Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island

by Mike Pitts, Michael W. Pitts

“A crisp, confident, and convincing new account of the place and its chroniclers" — The New Yorker “A definitive history of the mysteries of Easter Island...compelling...[a] magisterial history.” — New York Times

“Revelatory…fascinating… wholly convincing” — Daily Mail (UK)

A vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archeological 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 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.

But what if that history is wrong?

In The Island at the Edge of the World, archeological 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, World History

Audible Audio

Published January 27, 2026

About the author

Archeologist, who also writes as Michael W. Pitts.

Reviews

[Brendan (History Nerds United) · Rating 3 out of 5]

The funny thing about books which are revisionist is that they need to straddle the line of tearing down previously established information without seeming like they have an axe to grind. I personally don't like it when someone is too antagonistic with their peers. Again, very much a personal preference so please keep that in mind as I review Island at the Edge of the World by Mike Pitts.

The book is a tale of three narratives. The first is Pitts telling the generally accepted history of Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island. This portion of the book is a bit too speedy and negative for my tastes. Not so much when Pitts is calling out murderous Europeans trampling all over the island inhabitants, but more so when the author has some off-handed and dismissive verbiage towards non-explorers. Again, I recognize this is a personal pet peeve, but it really took my out of the flow of the book when I felt a potshot is taken without significant attribution.

The second narrative is about Katherine Routledge and her exploration of Rapa Nui while an anthropologist there. This section is a bit better but feels rushed and Pitts talks her up so much that I expected more about her work and findings. There are some reasons for that which the author chronicles. However, I couldn't help but feel that this section either needed to be expanded or eliminated completely because there wasn't enough.

The final portion of the book is by far the strongest and contains almost none of my criticisms from the first two. Pitts digs into (pun intended!) the current archaeological science and what we can glean from it when looking into the history of Rapa Nui. Pitts cites exciting new discoveries and takes a much more positive tone. I couldn't help but thinking that the whole book should have been this.

Ultimately, there is still a lot to learn from this book. I'd tell any reader who doesn't share my frustrations to give this one a look if you find the subject interesting.

(This book was provided as an advance reader copy by NetGalley and Mariner Books.)

[Lilisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read an historical book set on Rapa Nui or Easter Island last year, so I was interested in checking out this nonfiction book to dig deeper into the theories around its history, people, and the mysterious statutes from an expert’s vantage point. The book is certainly a worthwhile read debunking contentions by others about the supposed self-implosion of the island’s population and the playing down of the potential destructive impacts of “outsiders” who plundered the island’s human resources. I found the section about the Routledges’ travel experiences in part because of the interactions with the locals, interviews, and what they (mostly Katherine) learned firsthand. It was unfortunate that her archives were virtually ignored. There was overlap information in various sections of the book that I felt could have been tightened, although I get it was how the book was structured. The last part of the book was way too detailed for me, but probably the most interesting for others more archeologically inclined (!) and my eyes glazed over a bit. So, while I cannot say this book was a riveting read for me, I can say that overall, it was a worthwhile read and helped me learn more about what could have happened to past generations of Rapa Nui or Easter Island populations. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

[Sarah Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the first half of this book, reading about the Routledge's journeys around the world and all of the amazing discoveries that they made. Unfortunately, the second half of this book wasn't as engaging for me. I found myself having to do a lot of re-reading in order to ensure that I was intaking the information. It was very well researched, and well written, and I think that others who already have an interest in the topic would enjoy it and find it informative. It probably isn't the best book for someone who is at an entry-level understanding of the topic, like I was.

Thanks to Mariner Books and Netgalley for the ARC of this book!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having recently returned from Rapa Nui, I was excited to read this history. I enjoyed learning more about the island's history and also about alternative interpretations of the limited archeological records. Pitt's research was well-written and thoughtful. While he did not ultimately insist on a new interpretation of current ideas, he opened the door wide to other plausible options of the island's history.

[Jonathan Crain · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered Easter Island in the 1994 film "Rapa Nui"—unsettled, intrigued, and certain the story was incomplete. Further reading only deepened my skepticism: I found environmental parables, racialized speculation, and assertions that seemed designed to confirm contemporary anxieties rather than illuminate the past. Mike Pitts’s "Island at the Edge of the World" is the book I needed then.

