Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries by Brian Haughton (beginner reading books for adults txt) 📕

the direction of the sunrise from an unspecified Polynesian island. Just before he died, Hotu Matua traveled to the western extreme of Easter Island to look for the last time towards his homeland. Recent evidence from DNA studies has practically ruled out colonization by South Americans. Skeletons from burial sites on Easter Island have been found to contain a genetic marker, called the Polynesian Motif, proving that the Easter Islanders are descendents of settlers from eastern Polynesia, not South America.

The incredible Easter Island giant statues have puzzled explorers and archaeologists for hundreds of years. There are almost 900 of these statues, known by the islanders as moai, averaging 14 feet in height and 14 tons in weight, though the highest was almost 69 feet and weighed around 270 tons. These enigmatic monoliths were carved from hardened volcanic ash and consist of an elongated stylized human head, pointed chin, and a short body with arms lying at the sides. They were set up to face the interior of the island, perhaps keeping a silent watch on the population. Some of the statues would originally have had their eyes colored using red and white stone and coral, and there are remaining examples today with their strange staring eyes intact. More than half of the 887 statues are distributed along the island's coast, while the remaining moai are still in Rano Raraku, the quarry where they were made, indicating a fairly sudden end to statue building. Most of the monoliths were erected on ceremonial structures known as ahu. These ahu were built from blocks of volcanic rock and consisted of platforms, ramps, and plazas. As many as 15 moai were placed on these structures, which functioned as religious centers for dances and ceremonies related to ancestor worship.

© Thanassis Vembos.

Detail of some Easter Island moai.

The majority of the moai were carved, transported, and erected in the period between A.D. 1100 and 1600, when the island was well-wooded, and had an estimated population of between 9,000 and 15,000. Most of the statues

were still upright when Dutch explorer Jakob Roggeveen arrived there (by chance) on Easter Sunday in 1722 (hence the name of Easter Island). English explorer and cartographer Captain James Cook also found many still standing when he landed at the island in 1774. One of the great mysteries of Easter Island is how its inhabitants managed to move and set up the giant stone statues. Jo Anne Van Tilburg, of the University of California, Los Angeles, is a specialist in Polynesian studies who has worked on Easter Island for more than 15 years. Using computer simulation, which included data on available manpower and materials, rock type, and the easiest routes for transportationVan Tilburg arrived at a plausible hypothesis of how the statues were moved. She worked out that the giants would first have been laid on their backs on a wooden sledge and then moved on a wooden canoe ladder (logs spaced three feet apart over which the sledge could slide). Once the statues arrived at the ceremonial platforms, they were levered into an upright position, using the sledge to hold them in place. In 1999, she and a team of 73 people tested this theory with a considerable degree of success, showing that her method is the best suggestion yet for how the huge stone figures were transported and erected.

A much more difficult and complicated question is why the people of Rapa Nui undertook the enormous task of carving, transporting, and erecting these giant stone figures. Apart from the undeciphered Rongo- rongo script, which is probably no earlier than late-18th century, the Easter Islanders left no written record to help us understand their beliefs and the significance of the moai. Various theories have been put forward; perhaps they represent revered ancestors or powerful living chiefs. The statues must also have played an important role as status symbols, embodying the power and organization of the people who created them. Jo Anne Van Tilburg believes that the figures had a dual role. She thinks that they did not represent individual portraits of chiefs, but were standardized depictions of important rulers, as well as being mediators between the people, the chiefs, and the gods.

Easter Island once possessed a thick forest of palms, but by the time the Dutch arrived in 1722, it was a treeless landscape. Pollen analysis has shown that by as early as A.D. 1150 the lowlands of the island had practically been cleared of forest. As the trees vanished, considerable soil erosion took place, leading to problems in growing crops. This ecological collapse resulted in overpopulation, food shortages, civil war, and the eventual downfall of the Rapa Nui society. There is even some evidence of cannibalism from a few sites on the island. Eventually, all of the sacred statues on the coast were pulled down by the islanders themselves during intertribal warfare. Though the Rapa Nui used vast amounts of timber in the transport and setting up of their statues, in canoe building, and in clearing land for agriculture, they may not have been solely to blame for the deforestation. The Polynesian rat, used as a food source in the Pacific, seems to have contributed to the extinction of the native palm tree by eating the palm nuts thus preventing new trees from growing.

The first contact with Europeans proved to be a disaster for the Rapa Nui on almost the same scale as the collapse of their ecosystem. In raids between 1859 and 1862, Peruvian slave traders dragged off every ablebodied man and woman, probably around a thousand islanders, to work in mines on islands off the coast of Peru. After objections were raised by the Bishop of Tahiti, the Easter Islanders were eventually allowed to return home. But when those who had not already died of disease and overwork arrived back on Rapa Nui, they were carrying smallpox and leprosy. The diseases quickly took hold on the island, and by 1877, there were only 110 inhabitants left. As a result