Archaeology
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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...
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It's tempting to look for potential vocab exchange between Rapa Nui and (Quechua and Aymara). That could help dating the exchange with the Andes, as the lexicon stops following the lender's sound changes to follow the borrower's instead.
(Polynesian syllabic structure and small phonemic stock make this extra tricky though. For example, Classical Quechua /s ʂ h/ would probably end all merged into /h/, and you'd see multiple epenthetic vowels popping up.)
Even then I wouldn't be surprised if they contacted the folks up south, like the Mapuche. Specially as I don't expect the landing spot from a Rapa Nui → South America to be the best spot to start the opposite travel, due to sea currents.
It seems likely that the Polynesian word(s) for sweet potato is a direct borrowing from Quecha. Beyond that I don't think there's accepted evidence for vocabulary exchange.
I gave it a check. It's hard to take a lot of conclusions from a single word, but
This got to be at least two instances of borrowing, since either Rapa Nui picked another variant of the word to borrow or solved the issue with the ending consonant in a different way (by eliding it instead of adding a new vowel).
The Hawaiian cognate underwent /k/→/ʔ/ (spelled ʻ), so it's probably really old.
Based on that, if I had to take a guess: Polynesians contacted the Amerindians multiple times across the centuries, and it was kind of a big deal for Rapa Nui ones. Sadly a better analysis would need a bigger lexicon than a single word.