantry. There was no such thing as a “good” medieval monarch.

If you want to find a medieval hero, then why not look a hundred years earlier and choose Wat Tyler or John Ball, the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt?

But anyway, they DID find Richard III’s body, and that does make an interesting story. show less