Issue 86
January/February 2006
Contents
news
Unearthing the ancestral rabbit
Round and about in historic Leominster
features
700,000 years old found in Suffolk
Full report from the scientists who found the first Northern Europeans.
Easter Island statues explained
Brett Shepardson takes issue with stories of doom - thanks to Edwardian women.
50 years on
Celebrating industrial archaeology, but what is it? Michael Nevell knows.
Evacuees Christmas and other war art
Soldiers who draw: English Heritage report on a new study of old graffiti.
on the web
letters
CBA News
Headlines from the CBA office.
ISSN 1357-4442
Editor Mike Pitts
features
On the shoulders of giants
Brett Shepardson is surveying statues on Easter Island. Not the first to do so: but he has found a pattern that matches plans drawn by the English ethnologist Katherine Routledge nearly 90 years ago. He says the implications may change the way we think about the island's story.
Shrouded in a mysterious past and now thriving with a unique modern culture, the Pacific island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) rarely fails to inspire the imagination. Archaeologists investigate remains in a rigorous, and sometimes tedious, scientific manner, but romanticised popular accounts seem still to rule public understanding of the island's prehistory.
Rapa Nui's ecological and cultural collapse has become an allegory for our own poor resource management and global fate. We know that the island was deforested in the centuries immediately following human colonisation (around AD400-600, perhaps even as late as 800). Legends of cannibalism and warfare accent our interpretation of failure. Perhaps above all else, the trademark statues seem to tell the story of a culture's rise and fall.
More than 700 statues or moai (pronounced mo-EYE) were constructed prehistorically, ranging in length from roughly one metre to over 20m. Many of them once stood erect upon ceremonial altars (ahu), as witnessed by the earliest European explorers, but they subsequently fell. Explanations for the statues vary: some suggest they were offerings to deities, others that they were carved in the likeness of, and to honour, deceased chiefs (ariki) or relatives.
Of the moai that remain on the island today, previous surveys suggest that only 220 reached their final destinations at coastal ahu or ceremonial centres, some having been transported up to 15km from the statue quarry at the Rano Raraku volcanic crater. More than 360 moai remain in various stages of quarrying and carving on the crater slopes; and more than 80 have been classified as "in transport" - supposedly abandoned somewhere between the quarry and their destination. Prevailing explanations suggest that the statue industry was a case of indulgent ostentation, competition and escalation. Rival clans supposedly strove to construct, transport and erect statues until deforestation and depleted natural resources forced the tradition to end.
Such grandiose accounts have been written, in some cases, by people who have spent little time on Rapa Nui, and offer only a cursory synthesis of archaeological data. English ethnologist Katherine Routledge was from a different school. In an era in which women were dissuaded from venturing as far as university, Routledge travelled halfway round the world on the schooner Mana for 13 months to reach Rapa Nui - the most isolated inhabited island anywhere. Once there, she spent more than a year between 1914 and 1915 researching the Polynesian culture that had flourished for over 1,000 years.
While other Europeans were on Easter Island nearly 200 years before her, the detail and comprehensiveness with which Routledge documented Rapa Nui culture lie well beyond comparison with her predecessors - and perhaps her successors as well.
Routledge and her companions interviewed and re-interviewed numerous islanders on prehistoric, historic and contemporary culture. Her masterwork, The Mystery of Easter Island (1919), is of singular importance for Rapa Nui studies. After extensive research, she did not conclude the culture to be one that failed: she was more concerned with collecting data than arriving at sweeping conclusions.
Among the book's maps are one illustrating the routes by which the megalithic statues were transported, and another the social boundaries between familial clans. While the first has become widely accepted, the significance of the second has been questioned repeatedly. Perhaps partly on behalf of her informants, Routledge herself expressed uncertainty as to the territorial divisions. She was careful to note that islanders were free to move and even marry between clans. Archaeological research since has offered sparse physical evidence in support of the boundaries.
Over seven months in 2003 I hiked some 500km with a hand-held GPS unit, and surveyed 703 moai. The database reveals 59 inland statues (sited at neither the Rano Raraku quarry nor coastal ahu) on or near Routledge's political boundaries, bringing new life to her records. Many of these statues had previously been categorised as "in transport" - by implication, abandoned by a culture in collapse. We might instead imagine their purposeful placement by a lively and elaborate society in recent prehistoric or proto-historic times. Ultimately, we are probably better off withholding judgment until further evidence is available.
In the new spatial analysis, 29 inland moai do not lie on territorial boundaries: but these are on the statue "roads" mapped by Routledge. There are also a few inland statues that have been removed from the island, transported around the island in recent times, or whose locations simply show no relationships to territorial divisions or statue roads.
