The enigmas of Easter Island : island on the edge

273 Pages·2003·3.941 MB·English

by  Bahn, Paul G., Flenley, John

JOHN FLENLEY AND PAUL BAHN
The Enigmas of
Easter Island
Island on the Edge
1
3
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PREFACE
This tiny mote of land lost in the endless empty seas of the
southeast Pacific.
William Mulloy
T
he sheer remoteness of Easter Island is overpowering—it is five or
six hours by jet from the nearest land; to reach it by boat takes days. The
small island is pounded so hard by the ocean on all sides that, now
that it has an airstrip, very few boats go there any more. Since the nineteenth
century, the island has been known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui (Big Rapa), a
name owed to Tahitian sailors who thought it resembled the Polynesian island
of Rapa, 3,850 km (2,400 miles) to the west. The early islanders themselves may
never have had a real name for their island, which constituted their whole
world. Yet somehow this remote, battered speck produced one of the world’s
most fascinating and least understood prehistoric cultures, a culture which has
long gripped the public’s imagination because of its unique, huge, stone
statues or moai. These have become one of our ‘icons’ of the ancient world,
instantly recognizable in their frequent appearances in cartoons or advertise-
ments, where they are usually—and erroneously—depicted simply as blind,
brooding heads gazing gloomily out to sea.
In view of the worldwide public fascination with the island, it is odd that no
serious general account of its history and archaeology has appeared in English
for over thirty years. Yet we now know far more about the development and
downfall of its unique culture, and it is a story with an urgent and sobering
message for our own times. There have been many popular books, but if one
leaves aside those filled with fantasies about lost continents and visiting astro-
nauts, they are dominated by the works of Thor Heyerdahl, which set out
to buttress a single and now largely discredited theory. A more balanced and
up-to-date account is badly needed, and it is hoped that the present volume
willfill this gap.
Today, Easter Island is generally considered a strange, fantastic, mysteri-
ous place, and this is reflected in the titles of popular books and television
viii PREFACE
programmes; indeed, one recent book about the island is even subtitled The
Mystery Solved, though which particular mystery this refers to is not explained.
For the archaeologists who have devoted their lives to the study of this fascinat-
ing place, there are no mysteries exactly, but there are plenty of intriguing
questions to be answered. No one could fail to feel awe and wonder on con-
templating the bare landscape of rolling hills; the huge craters with their reedy
lakes; the hundreds of enormous stone statues toppled and scattered about the
place; the abandoned quarries; the ruins of platforms, houses, and other
structures; and the rich rock art. Easter Island has been called the world’s
greatest open-air museum, and indeed the entire island can be seen as one
huge archaeological site.
At a conservative estimate, there are between 800 and 1,000 giant statues or
moai on Easter Island; the total is uncertain because survey work is still
incomplete, and there are probably many lying hidden by rubble and soil at the
island’s quarry. More than 230 of the statues were erected on ahu (platforms),
each of which might carry from one to fifteen statues in a row. Contrary to
popular belief, the figures are not absolutely identical: in fact, no two are
exactly alike in height, width, or weight.
Despite variations in form and size, however, the classic moai consists of a
human head, gracefully stylized into an elongated rectangle, together with its
torso down to the abdomen. Beneath the overhanging brow, the nose is long
and straight or concave, the chin prominent and pointed, and the ear-lobes
often greatly distended and carved to appear perforated, with discs inserted.
The arms are held tightly at the sides, and the hands, their long tapering fingers
(which have no nails) almost touching, rest on the protruding abdomen.
What motivated the islanders to create these extraordinary towering figures?
Perhaps, as we shall see, on their platforms around the coast they served as a
sacred border between two worlds, between ‘home’ and ‘out there’. On a tiny
island such as Rapa Nui the feeling of being alone and cut off from the outside
world must have been overpowering.
How did the islanders transport the statues over long distances and erect
them on the platforms? Were they really devoid of timber and rope, as the first
European visitors thought? The answers are almost as diverse and contradict-
ory as the variety of scholars working on the problem.
