Mike Pitts

'The true and fascinating story of Easter Island and its amazing statues' KEN FOLLETT 'Revelatory... fascinating... [and] wholly convincing' MAIL ON SUNDAY Where did they come from? How did they get there? Why did they carve the island’s colossal iconic statues – and how? What happened to the civilisation they created? These are just a few of the questions about Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, that have puzzled generations. Europeans first encountered the Islanders in the early eighteenth century, bringing back astonishing tales from one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth. They told fantastic stories of lost continents, cannibalism, giants and aliens. Thor Heyerdahl claimed that the island was discovered by pale-skinned sailors from South America, ignoring the rightful claims of the greatest explorers the world has ever known. Recently, the idea that Islanders cut down all the trees, causing mass starvation and social collapse, has been espoused by scientists, broadcasters and politicians. Now, in archaeologist Mike Pitts’s superb investigation, Island at the Edge of the World, he provides authoritative new insights into what really happened. Using the latest scientific and archaeological research, plus a huge range of historical accounts, Pitts builds a fascinating new portrait of the Islanders’ story. In particular, Pitts revives the life work of Katherine Routledge, who spent sixteen months on the island in 1914-15, surviving revolution and war, assembling a priceless but largely ignored archive of excavations and interviews - and whose legacy reveals the rapacious interference that spawned generations of false histories. Many questions still remain, but this is the most compelling and comprehensive account yet published of the extraordinary story of Easter Island.

In the tradition of Hampton Sides and Simon Winchester comes 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.

Where did they come from? How did they get there? Why did they carve the island’s colossal iconic statues – and how? What happened to the civilisation they created?These are just a few of the questions about Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, that have puzzled generations.Europeans first encountered the Islanders in the early eighteenth century, bringing back astonishing tales from one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth. They told fantastic stories of lost continents, cannibalism, giants and aliens. Thor Heyerdahl claimed that the island was discovered by pale-skinned sailors from South America, ignoring the rightful claims of the greatest explorers the world has ever known. Recently, the idea that Islanders cut down all the trees, causing mass starvation and social collapse, has been espoused by scientists, broadcasters and politicians. Now, in archaeologist Mike Pitts’s superb investigation, Island at the Edge of the World, he provides authoritative new insights into what really happened.Using the latest scientific and archaeological research, plus a huge range of historical accounts, Pitts builds a fascinating new portrait of the Islanders’ story. In particular, Pitts revives the life work of Katherine Routledge, who spent sixteen months on the island in 1914-15, surviving revolution and war, assembling a priceless but largely ignored archive of excavations and interviews - and whose legacy reveals the rapacious interference that spawned generations of false histories. Many questions still remain, but this is the most compelling and comprehensive account yet published of the extraordinary story of Easter Island.

A brilliant new account of one of the world's most remote, mysterious and misunderstood places: Easter Island.

Draws on a lifetime’s study and a decade of new research to address the first question that every visitor asks: how was Stonehenge built? Icon of the New Stone Age, sculptural and engineering marvel, symbol of national pride: there is nothing quite like Stonehenge. These great sarsen and bluestone slabs, arranged with simple, graphic genius, attract visitors from across the world. The monument stands silent in the face of the questions its unlikely existence raises: who built it? Why? How? There has been endless speculation about why Stonehenge was built, inspiring theories ranging from the academically credible to the improbable, but far less investigation into how. In the millennia since its creation, pieces of Stonehenge have been knocked over by heavy machinery, found their way to Florida (and back again), and been exposed to radioactive sodium, but the seemingly impossible endeavour of raising the stones with Neolithic technology has remained inexplicable – until now. In the past decade ground-breaking discoveries, made possible by cutting-edge scientific techniques, have traced the precise provenance of the bluestones in Wales, but can we plot their journeys to the Salisbury Plain? And how might teams of labourers lacking machinery or even pack animals have dragged them 150 miles to the site? How did they carve joints into the sarsen boulders, among the hardest stones in the world, and then raise them into place? Mike Pitts draws on a lifetime’s study to answer these questions, revealing how Stonehenge stood not in austere isolation, as we see it today, but as part of a wider world, the focus of a megalithic cosmology of belief, ritual and creativity. With 109 illustrations

Britain has long been fascinated with its own history and identity, as an island nation besieged by invaders from beyond the seas: the Romans, Vikings and Normans. The long saga of prehistory is often forgotten – but our understanding of our past is changing. Mike Pitts presents ten astounding archaeological discoveries that shed new light on those who came before us, and radically altered the way we think about our history. His compelling, sometimes teasing, archaeological odyssey illustrates the diversity, complexity and sheer strangeness of the lives that represent Britain’s past.With 79 illustrations, 24 in colour

Take a cast of archaeologists and historians who inhabit different worlds. Add a medieval king who died in battle, and was revived by Shakespeare as the ultimate anti-hero. Throw in a forensic quest with almost unbelievable twists, and a theatrical modern burial with no parallel, and you have the material for an irresistible story for our times. In the hands of a leading archaeologist and award-winning journalist, the search for a king’s grave becomes the page-turning, entertaining, informed narrative that makes Digging for Richard III the must-read title on the most sensational archaeological find for generations.