Free Republic

Archaeologists working on the famed Easter Island have unearthed a previously unknown statue while excavating a dry lake bed. The newly discovered statue is one of the Moai, the well-known megalithic statues believed to have been carved by Polynesian tribes between the 10th and 16th centuries. “We think we know all the moai, but then a new one turns up, a new discovery,” archaeologist Dr. Terry Hunt told Good Morning America (GMA) Feb. 25. Hunt teaches archaeology at the University of Arizona and has been studying the statues and the Rapa Nui for 20 years. “The moai are important because...

A Chilean island resident was arrested on March 1 after his truck... crashed into one of the stone figures and badly damaged both it and the ahu, or platform, it was perched on. Local authorities believe that the accident was caused by brake failure that caused his truck to slide downhill. On the island, which is known as Hanga Roa by its native Rapa Nui people, the enormous stone heads called moai have long been a source of intrigue and wonder. In 2019, Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Director of the Easter Island Statue Project, told CNN Travel that bad tourist...

The giant heads, carved centuries ago by the island’s inhabitants, represent the living ancestors of Easter Island’s Polynesian people - the Rapa Nui - and have brought it UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Dozens of giant “Moai” statues dominate the hillsides surrounding the island’s Rano Raraku wetland, but they are facing the threat of what locals describe as a kind of leprosy, white spots that are appearing on their iconic facades.

WITH ALL THE WAR NEWS blaring from our TV sets, few Americans found time last week to mark the passing of 87-year-old Thor Heyerdahl. Yet his death haunts and accuses us, like a dagger pointed at our hearts. The great Norwegian explorer lived as few men dare to live in this effeminate age. Heyerdahl roamed the seas in primitive, handmade craft, as intimate with death as his Viking forebears had been. In 1947, he sailed more than 4,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean in a balsa-log raft named Kon-Tiki. He crossed the Atlantic in 1970, in a ship of reeds,...

WHEN THOR HEYERDAHL died in April, the mass media fell oddly mute. Some readers told me that they learned of the great Norwegian explorer’s death only a week later, by reading my eulogy on the Internet. Such apathy seems hard to fathom. Every schoolboy once read Kon-Tiki and dreamed of conquering the waves as Heyerdahl had done. Perhaps, imbued with the modern philosophy of "safety first," today’s journalists no longer wish to encourage such dreams. Media apathy has likewise greeted Dominique Goerlitz – Heyerdahl’s apprentice and heir apparent. On July 20, this 35-year-old German schoolteacher landed in Alexandria, Egypt, after...

In the Footsteps of Heyerdahl By Richard Poe August 16, 2002 WHEN THOR HEYERDAHL died in April, the mass media fell oddly mute. Some readers told me that they learned of the great Norwegian explorer’s death only a week later, by reading my eulogy on the Internet. Such apathy seems hard to fathom. Every schoolboy once read Kon-Tiki and dreamed of conquering the waves as Heyerdahl had done. Perhaps, imbued with the modern philosophy of "safety first," today’s journalists no longer wish to encourage such dreams. Media apathy has likewise greeted Dominique Goerlitz – Heyerdahl’s apprentice and heir apparent. On...

Floating A Big Idea: Ancient Use Of Rafts To Transport Goods DemonstratedMIT students built a small-scale replica of an ancient oceangoing sailing raft to study its seaworthiness and handling. (Credit: Donna Coveney/MIT) ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2008) — Oceangoing sailing rafts plied the waters of the equatorial Pacific long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, and carried tradegoods for thousands of miles all the way from modern-day Chile to western Mexico, according to new findings by MIT researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Details of how the ancient trading system worked more than 1,000 years ago were reconstructed...

Abstract: By approximately 100 BC Ecuadorian traders had established maritime commercial routes extending from Chile to Colombia. Historical sources indicate that they transported their merchandise in large, ocean-going sailing rafts made of balsa logs. By about AD 700 the data show that Ecuadorian metalworking technology had reached the west coast of Mexico but remained absent in the region between Guerrero and lower Central America. Archaeologists have argued that this technology was most plausibly transmitted via balsa raft exchange routes. This article uses mathematical simulation of balsa rafts’ mechanical and material characteristics to determine whether these rafts were suitable vessels for...

For the first time in nearly 500 years, a full-size balsa-wood raft just like those used in pre-Columbian Pacific trade took to the water on Sunday, May 10. Only this time, instead of the Pacific coast between Mexico and Chile where such rafts carried goods between the great civilizations of the Andes and Mesoamerica as long as a millennium ago, the replica raft was floated in the Charles River basin. The faithful reproduction of the ancient sailing craft, built from eight balsa logs brought from Ecuador for the project, was created in less than six weeks by 30 students in...

