Giant statues give up hat mystery

BBC News ^ | 6 September 2009 | Sudeep Chand

[Wardenclyffe]

Archaeologists have solved an ancient mystery surrounding the famous Easter Island statues.

At 2,500 miles off the coast of Chile, the island is the world's most remote place inhabited by people.

Up to 1,000 years ago, the islanders started putting giant red hats on the statues.

The research team, from the University of Manchester and University College London, think the hats were rolled down from an ancient volcano.

Dr Colin Richards and Dr Sue Hamilton are the first British archaeologists to work on the island since 1914.

They pieced together a series of clues to discover how the statues got their red hats. An axe, a road, and an ancient volcano led to their findings.

Dr Richards said: "We know the hats were rolled along the road made from a cement of compressed red scoria dust."

Each hat, weighing several tonnes, was carved from volcanic rock. They were placed on the heads of the famous statues all around the coast of the island.

Precisely how and why the hats were attached is unknown.

[Hegemony Cricket]

The statues never really struck me as being of elder ladies...

[Fred Nerks]

Pukao outside the crater.

Placing the headdresses on top of the statues’ heads was a tremendous feat of engineering. Those to be seen today on restored statues were all put there by cranes (fig. 5.11), and not without difficulty. Captain Cook suggested that ramps and scaffolding were used. Some scholars have proposed that the cylinders were lashed to the statues and both were raised together, but this is generally considered to be far too risky.

Experiments by Pavel Pavel show that some pukao may have been put in position by gradually pulling them up sloping beams of wood. A concrete pukao, 1 m in diameter and weighing 900 kg, was raised onto the top of a 3 m concrete moai by only 4 men in 6 hours (fig. 5.12).2

It should be borne in mind, however, that Paro’s monstrous pukao, which was by no means the biggest, measures almost 2 m across, 1.7 m high, weighs about 11.5 tons, and had to be raised 10 meters into the air.

SOURCE

[Grimmy]

Remember, they were a pre-tinfoil technology culture.

This was their attempt to keep alien space beams out of their statues heads.

[skepsel]

If the researchers had a tough time figuring out how they got the red hats on, wait til works starts on the jimmy hats question!

[coconutt2000]

Some chief woke up and said, “I had a dream...”, and then ordered his peons to stop farming and start making hats for the statues.

Probably believed it would stop global warming.

[night reader]

Precisely how and why the hats were attached is unknown.

Then the statues have not given up the mystery.

[gunsofaugust]

I am sure Art? Bell had on a psychic who explained all this long ago. These were placed on the head because the ufo aliens had worn them, ya know the venetians for vegans or whatever.:)

Is that guy still on

[SunkenCiv]

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