Further clues to the island’s rich cultural development are provided by its
cult of the ‘birdman’, which survived until the end of the nineteenth century.
The birdman was seen as the representative on earth of the creator god
Makemake and was of enormous symbolic significance to these isolated
PREFACE ix
people who could not come and go as the birds did. Indeed, the striking motif
of the birdman appears repeatedly in Easter Island’s abundant rock art, espe-
cially near the village of Orongo, which was the centre of the cult. One can
even see birdlike features in some of the giant statues. But what prompted the
rise of this enigmatic cult?
Scholars have searched for answers to this series of riddles in the
Rongorongo phenomenon, the islanders’ ‘script’ comprising parallel lines of
engraved characters preserved on a series of wooden boards. According to
legend, Hotu Matu’a, the first settler, brought sixty-seven inscribed tablets to
the island with him. We shall explore just how much progress has been made
in interpreting the twenty-five surviving tablets now scattered around the
world’s museums.
In this book, we take a look at these different topics, particularly in the light
of the intense archaeological activity of the past four decades. We also address
the issue of the islanders’ origins. Where did they come from, and when? How
many of them were there? How and why did they travel to the island in the
first place? What did they bring with them, and how did they survive? More
puzzling still is the question of why, not long after the first European visits to
the island, the statues were toppled over and left in disarray, often deliberately
beheaded. All the evidence points to a dramatic change in the islanders’ way of
life, which included the onset of violence and warfare. What cataclysm could
have had such a devastating impact on the island’s culture?
As we shall see, the answer to this last question carries a message that is of
fundamental importance to every person alive today and even more so to our
descendants. Given the decline of the island’s culture, we should consider the
parallels between the behaviour of the Easter Islanders in relation to their
limited resources and our cavalier disregard for our own fragile natural
environment: the Earth itself.
This is more, therefore, than an account of the rise and fall of an extraordin-
ary prehistoric culture; if Easter Island is seen as a microcosm of our own
world, then this is, indeed, a cautionary tale relevant for the future of all
humankind.
1 Easter Island lies isolated in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles
from its nearest inhabited neighbours.
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
I
n the ten years since the first edition of this book appeared, much new
work has been done on many aspects of Easter Island’s past, and many new
publications have appeared. Some problems have become better under-
stood, while others have deepened. And, as we write these lines, the death has
been announced of Thor Heyerdahl. Whatever one’s opinion of his theories,
and of his attitude not only towards the ancient Polynesians but also towards
those who disagreed with his views, his huge importance in this field should be
readily acknowledged. Most researchers involved with Easter Island, ourselves
included, first became interested in the island and its problems thanks to
Heyerdahl’s expedition in the 1950s, and the films and publications to which it
gave rise. As our book already made clear in 1992, many fundamental contribu-
tions came from that Norwegian expedition—careful excavations, pollen
analysis, the rescue of the toromiro, experiments in statue carving, transporta-
tion and erection, and, above all, the introduction of William Mulloy to the
island.
Amid the wealth of literature that has been devoted to Easter Island’s past
over the last decade, there have been a number of papers which question the
picture we outlined of massive deforestation caused by human factors. These
criticisms are answered in this new edition of our book. But here we would
just like to point out that ours was by no means a new view of what happened
on the island. Even La Pérouse, in 1786, had suggested that the islanders
themselves had imprudently cut down their trees:
suppléent en partie à l’ombre salutaire des arbres que ces habitants ont eu l’impru-
dence de couper dans des temps sans doute très reculés ... Un long séjour à l’Île de
France, qui ressemble si fort à l’Île de Pâques, m’a appris que les arbres n’y repoussent
jamais, à moins d’être abrit des vents de mer par d’autres arbres ou par des enceintes de
murailles; et c’est cette connaissance qui m’a découvert la cause de la dévastation de
l’Île de Pâques. Les habitants de cette Île ont bien moins à se plaindre des éruptions de
leurs volcans, éteints depuis longtemps, que de leur propre imprudence.1