Pitts aims to dismantle what he terms the “ecocide narrative,” the enduring assertion that the Rapanui precipitated their own downfall through environmental mismanagement, deforesting the island to support a purportedly reckless statue-building cult, which allegedly led to warfare and cannibalism. While this narrative may function as a compelling allegory, it does not withstand historical scrutiny. Instead, Pitts reconstructs the history of a resilient Polynesian society that adapted resourcefully to extreme isolation, only to be devastated in the nineteenth century by slave raids, disease, and colonial dispossession.

The book’s structure mirrors its central argument. Pitts opens with the consequences of European contact, including slave raids, disease, and the establishment of a sheep ranch, before analyzing how the island was subsequently studied and misinterpreted. Only after this does he reconstruct ancient Rapanui society. This sequence is intentional: understanding the island’s past requires first recognizing the violence that destroyed it and the misinterpretations that followed. The collapse must be clearly understood before the society’s achievements can be accurately assessed.

The book’s primary innovation is its recovery of Katherine Routledge’s archival materials. Routledge arrived on Rapa Nui in 1914 with her husband Scoresby aboard their custom-built yacht, the "Mana," with the intention of conducting the island’s first systematic archaeological and ethnographic study. The unique value of her work lies in its timing: she interviewed elders who retained living memories of pre-collapse traditions. Routledge acquired the language, mapped the quarries, documented ceremonial sites, and recorded the meanings of the moai as understood by their creators. Following her subsequent mental breakdown, her research became dispersed across English archives, remaining uncatalogued and largely unexamined for decades. The absence of her voice allowed speculative theories, such as those involving ancient aliens and lost continents, to proliferate in place of rigorous archaeology.

Pitts devoted years to reconstructing Routledge’s fragmented notebooks and field records. The resulting narrative challenges nearly all assumptions of the prevailing popular account. Early European visitors—Roggeveen in 1722, the Spanish in 1770, and Cook in 1774—did not encounter a society in terminal decline. Instead, they observed ongoing ceremonies at standing statues, the cultivation of sophisticated gardens utilizing lithic mulch (volcanic rock that retained moisture and enriched soil), and a social structure organized under clan chiefs capable of formal diplomatic engagement. La Pérouse noted that the islanders tilled their fields “with a great deal of intelligence.” Such observations are inconsistent with the notion of societal collapse.

The true collapse of Rapa Nui society was abrupt and externally imposed. In 1862, Peruvian slave ships arrived and seized an estimated 1,500 individuals, including most leaders and ritual specialists who were custodians of cultural knowledge. International intervention eventually compelled Peru to repatriate some survivors, but they returned carrying smallpox and tuberculosis. The island’s population fell from approximately 5,000 to only 110 by 1877. This event constituted not a gradual decline, but demographic devastation. The remaining population was confined to Hanga Roa, enclosed by a wall, as their land was converted into a sheep ranch and their gardens were destroyed by grazing livestock.

The toppled moai, frequently cited as evidence of pre-contact civil conflict, actually fell during this period of upheaval. Their destruction was a symptom of societal devastation, not its cause.

Pitts adopts a deliberately polemical stance. He examines how the ecocide narrative has appealed to various audiences: environmental advocates have embraced it as a cautionary tale, while filmmakers have exploited its dramatic potential. The 1994 "Rapa Nui" film is a particular source of frustration for Pitts, as it transformed academic conjecture into cinematic certainty and, in the process, damaged archaeological sites and left fiberglass “statues” scattered across the island. The film crew’s complaints about food shortages, which were a direct result of their own consumption, serve as a poignant example for Pitts, who highlights the irony that Hollywood enacted the very resource depletion it erroneously attributed to the Rapanui.

Pitts grounds his arguments in DNA analysis, paleobotanical research, experimental archaeology, and meticulous examination of early European accounts. When asserting that the moai were transported upright rather than rolled, or that the rongorongo script likely originated after European contact, he acknowledges areas of uncertainty without resorting to false equivalence. Pitts maintains that not all interpretations hold equal merit and rejects theories rooted in racial skepticism or unsupported environmental moralizing.

