Down on Easter Island's south coast, also in view of Rano Raraku, 15 more
of these gray monoliths, called moais (pronounced MOY-eyes), have been
reassembled and restored to their original upright positions in a single row
on a stone platform. Archeologists consider the site, Tongariki, one of the
greatest religious monuments of early Polynesian culture in the South Pacific.
It is certainly the most impressive accomplishment of recent restorations
here.
Everywhere one looks on this speck of land no more than 64 square miles in
size, about three times the size of Manhattan, another moai stands silhouetted
against the sky or lies in pasture grass or remains in its quarry, incomplete
or too large to have been moved by its over-reaching builders. A comprehensive
survey by archeologists from Chile and the United States has counted nearly
900 of these statues, with a few more pockets of land still unmapped.
The statues have long haunted the imaginations of explorers,
anthropologists and other visitors. Whatever the sculptors intended, the moais
are seen as the lithic embodiment of obsession and mystery. In a time more
attuned to ecology, they have also been invoked, rightly or wrongly, as a
metaphor for the fate of a society that self-destructs through the heedless
use of its limited resources.
Early this century, the English ethnographer Katherine Routledge spent more
than a year studying the Easter Island culture and its remarkable sculpture.
"The shadows of the departed builders still possess the land," she wrote. "The
whole air vibrates with a vast purpose and energy which has been and is no
more."
On average, each statue stands 14 feet and weighs 14 tons, though one
measures 32 feet and 89 tons. The motif is unvarying: an elongated head with
long ears, a prominent nose and pursed lips and a shortened torso with hands
placed across the abdomen, fingertips just meeting. Coral eyeballs have been
restored to only a few of the heads. The vacant eye sockets seem to render all
the others blind to the present and unrevealing of the vision that drove the
islanders to a frenzy of statue building between 1,000 and 400 years ago.
Archeologists at last are making progress in recovering the history of Rapa
Nui, which is the local culture's name for the island, the people themselves
and their indigenous language. They also are gaining a better understanding of
the motivations, practices and economic foundations of the statue builders.
But the place is in danger of losing its alluring air of mystery.
"All outsiders think the island is so simple and straightforward," said Dr.
Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an archeologist at the University of California at Los
Angeles and writer of "Easter Island: Archaeology, Ecology, and Culture"
(Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). "The remains are so visible there on
the surface, and the place is so small. But I've been working there 15 years
and I have more questions now than answers."
One evening after a day among the ruins, Dr. José Miguel Ramírez, an
archeologist and head of the National Park of Rapa Nui, ticked off some of the
most intractable mysteries. "We're not sure when the island was first settled,
where exactly the people came from or whether they maintained any contacts
with their homelands after they arrived," he said.
But scholars have disproved some of the more fanciful conjecture. "This is
not the tip a sunken continent like Atlantis, and has nothing to do with
aliens from outer space," Ramirez said emphatically. "We know it was human
beings who came here and erected these statues."
Likewise, scholars say they have laid to rest the notion, made popular in
the 1950's by the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, that the original people
were Indians from South America. He thought he saw similarities between Pre-
Columbian Peruvian and Easter Island architecture. To make his point that such
contact was possible, he sailed westward from Peru in a reed raft named the
Kon-Tiki.
Linguistic, cultural and genetic evidence, most anthropologists agree,
shows that the people of Rapa Nui were Polynesians. Their language is
Polynesian, though it has changed so radically as to indicate an early
separation from the home culture and centuries of isolation. The few surviving
examples of ancient writing are in a script that has yet to be deciphered. The
statues and other artifacts bear a Polynesian imprint, and in 1994, the DNA
from 12 Easter Island skeletons was found to be Polynesian.
Finding Easter Island, though, must have put the Polynesian navigators to
their severest test. They would have had to paddle against prevailing winds
and currents, traveling far to the south and east of their usual routes and
then somehow coming to an island that is next to nowhere: 1,400 miles
southeast of Pitcairn Island, the nearest inhabited land, and 2,340 miles west
of Chile, Easter Island's proprietor since 1888.
"It's unlikely this could have happened entirely by accident," said Dr. Ben
Finney, an anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii who specializes
in Polynesian exploration.
Next year, a team of Hawaiians skilled in traditional Pacific island
navigation plan an attempt to duplicate the voyage in a replica of a 62-foot-
long, twin-hulled Polynesian canoe. In previous expeditions, the same team
established that early sea-going Polynesians had the boats and navigational
skills for purposeful exploration and widespread settlement of the Pacific.
