Posted on 06/21/2012 3:47:03 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Did Easter Island's famous statues rock, or roll? After doing a little rocking out themselves, researchers say they're sure the natives raised the monumental figures upright, and then rocked them back and forth to "walk" them to their positions.
Their findings mesh with a scenario that casts the Polynesian island's natives in the roles of resourceful engineers working with the little that they had on hand, rather than the victims of a self-inflicted environmental catastrophe.
"A lot of what people think they know about the island turns out to be not true," Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at California State University at Long Beach, told me today.
Lipo and University of Hawaii anthropologist Terry Hunt lay out their case in a book titled "The Statues That Walked" as well as July's issue of National Geographic magazine. Their story serves as a counterpoint to a darker Easter Island saga, detailed in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," a better-known book by UCLA scientist-author Jared Diamond.
Two scenarios
In Diamond's scenario, Easter Island's society is portrayed as one that chose to fail through overpopulation, conflict and deforestation. Polynesians colonized the island as far back as 1,600 years ago, and cut down forests of palm trees as part of a slash-and-burn strategy that led to intensive farming, soil degradation, conflict, cannibalism and massive depopulation. By the time the Europeans arrived in the 18th century, Easter Island's society was on the ropes.
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com ...
Three teams, one on each side and one in the back, maneuver an Easter Island statue replica down a road in Hawaii, hinting that prehistoric farmers who didn't have the wheel may have transported these statues in this manner. The experiment was led by archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo and is reported in the July issue of National Geographic magazine. -- © Photo by Sheela Sharma
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thor Heyerdahl forever! :') |
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Seems like the hard way to me but I don’t know what they were thinking.
I was working in a cemetery....moving stones. I used a cookie sheet...easy as pie...
What you mean is a “dumb” way....I agree...
Any Polynesian native will tell you that statues walk at night.
Maybe they shouldn’t have blindfolded him. Did the researchers ever think of that?
Wally Wallington already pretty much showed this same thing for Stone Henge.
"...Ropes were also used to move the Moai statues to the platforms. For this to work, the hauling ropes would have had to have been about 250 feet long, which at an inch thick would have weighed over a ton. Many people required to make the rope, many people required to pull. Some Moai were erected up to 15 miles from the quarry, and until recently it was assumed they would have been hauled along on wooden rollers. However, latest research by Professor Charles Love who has been excavating the moai roads, shows that rollers would not have worked because the road beds themselves were not level, but slightly concave. How they moved the Moai statues is still one of the great mysteries of Easter Island. Whatever means were employed, once a statue arrived at its intended ahu, it had to be levered upright. Then the red crowns, some weighing up to 11 tons, could be placed on top...
AND NOT ONLY were the roads CONCAVE as shown in the image above, they were partially paved with rocks, which would suggest the statues were moved lying on their backas...
Thor Heyerdahl Forever. AKU AKU!
Yeah .. but ch’never lost yer gloves ‘cause they were pinned to yer cuffs.
Looks like a fun game for a 4th of July picnic.
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