Terry Hunt - The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island

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Copyright 2011 by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo

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First Free Press hardcover edition June 2011

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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunt, Terry L.

The statues that walked: unraveling the mystery of Easter Island / Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Easter IslandAntiquities. 2. Sculpture, PrehistoricEaster Island.

3. Prehistoric peoplesEaster Island. 4. PolynesiansEaster IslandAntiquities.

I. Lipo, Carl P. II. Title.

F3169.H86 2011

996.1'8dc22 2011001627

ISBN 978-1-4391-5031-3

ISBN 978-1-4391-5434-2 (ebook)

To Professor Robert C. Dunnell

(December 4, 1942December 13, 2010),

mentor and friend, whose contributions to archaeology

and to our thinking made this book possible.

THE STATUES THAT WALKED

The old net is laid aside; a new net goes a-fishing.

Maori proverb

M ention Easter Island to just about anyone and mystery immediately comes to mind. The Mystery of Easter Island is the title of untold books and modern film documentaries. The mystery surrounds how so few people on a remote, treeless, and impoverished island could have made and transported hundreds of the eerie, gargantuan statuescalled moai for which the island is so famous. The awe-inspiring, multi-ton stone statues, some standing nearly forty feet high and weighing more than seventy-five tons, were carved out of the islands quarry of compacted volcanic ash and then somehow transported several miles over the islands rugged terrain. Not all of them survived the journey. Many lie scattered across the island, some broken, never to take their intended places on platforms along the shoreline or elsewhere throughout the island. To see these statues, many of them situated upon equally impressive platforms called ahu, is to sense a hidden drama of compelling human proportions calling out for explanation. Facing inward, rather than out to sea, they seem to be gazing back in a vain search for the noble society that created them.

As we were archaeologists who had studied other parts of Polynesia, when we began our work on the island the statues were somewhat familiar. Similar religious statuary are found elsewhere in Polynesia. And on other islands, statues were also moved significant distances. The moai, like the elaborate carved wooden images from the Hawaiian Islands, or the stone tiki of the Marquesas, while much bigger, represented the same deified ancestors so important in Polynesian religion and cosmology. That the moai were religious images explains why the vast majority face inland, watching over their descendants day after day. With their backs to the sea, the moai had not been carved as sentries, warding off potential intruders, as with the Colossus of Rhodes.

Had the islanders carved and transported just one or two of these statues, the accomplishment would have been noteworthy, but not surprising. But our count for Rapa Nui suggests that the islanders carved something well over 950 statues, and of those, more than 500 were transported considerable distances, appearing in every corner of the island. Nowhere else in Polynesia is such a creative and monumental legacy found. Why did it emerge only on this tiny island, whose population should have, by all accounts, been focused solely on where to find the next meal?

Since Easter Sunday 1722, when the first European accidentally sighted this isolated speck in the vast South Pacific, Easter Island has presented a seemingly intractable dilemma for explorers, scientists, and curiosity-driven tourists. By comparison to the cultural and physical richness of such storied Polynesian islands as those of the Tahiti and Hawaii archipelagos, Easter Island seems a poor settingalmost mockingfor one of the great achievements of early Polynesian history. The island itself, which today Polynesians call Rapa Nui (the people who live there are called the Rapanui), is almost a moonscape in appearance, little more than a barren lump of lava-covered terrain. Lacking the deep valleys, steep mountains, lush streams, and beautiful waterfalls typical of many of the volcanic islands of Polynesia, Rapa Nui is characterized by a modest landscape of rolling hills. The island was born less than a million years ago when the coalescing eruptions of three seafloor volcanoes reached the surface. One searches in vain here for a refreshing stream, let alone a flowing river. Most of the water is found in lakes formed in the three volcanic cones, though some also trickles out of a number of small springs.

Nor does fruit fall from the trees here, as it does on so many other Polynesian islands. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, seamen, explorers, Christian missionaries, and other visitors remarked consistently on the pitiable and wretched lives of the islands native inhabitants. Swedish botanist Carl Skottsberg, who compiled the first natural history of Rapa Nui, wrote that there is in the Pacific Ocean no island of the size, geology and altitude of Easter Island with such an extremely poor flora and with a subtropical climate favorable for plant growth, but nor is there an island as isolated as this, and the conclusion will be that poverty is the result of isolation.

Those who settled Rapa Nui had accomplished a remarkable feat of seamanship, perhaps the most daunting of the whole colonization of the Polynesian islands, only to have arrived at a desperately inhospitable new home.

The story of the Polynesian migration is staggering in its sweep.

Seafaring colonists known by their distinctive pottery called Lapita, who had set out from the shores of the western Pacific, reached the islands of Tonga and Samoa by 800 BC. It must have seemed to be the edge of the world. Verdant Samoa is today considered the heart of Polynesia, but at that time, there on the eastern frontier of their rapid dispersal to hundreds of islands, Lapita stopped dead in its tracks. Maybe Samoa was just too luxurious for them to leave. We dont currently know why they stopped, but we do know that no islanders ventured farther into the Pacific for nearly two thousand more years.

It was in the Polynesian homelands of Tonga and Samoa that the earliest forms of Polynesian monumental architecture emerged, by about AD 1000. When the islanders began migrating again, sometime around AD 1100, they brought their ritual architecture with them, including religious courtyards made of stone and upright stones, conceived of as backrests for the gods. In some places these backrests were transformed into elaborate carved human figures, like those found in the Marquesas, Hawaii, the Australs, and, ultimately, Rapa Nui.