The book is not without limitations. Certain reconstructions rely on inference, and Pitts at times dismisses oral traditions that contradict material evidence, a tension he acknowledges but does not entirely resolve. However, these challenges are intrinsic to authentic historical revision, rather than the uncritical repetition of established narratives.

Pitts ultimately restores agency to the Rapanui. Their history has often been recast as a cautionary tale, distorted to reflect Western anxieties about environmental limits and societal collapse. The true narrative, characterized by resilience and disrupted by colonial violence, is less convenient but far more instructive. "Island at the Edge of the World" does not cater to readers seeking mystery or allegory; rather, it challenges those willing to confront the reality that historical truth is frequently more complex and unsettling than the parables we construct.

This review is of an advance reader’s edition provided by NetGalley and Mariner Books.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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.

[Maggie Timlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A completely different view of the world’s most remote island.

This is a fascinating story of two parts. The first part is the history of an interesting sounding woman called Katherine Routledge who visited Rapa Nui in the early years of the twentieth century. The second half is about how Rapa Nui has been viewed since then and how the islanders story has been told by others.
Katherine Routledge worked on an extensive survey of the island, this included talking to the inhabitants as well as examining the fascinating standing stones and enigmatic heads that the place is famous for. Her findings were never fully published however and this left a vacuum in the west’s knowledge of this far flung island. Into this vacuum seeped assumptions. One of the most persistent of these assumptions is that there had once been a thriving forest on the island which the islander had destroyed themselves in a frenzy of statue building. The idea being that the trees were used to roll the statues into place (Pitts has very interesting findings on this idea and on the more modern theory that the statues ‘walked’). Pitts shows that these conventions can be questioned very robustly.
There was an culturally devastating event which lead to the depopulation of the island but rather than being a self-inflicted wound that can actually be traced back to the moment Europeans came to the island and started taking away the residents and forcing them to work as slaves in other parts of the world.
Pitts in this case becomes an archaeologist not only of the earth but of the records. He examined what was left of Routledge’s work and was able to debunk many of the racist theories that grew up in the twentieth century around Rapa Nui.
This book is something special. It is an account of how we got a history of an entire island wrong for years. It is also a vindication of the work of Katherine Routledge who has since been forgotten. This deserves a place on the shelf of anyone who takes an interest in world archaeology and anyone who enjoys having their own assumptions challenged.

Thank you to publisher for a review copy of this book.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 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.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting subject to be sure, but one presented in a way that feels reductive in its arguments.

As with any piece of nonfiction, the story needs to start with the facts and end with conclusive remarks, not the other way around. That the people of Rapa Nui were exploited by colonialism I have no doubt, and because history is always written by the victors, I’m sure they’ve also been disproportionately blamed for the issues that have plagued the island.

That said, when you present the narrative backward by putting your conclusive opinions first as is the case here, the text appears as the product of an author with an opinion looking for facts that fit instead of an author who found facts and then developed an informed opinion.

A better approach would probably have been to make this a book about Routledge. This puts facts and conclusions into the correct narrative order and likely still results in the same outcome.

I also think that a book like this needs to do a lot more justice to the location. Why should readers care about this place? What makes it special or interesting? Pitts gives us little descriptive character for the island, whether about its location or visual appearance or peoples or resources, and it makes the narrative even more difficult to engage with meaningfully.

[Miguel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unexplained

Like other reviewers having a hard time digesting this one as it started out with such promise on a highly intriguing topic, coupled with upending an oft-cited thesis of human induced resourced depletion, but failing to deliver in fully fleshing out these points. Let alone saying up front that the work of the Routledge would be given the summation it deserves, but only in the end providing a fairly anodyne synopsis of the island's history.

The resource depletion narrative seen anywhere from Diamond to Hariri taken as gospel by many does get upended here or at least comes into serious doubt reasonably enough. Perhaps that's the best take-away from the book.

