Colin Richards, an ordinarily placid professor of archaeology, looks angry. “All this talk of catastrophe is nonsense,” he says. “We’ve had this one assumption, and built upon it and built upon it. That’s the history of work on Easter Island.” He rises to a satisfying crescendo. Behind him a South Pacific storm builds to its own crescendo. “It is falseness and idiocy upon idiocy.” He gesticulates, sadly not quite in time with the distant thunder.
Fifteen miles from Richards, over the bleak, green meadows of Easter Island, a moai also looks angry. They tend to do that, moai — the local word for the island’s famous, and perpetually scowling, stone heads. But this moai has more reason than most to be annoyed.
Neither lined up