After the 2003 survey and analysis, I returned to Rapa Nui for field-testing. Did the inland statue locations really map political divisions? By walking paths where I thought Routledge's boundaries were, in just two days I ran right into four previously undescribed moai, all within 100m of courses plotted before I set out. In addition, I found six avanga (elongated rectangular burial chambers) similarly close to territorial boundaries. Avanga are generally found along the coast. In this case, however, they are inland: boundaries seem to pass perpendicularly through their long axis, though further analysis is required.
The correlation between social boundaries and statuary can lead us to find more moai: but perhaps more importantly it may help us explain the distribution of settlements and architectural features across the landscape. However, the strong relationship does not prove that certain statues were deliberately placed to mark political or social boundaries. To begin with, these moai (or their associated ceremonial or habitation centres) may not all have been occupied or constructed at the same time. Even if these inland statues were contemporary with each other, and even if their sites related to an extinct sociopolitical order, this would not prove that statues were deliberately placed to create or mark boundaries. Boundaries may have been delimited by settlements, ceremonial sites or natural geography - whether these locations were adorned with moai may be a separate issue altogether. Thus sociopolitical boundaries may have become well defined prior to or long after the placing of statues.
On the other hand, a spatial pattern exists that seems more than coincidence, and archaeologists must attempt to explain it through additional investigation. Although Routledge missed the relationship between inland statue locations and clan boundaries, she makes it clear that moai were known sometimes to function as boundary markers. We can also conclude that appealing to the fall of the megalithic statue tradition or the abandonment of statues "in transport" (implicitly or explicitly) as a sign of cultural collapse is imprudent. Any number of explanations may suit the observed distribution of statue locations on the island. We now have reason to pursue one of these explanations as a legitimate hypothesis.
Preparations are underway for more fieldwork in 2006. As volunteers in 'A Pó - The Rapa Nui Youth Involvement Program (www.terevaka.net/apo.html) - island high school students will join me and members of the local Padre Sebastián Englert Anthropological Museum to map, photograph and describe all habitational and ceremonial remains linked to inland statues and Routledge's territorial boundaries. We will study the orientation of moai and settlement or ceremonial centres. Until now, archaeologists have often judged a statue's location to be final if it had reached an ahu or if its eyes were fully carved (legends refer to statues "seeing" once they reached their destination). Our survey may help to substantiate Routledge's work, but also to extend our understanding both of statue locations and settlement patterns across the island's interior.
The moai were only one facet of a complex culture, but they loom large in our perception of the island's prehistory. The decline of the megalithic tradition on Rapa Nui, the abandonment of statues en route to ahu, and the toppling of the moai (naturally or by malicious intent), are often suggested as symbolic of the collapse of an entire culture. Even more, the statue tradition - through its demands on timber and other resources – is itself purported in some cases to be partially responsible for environmental collapse. My research suggests that all this may be based on a premature and flawed interpretation.
Explanations of cultural and ecological collapse are not only unsubstantiated, they are irresponsible. The end of the statue tradition denotes a change in cultural iconography, not collapse or failure. This change certainly does not prove that statues were responsible for an environmental collapse on the island.
Characterised as a case of poor resource management, ecological collapse and cultural failure, Rapa Nui culture provides an alarming parable to current global social and environmental concerns: but it may be altogether misleading. Rapa Nui is a subtropical island that may have offered far fewer natural resources and biodiversity than its tropical Polynesian counterparts. Yet generation after generation, islanders found a way to survive and adapt to changing environmental conditions.
Rapa Nui people bore the horrible burden of physical and epidemiological colonialist intrusion from Europe. They suffered repeated slave raids in the late 19th century. Yet the island's population successfully adapted and rebounded. After suffering cultural oppression by the Chilean government even in the 20th century, Rapa Nui culture is again reshaping. In many ways, there may be few better examples of successful cultural adaptation, resource management and resilience than Rapa Nui. A methodical re-evaluation of archaeological evidence may help to support this interpretation.
Visitors to the island today will see that the modern culture stands proud on the shoulders of giants. Archaeologists must do the same - and build upon the work of those like Katherine Routledge, who took great time and care in committing to detailed research and documenting the facts of Rapa Nui's past. It is up to readers to discern critically and inquisitively between the work of those like Routledge, and publications or television programmes that are just trying to sell a story.
See BL Shepardson The role of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) statuary as territorial boundary markers, Antiquity 79 (2005), 169-178; K Routledge The Mystery of Easter Island (reprinted 1998 Adventures Unlimited Press ISBN 0932813488)
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