Easter Island named by your inhabitants since Rapa Nui or Tepito O Te Henua, is the most remote inhabited island of the world. Curiously, one of the mysteries without resolving is the own name of the island, between the traditional versions they tell themselves “Te Pito O Te Henua" (the navel of the world) or "Te Pito O Te Kainga” (the counterfoil), and "Kuri Ki Te Rangi” (eyes that look at the sky). The current islanders adopted the name Rapa Nui for his island and culture. It was baptized since it Rapa Nui (Big Island) for the sailors who were furrowing these zone of the pacific one at the end of the century xix, for your seemed one with it Rapa Iti (Girl Island), located to approximately 5.000 km in the western part. The official name, it was given by the Dutch sailors who re-discovered it on a Sunday of Pascua of resurrection, on April 5, 1722.It does approximately three thousand years; navigators proceeding from the Asian southeast were in the door of access to the Polynesia, in Tonga and Samoa. From this moment, and throughout the following thousand years in his displacement eastward, they developed what knows as Culture Polynesia Ancestral shared by hundreds of groups seated in a multiplicity of islands that present different environmental conditions and, in consequence, different forms of adjustment that with the time generated a wide variety of social and cultural expressions.
In it there developed one of the most surprising cultures comparably alone to the big megalithic cultures, the Egyptian, Maya or Inca, in extreme conditions of isolation. The manifestations most known about the historical cultural development Rapanui are your famous monolithic sculptures (moai), the megalithic altars (ahu) and a type of hieroglyphic writing (Rongo Rongo) that still refuses to be deciphered, close to advanced knowledge of engineering and astronomy. Though the advances achieved in the island seem to be impossible, your roots can be recognized polynesic. These achievements were the result of a complex process, where the special conditions of the environment conjugated with a society stratified, orientated to the control of territories across the competition by the prestige, with chiefs of semi-divine character, with the support of an ideology centred on the worship to the ancestors, and on the basis of an intensive production of food.
Actually, the real "mystery" of the island is not so much that of the moai and the technologies for your transport, which is a topic of present engineering in many cultures of the world, but the paradoxical thing that turns out to be the emergence of a complex culture in such a condition of isolation. Normally, the High Cultures or Civilizations arise and develop in favorable conditions for the food production, where a relatively big population meets in easy contact other populations, of whose exchanges of ideas and products will arise the new advances. The knowledge that we have of what happened in the island escapes of the norm.
On the other hand, your strategic location turns her into the door of commercial access towards the countries of Asia and is an important center for scientific investigations specially of archaeological and anthropologic type.