By Jeffrey M. O'Brien
January 13, 2009

(Fortune Magazine) -- It's the tail end of the rainy season in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, and a wind-blown mist falls on the planet's most remote civilization, Rapa Nui, known as Easter Island. Sonia Haoa, a 55-year-old native with olive skin and a long ponytail pulled through a baseball cap, pokes the earth with a walking stick as she considers the scene before her.

	The island's mysterious residents carved the Moai around the 12th century.

Millions of black lava rocks are strewn across a rolling pasture that glistens against an ominous sky. Where untrained eyes would see only randomness in the tableau, the haphazard spew of some ancient volcano, Haoa, like the John Nash character in "A Beautiful Mind," sees intricate patterns. She explains that the size and placement of the rocks vary according to elevation, microclimate, and proximity to the sea. The patterns offer clues about her ancestors' incredible and tragic history: where they lived, what they ate, even their socioeconomic status.

"You have a garden, and a depression, a garden, and a depression," Haoa says, highlighting several groupings of stones. She speaks softly with a heavy Spanish accent. Her kind eyes and gentle tone have earned her a nickname: the Dali Mama.

"In the middle there, there's an Ahu," she adds, using the Rapanui word for the stage built to hold an iconic Moai statue (pronounced mo´-eye). The rocks speak to Haoa about how the ancients narrowly avoided extinction through equal parts desperation and ingenuity. They also remind her of how much work she has left to do.

	3-D laser scans of the Moai can be used for mapping, analysis, construction, and preservation

The island's coordinator of national monuments, Haoa is on a quixotic mission to survey every last piece of archaeology scattered around these 64 square miles of volcanic earth. As her homeland has catapulted from the Stone Age to modernity over the past two decades, attracting ever greater numbers of tourists and straining the fragile infrastructure, she's been quietly cataloging everything from ancient boathouses, the primitive dwellings that her ancestors built on lava foundations, to human remains, scores of buried statues, and man-made "rock gardens."

It may seem like a purely academic exercise, but it's not. Easter Island's economy is inextricably tied to its mysterious past. Tourists come to glimpse the awesome Moai, which stand up to 30 feet tall and weigh as much as 90 tons. The visitors bring money to Rapa Nui - a territory of Chile almost 2,500 miles from the nearest populated landmass - along with pressure to develop grander hotels and restaurants, medical tourism resorts, and even a casino.

But developing here is unimaginably complex. Besides the extreme isolation, copious artifacts lie buried a scratch beneath the surface. As the person with the most complete map of all that archaeology, Haoa has become the gatekeeper through whom developers increasingly must pass.

A huge task
For years Haoa's quest to map her homeland has been a lonely one. Her title may sound impressive, but her work involves trudging along steep slopes in torrential rain and blistering sunshine, back and forth, sketching artifacts with a few young researchers who sleep in tents at the farthest corners of the world for days at a time. Their output has been modest: stacks of paper, line drawings, and spreadsheets - an analog system that hampered Haoa's ability to mark progress.

	Haoa has made it her life's work to survey the 64-square-mile island.

That is, until two years ago, when she met a man who would change the course of her work forever. Pete Kelsey came to Rapa Nui mainly looking for some R&R. A technical evangelist for the San Rafael, Calif., software company Autodesk (ADSK), he was consulting with customers in Buenos Aires and Santiago in February 2007. With more than $2 billion in annual revenue, Autodesk is a design software firm best known in the world of architecture, but its clients make everything from videogames to running shoes.

Kelsey's division produces AutoCAD Civil3D, civil-engineering software for land, transportation, and environmental development. He travels the world scouting for opportunities and consulting with the likes of Exxon Mobil and federal governments. But this time he brought GPS equipment and a laptop mainly because he thought it'd be cool to survey such a mysterious location.

"I went on holiday, thinking this is a place I need to see before I die," says Kelsey, a gangly music junkie with a baritone that would make a drive-time deejay jealous. "But I also thought there has to be someone here who would benefit from the kind of technology we have. That led me to Sonia."

