| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Steven Roger Fischer. Island at the End of the World: The Turbulent History of Easter Island. London: Reaktion Books. 2005. Pp. 304. $24.95.

This is the first general history of Easter Island, written by a linguist whose aim is to tell the Easter Islanders' story rather than recount the mysteries of their island's "lost" civilization. Steven Roger Fischer portrays the island as the "ultimate Polynesian frontier" (p. 15), settled by descendants of the Lapita people who migrated from Southeast Asia across the Pacific Ocean 4,000 years ago. The first Easter Islanders probably "island-hopped" from Mangareva, which was two to three weeks' voyage away by outrigger canoe equipped with a lateen sail. As in New Zealand, that other apex of the Polynesian triangle, radiocarbon dating has brought forward the estimated date of human settlement, in this case to 690 a.d., plus or minus 130 years. Easter Island was the last frontier of Polynesian voyaging not in terms of late settlement—New Zealand was settled later—but in terms of remoteness. It is one of the most remote habitable places in the world, deep in the Pacific 2,300 miles westward of its colonial power, Chile. Fischer's fluent narrative reveals how smallness, isolation, and a fragile environment have shaped the history of this tiny community since the first Polynesians unfurled their genealogy on its windswept shores.

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