Finney, an adviser to the group, known as the Polynesian Voyaging Society,
said the expedition would start from Mangareva, an atoll northwest of
Pitcairn. Mangareva is considered one of the more likely departure points for
the original voyage of discovery; the Marquesas are another candidate. If the
winds are favorable, Finney said, the journey might be completed in 17 days,
but it would probably take much longer to wait for favorable breaks in the
prevailing winds.
"The voyages may have been celebrations of technology," the anthropologist
said. "The people had developed the world's best ocean-going technology for
the tropics. They were proud of it and wanted to test it to the fullest. And
then there was their hierarchical social structure. Only the oldest sons could
hope to become chiefs. So like the younger sons of Europe who went off on the
Crusades or to the New World, the younger sons of Polynesia organized
expeditions to find a new island, where guess who would then become chief."
Once they reached Easter Island, however, the people probably found
themselves stranded. Scholars can find no evidence of two-way communication
between the island and the rest of Polynesia. The settlers, it seems, were
stripping the island of trees, especially the hardwoods used in canoe
buildings. Without canoes, they had no way back, and were utterly alone until
Jacob Roggeveen, a Dutch mariner, reached the island on Easter Sunday in 1722.
By then, the culture's glory days had passed. Recent excavations led by
University of Chile archeologists have uncovered old agricultural fields,
seeds and roots of former woodlands, house foundations, ceremonial sites as
well as the fallen statues. An analysis of the findings indicates that the
island population grew steadily from 1000 to the 1500's, when it apparently
peaked at 9,000.
Although the first statues were probably erected soon after the island's
settlement, archeologists have found that the people went on a building spree
between 1400 and 1600. Nearly all of the statues were quarried and carved at
the summit of Rano Raraku, a satellite cone of one of the three volcanoes that
formed the island. Toward the end, the sculptors were producing bigger and
bigger statues, as if they were desperately appealing for greater divine
intercession in times of mounting trouble.
Most archeologists view the statues as the central manifestations of
ancestral worship. The island was ruled by a religious aristocracy with the
power to enlist a large labor force to create the statues as representations
of their forebears, the chiefs who were also gods in Polynesian culture.
Nearly all the statues faced not to the sea, but inland, toward fields
requiring the blessing of fertility and some of the sacred places.
Van Tilburg explained that the moai is an icon exemplifying the fundamental
Polynesian concern with genealogy, generation, status and respect. It served
as "a cultural motivator and modifier of group behavior."
In her book, the U.C.L.A. archeologist wrote, "The originators of moai
design were absolute masters of the components of traditional art as
communication and use of line to convey emotion, and understood the social
function of the form they had created."
With the waning of the moai cult, the people replaced it with a "birdman"
cult. A warrior from each tribe would meet at the ceremonial site of Orongo on
a cliff overlooking tiny offshore islands. The young warriors would race out
to the outermost island to bring back the first egg of the nesting season from
the sooty terns. The winner, according to a tradition that existed into the
last century, became the birdman and the island's ruler for the next year, an
incarnation of Makemake, the culture's creator god who was born in the sea.
The collapse of the culture is usually attributed to a combination of
overpopulation, overuse of the land and the cutting of all trees for firewood
and log rollers for moving the statues. Dr. William S. Ayres, an archeologist
at the University of Oregon who has studied the island agriculture, has found
evidence that many of the large fields were abandoned in the 1600's and the
people increasingly had to subsist on the produce of small household gardens.
Their numbers diminished.
As an example of the struggle to live on an island denuded of vegetation,
Ayres said, one of his graduate students, Joan Wozniak, looked under the rocky
landscape and detected evidence that the people had resorted to a kind of
lithic mulch gardening. They used rocks as mulch to keep moisture in the soil.
Under the rocks, she found a thoroughly mixed soil typical of intensive
gardening and traces of rotted tubers, even part of an ancient hoe.
Both Ayres and Van Tilburg think that the people may not have been entirely
to blame for the culture's sad decline. Storms and cyclical climate changes
could have had a hand.
"There's a strong possibility that an isolated island like that could have
been at the mercy of nature, with no help in reach," Van Tilburg said. "It's
one of the biggest mysteries of the island, and we haven't begun to
investigate it."