Before meeting Kelsey, Haoa had been resolved that she'd never finish the survey of the island in her lifetime, that the secrets of her ancestors would die with her, and that developers would plow the sacred gardens. And then Kelsey turned her pencil sketches into digital renderings. He introduced her to the best technology he could find, from laser scanners and GPS receivers to the latest AutoCAD development software. He showed her how to plot the locations of artifacts directly into a computer and add metadata, descriptions, and elevations.

	Kelsey in a cave

Not only could she easily keep track of which parts of the island had been surveyed, but she could search for, say, rock gardens greater than 50 feet long, and see that they all appeared within 100 yards of the ocean. Haoa had been working in two dimensions. Kelsey gave her a third. "The first time I showed this to Sonia, she burst into tears," Kelsey remembers. "She said, 'You can do that? That would take me six weeks running through pages of paper.'"

Kelsey knew from the start that helping survey Easter Island wouldn't sell much software for his employer, but he figured that the complexity of developing a plot of land that's both extremely isolated and absolutely rife with archaeology could teach Autodesk about working in other fragile and rapidly developing environments like India, China, and South Africa.

This is the unlikely story of how a middle-aged self-taught scientific researcher and a mild-mannered tech junkie came together to try to help a mysterious faraway island that they both adore. Their tale involves a fascinating and complicated history of disease, torture, and cannibals - and a reclusive energy and cruise line magnate named Fred Olsen, who is known both as the "Norwegian Howard Hughes" and the inspiration for the Montgomery Burns character on The Simpsons. But it starts with a powerful realization. The mysterious island didn't just need to be surveyed. It needed to be saved.

Mysterious Moai
If people know anything about Easter Island, they know about the Moai, the massive statues carved out of compressed volcanic ash, or tuff, around 900 years ago. If they know anything else, it's that Rapa Nui served as a keystone in Jared Diamond's bestselling book "Collapse." Haoa's ancestors committed ecocide, devastating the island and all but destroying themselves in the process. Diamond identified the plight of Easter Islanders as a roadmap - an especially relevant metaphor given the global wane in natural resources - to societal implosion.

Best guesses are that the island was settled between 400 and 800 A.D. by Polynesians who were probably horribly lost at sea. Squat palm trees covered the landscape, along with plenty of obsidian for making tools, and fresh water. The settlers prospered, and the population peaked near 15,000. Then things got crazy. Sometime around the 12th century, they started carving Moai in Rano Raraku, a quarry on a corner of the triangle-shaped island that still holds hundreds of statues in various stages of completion.

Tribesmen would drag ever larger statues around the island and erect them near their villages in homage to ancestors. How they transported the totems is anyone's guess. Most likely they rolled them on the enormous palms. One thing is certain: For whatever reason, the natives chopped down all the trees, ending their ability to fish (no boats, poles, or spears) and hastening erosion, which halted traditional farming. Having eaten all the birds, the ancients turned to cannibalism. Some historians think they even ate their young.

A Dutch explorer landed in 1722 on Easter Sunday (hence the name), and over the next 200 years Western ships kidnapped the islanders, infected them with smallpox, and decimated the population, which dropped to 111. In the 19th century a Scottish sheep company took over, enslaved the natives, and imported 70,000 sheep, which grazed the island bare. When locals weren't doing slave work, they were being tortured by the Chilean government.

Haoa's parents were born in caves, and, in 1954, gave birth to her in a small hut. Children of the 1960s on Rapa Nui had a unique upbringing: electricity for two hours a day and little in the way of entertainment. "You don't have nothing to play," she remembers. "So you make a doll. You put five or six rocks together for the legs or the arms; you make the big rock for the face." The only school stopped at sixth grade. After that Haoa departed alone for high school, boarding the once-yearly supply ship heading back to Chile.

