Abstract

Historical accounts of European exploration and intervention in Polynesia during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries speak of the complex interpretative fields through which both Polynesians and Europeans came to understand each other. Here we employ the record of material practices on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to investigate the indigenous response to European contact from the island's 'discovery' by the Dutch in 1722 to the population's conversion to Christianity in 1868. Rather than seeing events on the island during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a simple trajectory of decline, we highlight how myriad new practices and social orders emerged through a creative agency that drew inventively upon the material and cosmological possibilities afforded by contact.