Restoration of the island's monuments was begun in the 1960's primarily by
Ayres and Dr. William Mulloy of the University of Wyoming, who had been a
member of the Heyerdahl expedition. Several of the toppled statues were put
back on their stone platforms, called ahu, and the stone dwellings were
reconstructed at Orongo.
In the most ambitious project, Dr. Claudio Cristino, a Chilean
archeologist, directed the restoration of the 15 imposing moais at Tongariki,
completed in 1994. A Japanese company provided a crane for lifting the heavy
stones into place.
The people face a new threat because of the island's new-found prominence.
The signs of increasing tourism abound in Hanga Roa, the only town, inviting
visitors into auto-rental agencies, small hotels, curio shops, a pizza parlor
and a disco. Few children are learning the Rapa Nui language, threatening it
with extinction in a generation or two.
Frustrated by the changes, many of the island's 2,000 people are demanding
that Chile grant them more control of their affairs, the land and the
archeological sites. Their demands for autonomy are boldly displayed on a
large sign outside the Roman Catholic church here. Inside, the celebration of
Mass reflects merging cultures. The service follows the familiar Christian
ritual, but the guitars, drums and lilting voices in song echo the sounds of
Polynesia. At the altar, the statue of a saint is carved in the traditional
elongated style of the moai.
"We are trying not only to preserve but to rescue the Rapa Nui culture,"
Ramirez said.
He is especially concerned for the moais. They and the entire island have
been declared a world heritage site by Unesco. The most prominent statues are
in the national park, which encompasses 40 percent of the land. Still, they
are endangered.
"Our most immediate problem is to conserve these statues from people and
cattle," Ramirez said, referring to increased tourist traffic and free-ranging
livestock.
He wants the Chilean Government to enact a strict management plan for the
park and estimates it would take at least $1 million to develop trails and
facilities for visitors to the sites. When an international group of
scientists visited here last month, Ramirez appealed to them for assistance in
calling world attention to the island's needs.
Ayres, the Oregon archeologist, said the Chileans had generally done a good
job managing the archeological treasures. "But they have limited funds," he
added. "Such a remarkable achievement by the Easter Island culture is of
interest and importance to the whole world, and should be treated
accordingly."
Van Tilburg said that in her years of work on the island she has seen the
weathering effects on the statues. "All of us must find a way to preserve the
statues, if not all of them, at least some," she said.
For her part, Van Tilburg has produced 5,000 detailed drawings and
measurements of what the statues look like as the most complete documentation
of the mystery of Easter Island and a legacy to future archeologists who will
surely still be puzzling over the fate of a people who once lived alone in the
vast emptiness of the sea.
(Source: The New York Times / by John Noble Wilford / via Skywatch Intl - July 7 1998)
RECOVERED OLD FILE - Reposted June 27.06
Easter Island Giving Up Its Secrets, But Only Grudgingly
EASTER ISLAND, Chile -- On the sacred slopes of Rano Raraku, a Polynesian
Mount Olympus, the impassive faces on huge statues carved out of soft volcanic
stone look across fields tinted dusty pink by the ripening tall grass and far
out to the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. The vista encompasses the entire
world that could have been known to the creators of the enigmatic statues, the
most distinctive expressions of an ancient society coping with life in
isolation on the most remote inhabited island on Earth. THE SETTLERS - Polynesians Found Isle Next to Nowhere
The first settlers apparently arrived from the west by canoe sometime
between A.D. 400 and 750. This was a time of epic voyages of Pacific
settlement. The migrating Polynesians, originally from Southeast Asia, had
reached Tahiti and the Marquesas islands by 300 before going on to discover
and occupy Hawaii and New Zealand. THE REASONS - Feats of Bravery, Then Stranded Alone
The Polynesians probably sought out Easter Island for the same reasons they
crossed much of the rest of the Pacific, Finney said. It was not necessarily
overcrowding that drove them forth. THE DECLINE - Statue Cult Prey To Man and Nature
By the 17th century, the old order of statue builders was disintegrating.
Tribes organized into warring confederacies. Rebelling against the religious
elite, they toppled and often decapitated the symbols of their influence, the
statues. Famine may have led to some cannibalism. THE PRESENT - Trying to Preserve, And Save, a Culture
While some restorations continue, much of the concern has now shifted to
preservation of the monuments and the culture itself. The island has revived
from the Peruvian slave raids and disease in the late 19th century that almost
wiped out the culture, leaving only 111 people in 1877. "We were almost
extinct," Ramirez said.