Lacking an advanced degree, Haoa doesn't consider herself an archaeologist. But she has plenty of experience, two co-authored peer-reviewed scientific papers, and a Smithsonian exhibit to her credit. Shortly after returning home in the late '70s, she assisted famed archaeologist William Mulloy in restoring and re-erecting the Moai, which had all been toppled by warring tribes. In the mid-'80s she traveled for five years with Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl, most famous for writing the book "Kon-Tiki." They studied pyramids and the effect of deforestation, respectively, in northern Peru and the Polynesian island of Mangareva. In the early 1990s the Chilean government issued her a grant to survey Rapa Nui.

Haoa soon realized that pastures covered densely with broken lava were often accompanied by one or more outcroppings of boulders. She surmised that they were "production rocks," quarries where her ancestors heated, split, and distributed the rocks. Far from being natural or random, most of the stones that blanket the island once constituted man-made gardens.

This is Haoa's key contribution to scientific knowledge: Living on a vastly eroded island, the ancient Rapanui people made the most of their last remaining resource. They learned to grow plants from rocks, grouping them together to trap enough humidity to provide moisture and grow food. It turns out Haoa's ancestors were not unique. There's evidence that rock gardens flourished in the southwestern U.S., as well as in Israel, New Zealand, and Peru. But Haoa didn't know that at the time. No trained archaeologist had made the connection. At one point she abandoned her work for two years, thinking she was crazy. "Who will believe you if you don't have a master's or a doctorate?" she remembers asking herself repeatedly. "I don't want them to think I am stupid, so I keep quiet."

When she finally revealed her theory, the scientific community was stunned. Archaeologists had been fascinated by the enormous Moai while trampling all over another interesting and innovative aspect of Rapa Nui's past. "It's huge," says Christopher Stevenson, an archaeologist for the Virginia Department of Historical Resources. "It changed the whole emphasis of Easter Island archaeology."

Meanwhile Rapa Nui had grown increasingly connected to the rest of the world. In the mid-'80s, NASA built a backup runway for the space shuttle, enabling wide-body jets to land. Ten years later the island saw its first road. Today there are more than a thousand cars on the island, plus daily flights from Santiago. Most tourists come to see the Moai, but there are plenty of surprises to behold. There's still a dearth of vegetation and birds. Parts of the island are now so eroded that they resemble Martian terrain. About 4,000 humans live alongside three times as many wild horses, some mangy, some Kentucky Derby handsome.

In the midst of obvious poverty and a strained infrastructure, modernity has crept in. There's cellphone coverage and Wi-Fi (albeit at dial-up speeds). There's not a Starbucks or a McDonald's in sight, but there's plenty of fresh ceviche and even a few cappuccino makers, including one at the swank 30-room hotel Explora, which opened a year ago. The resort has a swimming pool, massage rooms, world-class food, and a decent wine list.

Development was complicated by rough seas and by Haoa. She found a cave in the middle of the building site, which forced the contractors to redesign. It was worth the effort. Room rates start around $700 per night, and Explora is booked solid during peak season. Now copycats are coming. A sprawling 100-room oceanside resort, Hanga Roa, is slated to open in July, and a handful of other projects are on the books.

The island's mayor, Petero Edmonds, proud owner of an iPhone and a Louis Vuitton briefcase, has no shortage of ambitious ideas. In 2006 he championed plans for a casino (it was nixed by the Chilean government). Now he's talking about a second airstrip, a deepwater port, a modern health-care system, and medical tourism resorts. During a visit to his office he touts a study that says Rapa Nui can accommodate 150,000 people - nearly three times the number of annual visitors today. "The island is strategically located between San Francisco and Sydney. We are five miles off the international routing for cargo and tourism ships," Edmonds says. "There's opportunity for everybody - and lots of it."

Big problems
There's a perch atop a sheer cliff on Rapa Nui called Orongo where one can see the curvature of the earth along the 360-degree horizon. At the water's edge things get uglier. Kelsey and I look over a raging stream that dumps red mud into the bay. Just below on the beach, a stray dog gnaws on the skull of a freshly dead horse.