Archaeologists have disproved the fifty-year-old theory underpinning our understanding of how the famous stone statues were moved around Easter IslandArchaeologists have disproved the fifty-year-old theory underpinning our understanding of how the famous stone statues were moved around Easter Island. Fieldwork led by researchers at University College London and The University of Manchester, has shown the remote Pacific island's ancient road system was primarily ceremonial and not solely built for transportation of the figures. A complex network of roads up to 800-years-old crisscross the Island between the hat and statue quarries and the coastal areas. Laying alongside the roads are dozens...

South Americans helped colonise Easter Island centuries before Europeans reached it. Clear genetic evidence has, for the first time, given support to elements of this controversial theory showing that while the remote island was mostly colonised from the west, there was also some influx of people from the Americas. ~~~snip~~~ Now Erik Thorsby of the University of Oslo in Norway has found clear evidence to support elements of Heyerdahl's hypothesis. In 1971 and 2008 he collected blood samples from Easter Islanders whose ancestors had not interbred with Europeans and other visitors to the island. Thorsby looked at the HLA genes,...

The scattered islands of the vast Pacific Ocean were settled by seafarers who set out from the eastern coasts and islands of Asia and traveled thousands of kilometers by boat. Meanwhile pre-Columbian South America was populated by people who crossed a now-vanished land bridge far to the north. Did these two groups ever meet in the New World? There's a good chance of that, according to a new study, which finds evidence that Easter Islanders may have reached South America and mixed with the Native Americans already there. University of Oslo immunologist Erik Thorsby first began analyzing the people of...

The head statuary of Easter Island is instantly recognizable to people all over the world, but who would have guessed that, lurking beneath the soil, these famous mugs also had bodies? The Easter Island Statue Project Conservation Initiative, which is funded by the Archaeological Institute of America, has been excavating two of the enormous figures for the last several years, and have found unique petroglyphs carved on their backs that had been conserved in the soil. Their research has also yielded evidence of how the carvers were paid with food such as tuna and lobster, as well as clues to...

Lichen are eating away at the Moai, the 400 volcanic stone heads that dominate the skyline of Easter Island. Earlier treatments to preserve these ancient monoliths at this World Heritage Site called for filling some of the most deeply corroded stones with concrete. Unfortunately, experts think that this treatment might have worsened the damaging effects of the wind and saltwater that batter the Polynesian island. In fact, the lichen may even be feeding off the concrete used to save the Moai. Professor Lorenzo Casamenti and five of his students from the restoration school Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence have found...

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...

German Firm Hired to Save Easter Island Sculptures Tue Nov 4,12:24 PM ET BERLIN (Reuters) - UNESCO has awarded a German firm contract to preserve the world-famous but decaying Moai head sculptures on Easter Island, which are suffering the effects of the weather, tourism and past restoration attempts. Stefan Maar, founder of Berlin-based Maar Denkmalpflege GmbH said Tuesday his company planned to begin treating the statues with chemicals in early 2005 in a project estimated to cost about 10 million euros ($11.5 million). "Something has to be done," Maar told Reuters. "But with over 1,000 figures, it is a really...

Experts work to save Easter Island statues CLARE CHAPMAN A TEAM of conservationists is working on a ‘miracle cure’ to save the famous giant heads of Easter Island from crumbling away. Experts from Germany are investigating the use of a chemical to stabilise the stone monoliths, which have become severely eroded. The Moai stone heads with their famous long faces and large noses were carved out of rock that was originally volcanic ash by the island’s inhabitants between 1100 and 1650. They are one of the main sources of income for the island, known as Rapa Nui, drawing in more...

Easter island, fools' paradise Ronald Wright 18 November 2004 The greatest wonder of the ancient world is how recent it all is. No city or monument is much more than 5,000 years old. Only about seventy lifetimes, of seventy years, have been lived end to end since civilization began. Its entire run occupies a mere 0.002 per cent of the nearly 3 million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone. The progress of “man the hunter” during the Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic – his perfection of weapons and techniques – led directly to the end of hunting as...

Release Date: Aug. 31, 2005 Contact: Will Dube (585) 475-4954 or wjduns@rit.edu Groundbreaking Research Sheds Light on Ancient Mystery RIT researcher creates new population model to help predict and prevent societal collapse A researcher at Rochester Institute of Technology is unraveling a mystery surrounding Easter Island. William Basener, assistant professor of mathematics, has created the first mathematical formula to accurately model the island’s monumental societal collapse. Between 1200 and 1500 A.D., the small, remote island, 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile, was inhabited by over 10,000 people and had a relatively sophisticated and technologically advanced society. During this time,...

Did humans decimate Easter Island on arrival? 19:00 09 March 2006 NewScientist.com news service Bob Holmes Early settlers to the remote Easter Island stripped the island’s natural resources to erect towering stone statues (Image: Terry L Hunt)The first humans may have arrived on Easter Island several centuries later than previously supposed, suggests a new study. If so, these Polynesian settlers must have begun destroying the island's forests almost immediately after their arrival. Easter Island has often been cited as the classic example of a human-induced ecological catastrophe. The island – one of the most remote places on Earth – was...