One of the world’s most famous yet least visited archaeological sites,
Easter Island is a small, hilly, now treeless island of volcanic origin. It is located in the
Pacific Ocean at 27 degrees south of the equator and some 2200 miles (3600 kilometers) off the coast of Chile, it is considered to be the world’s most remote inhabited island.
The Easter Island, known in the native language as
Rapa Nui (“Big Rapa”) or
Isla de Pascua
in Spanish, is sixty-three square miles in size and with three extinct
volcanoes (the tallest rising to 1674 feet). The oldest known
traditional name of the island is
Te Pito o Te Henua, meaning
The Center (or Navel) of the World.
In the 1860’s Tahitian sailors gave the island the name Rapa Nui, due
to its resemblance to another island in Polynesia called Rapa Iti,
meaning ‘Little Rapa’. The island received its most well known
current name, Easter Island, from the Dutch sea captain Jacob Roggeveen
who became the first European to visit Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722.
That culture’s most famous features are its enormous stone statues called
moai, at least
288 of
which once stood upon massive stone platforms called ahu. There are
some 250 of these ahu platforms spaced approximately one half mile apart
and creating an almost unbroken line around the perimeter of the
island. Another
600 moai statues, in various stages of
completion, are scattered around the island, either in quarries or along
ancient roads between the quarries and the coastal areas where the
statues were most often erected. Nearly all the moai are carved from the
tough stone of the Rano Raraku volcano. The average statue is 14 feet, 6
inches tall and weighs 14 tons. Some moai were as large as 33 feet and
weighed more than 80 tons (one statue only partially quarried from the
bedrock was 65 feet long and would have weighed an estimated 270 tons).
Depending upon the size of the statues, it has been estimated that
between 50 and 150 people were needed to drag them across the
countryside on sleds and rollers made from the island’s trees.
Most moai were carved out of a distinctive, compressed, easily-worked
volcanic ash or tuff found at a single site called Rano Raraku. The
quarry there seems to have been abandoned abruptly, with half-carved
statues left in the rock. However, on closer examination the pattern of
use and abandonment is more complex. The most widely-accepted theory is
that the statues were carved by the ancestors of the modern Polynesian
inhabitants (Rapanui) at a time when the island was largely planted with
trees and resources were plentiful, supporting a population of at least
10,000–15,000 native Rapanui. The majority of the statues were still
standing when Jacob Roggeveen arrived in 1722. Captain James Cook also
saw many standing statues when he landed on the island in 1774. By the
mid-19th century, all the statues had been toppled, presumably in
internecine wars.
Ancient island legends speak of a
clan chief called Hotu Matu’a,
who left his original home in search of a new one. The place he chose
is now known to us as Easter Island. When he died, the island was
divided between his six sons and later sub-divided among their
descendants. The islanders may have believed that their statues would
capture the chiefs’ “mana” (supernatural powers). They may have believed
that by concentrating mana on the island good things would result,
e.g., rain would fall and crops would grow. The settlement legend is a
fragment of what was surely a much more complicated and multi-faceted,
mythic sketch, and it has changed over time.
Really amazing are these stone giants just sitting there for such a
long time. I will be for sure a journey of a lifetime to get there and
see them i think.
