When British explorer James Cook arrived at Rapa Nui — known to him as Easter Island — in 1774, he described small bands of malnourished people barely sustained by a barren, treeless strip of ...

By the time British captain James Cook arrived in 1774, the Rapa Nui population had plummeted and was decimated further in ...

The sun is about to break on Rapa Nui, the Polynesian island dubbed Easter Island by a Dutch seafarer in 1722. Rapa Nui’s megaliths are called moai, and 15 of them stand with their backs to the ...

A newly identified drought on the Pacific island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, could have spurred islanders to invest fewer resources in building their legendary stone monuments.