But what about Routledge? How did a seemingly well educated, curious, diligent and smart woman of her age perform all of this important field work only to descend into madness later? Did it have anything to do with her expedition or time on the island? There are so many threads lightly pulled at in here that never get a full airing, even though the author says he will do so early in the book.

In any event, absorbing topic and even decently written but hopefully someone else can come along and write a better work that fully develops the theories and background the author attempts to make.

[Colleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know very much about Easter Island before reading Island at the Edge of the World.

(I decided to read this book to learn about Easter Island; and in doing so I feel that I did learn a great deal about Easter Island.) Very interesting history indeed!

Much of archaeologist and anthropologist's Katherine Routledge's research was lost. Katherine Routledge was born Aug 11, 1866 and died institutionalized Dec 13, 1935. As a woman archaeologist, often her husband was credited with findings when she was not.

Island at the Edge of the World is non-fiction. As mentioned, I learned a lot. This book felt very much like a thesis paper where questions were provided and then rationale to substantiate the authors (Mike Pitts) theories. This format did provide for a bit of overlap in the information provided. Still glad that I read this book.

Many thanks to NetGalley, author Mike Pitts and publisher Mariner Books for approving my request to read the advance read copy of Island at the Edge of the World in exchange for an honest review.

Approx. 368 pages. Publication date Jan 27, 2026.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first section is a bit of a slog retelling the usual info as known in the past with all of its mismanagement and abuse of the locals.
Then is the section describing the work that was done by Katherine Routledge and her exploration of Rapa Nui as an anthropologist working there on an extensive survey and oral histories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The third section regards the current archaeological studies and what we can glean from the
explanations of the artifacts and architectural details that bring the ancients come to life.
Finally there is all of the references and source material.
I requested and received a temporary uncorrected advance reader e-proof from Mariner Books via NetGalley. Pub Date Jan 27, 2026 #preorder
#IslandattheEdgeoftheWorld by #MikePittsArchaeologist @Netgalley @marinerbooks @harpercollins @goodreads @bookbub @librarythingofficial ***** Review #thestorygraph #bookshop_org #bookshop_org_uk #bookshop_org_ca #archaeology #historicalresearch #anthropology

[Cherryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

** Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review **
This is a fascinating blend of archaeology, history, and travelogue, taking readers to remote Skara Brae in Orkney. The chapters trace the site’s discovery, its place in Neolithic life, and the mysteries still surrounding its sudden abandonment. Pitts writes with the enthusiasm of someone who has walked the windswept paths and felt the past underfoot. His explanations of the artifacts and architectural details make the ancient village come alive. I appreciated how he balanced hard evidence with thoughtful speculation, letting the reader feel the pull of unanswered questions. It’s the kind of nonfiction that leaves you both informed and itching to visit for yourself.

[Audrey Stars in Her Eye · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book looks at Easter Island as it truly is, not just through the eyes of colonizers. The author breaks theories that are based on dangerous stereotypes by using actual archaeologists who were interested in the people and their culture. And while you can never take out the biases, those documents plus teh authors actual visits to the island, we can begin to truly understand what the island was really like.
There are some drawing but I dropped a star because there aren't enough photos nor stories shared. Both of these would have made this book more engaging for people interested in the islan outside of acedemia plus document the history.

I received an ARC through NetGalley7; all opinions are my own.

[Andrea Wenger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book overturns the accepted history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), presenting new evidence and the rediscovered research of WWI-era anthropologist Katherine Routledge. It challenges the narrative of ecological self-destruction, revealing the surprising truth about the island and the Polynesians who called it home. This corrective history is illuminating persuasive, engrossing, and easy to read.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

[MaddiBReading · Rating 5 out of 5]

[ARC Review] This was an interesting read! I had to read up on Easter Island for a class last year and this added way more context to the academic articles I read. Its an indepth read on the progress of the development on the island and impact of different periods (and people). It was enlightening but also read really easy so I wasnt bogged down with a dense amount of notes or information.

[Toby Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting

[JXR · Rating 5 out of 5]

great nonfiction with a very well-done thread of connection throughout and filled with a lot of detail. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

[Kathy Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great documentary of Easter Island. Fascinating new thoughts and ideas of island history