Easter Island's statues stand as silent witnesses to a thousand years of mystery

Easter Island's statues stand as silent witnesses to a thousand years
of mystery
By Janet Fullwood - Bee Travel Editor
Published 12:00 am PST Sunday, January 14, 2007
Story appeared in TRAVEL section, Page M

EASTER ISLAND, Chile -- Heads, heads, I couldn't wait to see the famous
heads of Easter Island.

The first ones I spotted were from the plane, black slabs sticking up
like tombstones in a tawny, treeless landscape.

As soon as I'd settled into the hotel -- where I had to borrow a broom
to sweep up a harvest of freshly fumigated cockroaches -- I walked up
the coast from the little town of Hanga Roa toward the archaeological
complex called Tahai.

The eerie silhouettes of the statues loomed behind a cemetery whose sea
of crosses seemed to mock the neolithic icons.

I didn't go close at first but sat at a distance in the field fronting
the monuments -- or moai, as they're called in the indigenous Rapanui
language. The panorama encompassed a group of five human
representations clustered on a single ahu, or ceremonial platform, and
two single monoliths some distance away.

On first impression, the statues creeped me out. They seemed to emanate
bad vibes, especially the one with the eyes. He was a 16-foot-tall,
20-ton, no-mercy kind of guy: I could visualize the islanders of a
millennia ago cowering in his presence, drums thumping, torches
blazing, rituals unfolding under a black, star-spangled sky. Easter
Island is so isolated -- mainland Chile, its parent country, is 2,300
miles away -- that the culture of the moai builders thrived,
uninfluenced by outsiders, for more than 1,000 years.

The other statues, once I got closer, revealed personalities of their
own. One seemed benevolent under its stony, dark-socketed stare. One
was wise, one stern. They all had long, stylized ears and long-fingered
hands wrapped, Buddha-like, around protruding bellies.

The more I looked, the more I saw. And the more I saw, the more deeply
I ceded myself to the bewitching spell of Easter Island -- or Rapa Nui,
as it is called by the 4,500 people who live here.

By whatever name, this remote, 10-by-15-mile chunk of volcanic rubble,
the easternmost outpost of Polynesia, is one of the wonders of the
world, a place where history and mystery converge to tantalize the
imagination and challenge rational belief. The moai, and the
prehistoric culture that chiseled an estimated 1,000 of them from a
volcanic crater and hauled them around the island without benefit of
metal or wheel, have been the subject of intense scientific inquiry for
more than a century. Yet much remains unknown.

"There is so much speculation -- about everything," said China
Pakarati, the guide who led our group of visiting journalists on a
five-day exploration of the island. Her knowledge of island
anthropology proved encyclopedic, but it was the genetic ties that lent
her interpretations an added dimension. A native Rapanui descended from
the statue builders, Pakarati was weaned on myths and legends passed
down through the generations.

"The challenge for me," she told us at the outset, "is to reconcile
what is written with our own oral tradition. It's important to keep our
traditions alive."

And so we heard stories related by her father, her cousins, her oldest
great-aunt -- right alongside the latest academic theories about such
particulars as the significance of the female vulva symbols carved atop
some of the moai's pukao, or red scoria topknots.

Like many travelers who find their way here, I'd seen photographs of
Easter Island's monuments as a child, studied them in Anthropology 101
and eaten up every word written by Norwegian anthropologist Thor
Heyerdahl, who postulated that the island had been settled by Peruvians
who arrived in reed boats.

Still, nothing could prepare me for the gut-punch impact of Rano
Raraku, the quarry where the statues were made -- and where almost 400
of them, in various stages of fabrication, still stand or lie shattered
in the dust. Across the island, the green, water-filled crater called
Rano Kau took my breath away: Its topography is unique in the world,
yet I'd never seen pictures of it. The adjacent ritual site of Orongo
had restored, boat-shaped houses to contemplate, along with petroglyphs
depicting the ancient world.

http://www.sacbee.com/643/story/106545.html

Pakarati took us to see cave paintings and pointed out close-fitting
masonry resembling that at Machu Picchu in Peru. At another site, Te
Pito te Kura, we gathered around a smooth stone with magnetic
properties that spiritual tourists flock to under the belief that
ancient Rapanui regarded it as the "navel of the world." (In reality,
Pakarati said, the entire island was considered the umbilicus.)

The most awesome site, in terms of sheer wow factor, was Tongariki,
where 15 recently restored stone giants -- the tallest of them 46 feet
high -- stand with their backs to the sea, staring forebodingly at the
crater from which they were born.

Theories abound as to why the statues were built.

"My aunt, she says the moai are a portrait; that they (the islanders)
carried the statues to the villages to have the presence of their
ancestors there," Pakarati said.