Scenes like this brought Kelsey to an inescapable conclusion on his first visit: Rapa Nui can barely support its current population. There will be no opportunity without a major infrastructure overhaul. A large percentage of the island's drinking water, for instance, comes from a collapsing reservoir housed in a caldera situated precariously above a landfill. One diesel generator produces all the electricity. Drastic erosion continues to deposit topsoil into the sea. Even the Moai are suffering, their eyes, noses, and lips fading with every passing year.

So Kelsey convinced his bosses to send him back on Autodesk's dime and create a base map that would allow the municipality to create a planning scheme, fix what's broken, track the erosion, encourage sustainable development, and think about where to move the landfill. Of course, all that would mean teaching the locals to use his software, so he'd need to set up a training regimen. "I'm supposed to want to pave the whales," Kelsey jokes. "But this was different. I told my superiors we have the opportunity to do something special."

On his second visit, in October 2007, Kelsey brought a team of eight, plus a half-million dollars in laser-scanning equipment, and stayed for almost a month. He rounded up a colleague and a crew of three from laser-scanning company Metco Services. Another Autodesk partner, Leica Geosystems, sent two people to help with data acquisition and analysis.

The plan was to secure GPS coordinates and scans of significant artifacts and then overlay them on a map with Haoa's data, cadastral information from the municipality, topographical charts, and satellite imagery. Once everything was digital, Haoa could use the map to discern patterns that even her expert eyes hadn't noticed. The national parks department could monitor erosion; the municipality could simulate extremes in the drainage system or the effect of proposed development; and the mayor's people could plot world domination - sustainably.

Kelsey and crew started by scanning the Moai in the Ranu Raraku quarry. "They're the icons of the island, and a lot of them are in really bad shape," Kelsey remembers deciding, "so let's focus on those." The team would start as early as 4 A.M., establishing GPS points for each statue and running the green lasers over all sides to capture every nook and cranny. A laser scan can capture as many as 250,000 points per second in mind-blowing detail. To demonstrate, Kelsey opens a 14-gigabyte scan on his laptop and zooms in to show the chisel marks where the statue was carved almost a millennium ago. "We were making submillimeter-accurate models in real time," he says. The scans effectively captured a moment in time, allowing researchers and planners to track erosion precisely and consider solutions - whether building overhangs for the Moai or buttressing a collapsing cliff.

The team traveled five hours on horseback to reach some destinations. They even packed the equipment on a boat and braved 12-foot swells to scan a tiny, unpopulated island nearby, once used as an obsidian mine. Metco VP Martin Dunn usually surveys nuclear power plants and automotive factories. This was different in ways he couldn't have imagined. "We scanned the inside of five caves and picked up petroglyphs. It wasn't what you'd call a profitable journey, but that experience is paying dividends," he says, noting that he's since scanned the Mayan ruins in Mexico's Yucatán peninsula.

After a week of 14-hour days, the scanning crew left for home, but Kelsey stayed on. He and a colleague used their planning software to design a civic center that the mayor had been agitating for. "We did in 90 minutes what they had been working on for a year and a half," Kelsey remembers. He arranged training classes for municipal workers - classes that continue to this day - showing them how to run simulations of water runoff during a heavy storm and demonstrating how reforestation efforts could retain topsoil. He also introduced new ideas about how medics could track disease, for example, or how taking into account the angle of sunlight during summer months would allow builders to decrease energy load. Then he showed his wares to the kids because he knew they'd be the key to getting the technology to stick. "I go to this class of fifth-graders, and they wouldn't let me leave," says Kelsey. "It was one of the greatest days of my career."

Out of money
Late one morning, Haoa coaxes me into her four-wheel-drive and we head to her secluded home. Over the course of a week we've trudged into open fields where she's testing the effect of humidity, slope, and rock size on the growth of taro, a native root. It's simple experimentation. She tucks a leaf into a pile and revisits it periodically to check for progress. The plant may do well in one garden but flounder a hundred yards away, and she wants to know why. She has better luck in the greenhouse outside her home, where onions, grapes, pineapples, lettuce, hibiscus, and flowers all flourish without soil. Beyond her backyard we visit an alcove where eight-foot ferns sprout leaves as big as potbellied pigs. "Do you see those?" she asks, as if one could miss them. "It's the rocks that gave them the humidity to grow." This isn't just about unlocking an ancient way of life. Food remains expensive on Rapa Nui because most of it is shipped in. Rock gardens could offer the key to sustainable agriculture.

We stop at another unexpected bounty. As it turns out, the island isn't entirely bereft of the palm trees that once covered the land. A short drive from her home, Haoa shows me six stout palms in hiding. The biggest is about ten feet tall with a trunk like a wine barrel - appearing just sturdy enough to transport a giant Moai. Why isn't there a massive effort to reforest the island with native plants? "There's no money," she says, shaking her head.

There's not even any money left to fund her survey. As of 2009 the government has decided to sever Haoa's $60,000 annual grant. "They don't realize the importance," she says matter-of-factly. But she has good news. She tells me that Fred Olsen has swept in to save the day. Olsen is the patriarch and chairman of the vast Norwegian energy and cruise line conglomerate Fred Olsen & Co., and an archaeology enthusiast. Olsen knew of Haoa because of her work with his fellow countryman Heyerdahl.

Olsen traveled to Easter Island on his personal cruise ship last February, and before long he and Haoa were touring the South Pacific together, stopping at Pitcairn Island and various points on the way to New Zealand to study habitats. After the trip, Olsen decided to start a foundation with his youngest daughter to cover Haoa's costs and allow her to finish her life's work.

Olsen put up the money because he found a kindred spirit in Haoa - both are fond of putting together intellectual puzzles - and because she's unlocking the island's mysterious history. By uncovering more about her ancestors, Haoa stands to help modern civilizations facing similar fates, like Australia. "It's difficult to put your foot down without stepping on archaeology," he tells Fortune in a phone interview. "The goal is to do research into the past, but it's not just the past. Sonia has been incredibly keen on trying to protect the island. That's part of what we should be helping her to do."

As a self-respecting billionaire, Olsen naturally has a business idea in mind too. He thinks archaeology could become the basis for an export economy. Norway has oil and gas; Rapa Nui has statues. If that sounds like a stretch, consider that one of the island's 900 or so Moai will travel to the Louvre in the summer of 2010, a trip funded by French luxury goods company Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. (To quiet any protest among natives, Haoa says every Rapanui has been offered a free trip to Paris.)

Olsen also has thoughts about the island's energy stream. He concedes that the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end. The future is renewables, so experimenting on the island could help him as much as it will help the natives. "We've been working to see if we can put up a couple of windmills," he says. "And it would be a fantastic place to test electric cars. There are some islands that can be self-sufficient once they get going. Easter Island is one of those places that could be totally green and perhaps build up again what the ancient people ruined."

With the specter of depleting natural resources around the globe, Easter Island seems a strong metaphor for a much bigger collapse. But Kelsey and Olsen no longer see it that way. By giving Haoa the latest technological tools and plenty of funding, they've advanced her survey to the point where she now expects to finish within five years. In return, Haoa has altered their worldview. Where most see tragedy and sadness in Rapa Nui's history, they now see innovation and the human capacity for survival. Where others see doom, they now see hope.

On a final trek before I head home, Haoa takes me to a stretch of earth that few people on this planet have witnessed. Haoa has logged 35,000 archeological sites on the island, but the landscape remains covered in rock gardens that have not been surveyed. I suggest that a five-year time frame seems optimistic. She admits that it's an ambitious schedule, but she's committed. "That's next year," she says, pointing to a hillside in the distance.

As we trudge up a slope in driving rain, she stops in her tracks and picks up what appears to be a sand dollar. "This is a baby's skull," she says, explaining that the density demonstrates that it was human and the open sutures show that it belonged to an infant. She steps off the path toward a small gathering of rocks, tucks the bone into the pile, and covers it. There it will lie, alongside so much of the rest of Easter Island's mysterious past, for who knows how long. Without another word she renews her dogged trek, walking stick in hand, into the future.