Anthropologists think they were built for different reasons at
different times and moved by methods that evolved over the centuries.
In all, about 500 moai, not counting those left in the quarry, were
erected on ahus at prehistoric settlements around the island or
abandoned on roads leading from the crater. The statues weigh an
average of 14 tons; the heaviest one transported, a giant called Paro,
weighed a staggering 82 tons.

The most intriguing Easter Island enigma concerns not the mechanics of
moving the moai, but the fate of the culture that built them.

UCLA professor and author Jared Diamond, in his 2005 best-seller
"Collapse," devotes a chapter to the ominous demise of the
statue-building cult. He attributes it to environmental ruin caused by
deforestation, overpopulation and materialistic obsession.

"By now the meaning of Easter Island for us should be chillingly
obvious," he concludes: "Easter Island is Earth writ small."

In a nutshell, the story of Rapa Nui, as set forth in the Sebastian
Englert Anthropology Museum in Hanga Roa, begins with its settlement
between A.D. 300 and 800 (even the date is controversial) by Polynesian
voyagers from (probably) the Marquesas Islands. DNA evidence has proved
the Polynesian connection beyond a doubt -- though somehow, the
Peruvian theories popularized by Heyerdahl in the 1950s seem to persist
in the DNA of public consciousness.

Anyway, experts generally agree that at the time of human settlement,
the island was covered by millions of giant palm trees of a species now
extinct. The islanders immediately began chipping away at them, first
to clear fields for agriculture, then to provide timber and rope for
moving statues.

Increasingly, size mattered: The moai started out small and grew ever
larger over the centuries. At the end, the quarry at Rano Raraku was
well on its way to becoming a Polynesian version of Mount Rushmore.

The island -- and the islanders -- paid a terrible price for their
obsession. As the trees went, so went wood for canoes, and so went
offshore fishing. Topsoil eroded, agriculture faltered, seabirds and
native mammals disappeared, firewood became scarce, and stored seeds
were devoured by rats.

A diminishing food supply and deteriorating environment spawned
conflict among rival clans, who began warring with each other,
cannibalizing each other and desecrating each other's statues. A new
religion -- the Birdman cult -- arose and still was flourishing when
the first Europeans, led by Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, came ashore
in 1722.

Roggeveen reported many moai still standing; Capt. James Cook saw them,
too, in 1774. But by the mid-1880s, all the statues had been toppled.
And then, in a story repeated all over the Americas, came European
exploitation and, by the end of the 19th century, near-extermination of
the island's remaining native people.

The wounds continued to bleed throughout most of the 20th century.
Author Paul Theroux, visiting in 1986 for his book "Happy Isles of
Oceania," termed Rapa Nui "a lost island of damaged souls ... a place
of gloom and anarchy."

Only in the past couple of decades have things changed for the better.
The Chilean government in recent years has returned land to native
Rapanui, restoring pride and restarting agriculture. Tourism is
thriving, with four passenger jets a week delivering visitors from
Santiago and another two arriving from Tahiti. Dozens of moai have been
restored and re-erected, giving visitors a better sense of the ancient
Rapanui world.

Visitors such as Bonnie Dill and Wendy Lynn Peltier of Charleston,
S.C., are not alone in finding that a visit to the island exceeds
expectations.

"We decided to stop over on the way to Tahiti in the most exotic place
we could think of, and I really didn't expect to like it all that
much," said Peltier, a sculptor. "But it's been so inspiring ... when I
saw Tongariki, it took my breath away. We've been out from sunrise to
sunset every day."

Easter Island is still cutting its teeth on tourism, and much of what
makes the island so engaging are elements of the unexpected. Who would
anticipate, for example, landing on one of the biggest runways in the
world -- a 3.8-kilometer strip built by NASA to serve as an emergency
airstrip for space shuttles? Surfers and scuba divers come from around
the world, drawn by uncharted breaks and transparent waters. Open-air
restaurants serve floppingly fresh seafood and home-grown salad at
reasonable prices, and the grocery store stocks a good selection of
Chilean wines.

My hotel, the O-Tai (which I recommend despite that encounter with
cockroaches) was just down the street from the village school, and
every morning I watched a father trotting his son to class on
horseback. Horse culture is big here -- by some accounts there are more
horses than people -- and so is the culture of long-haired young men
who ride through town bareback, giving newly arrived women tourists the
eye.

Given another day, I would have embarked on a hike around the island's
roadless north coast, which is pocked with caves and fallen moai. Given
still another, I would have packed a picnic and split the day between
the beautiful white-sand beaches at Ovahe and Anakena.

Easter Island, as I quickly discovered, is more than the sum of its
heads. It's a friendly place with a proud culture, and getting around,
either on your own or with a tour group, is a breeze.

Just don't hang out around the moai at night. Even in the 21st century,
the statues retain the uncanny ability to creep people out.