Please accept our Best Wishes for Mother and Child.
0
It was Easter 1722. The Dutch Admiral Jacobs Roggeveen had discovered a new island in the Pacific Ocean. He named it Easter Island. Near the coastline, his crew saw small boats of the local people setting off to greet his ship. Scanning the coastline of the island, he saw gigantic heads. Roggeveen gave this description of the heads: “the stone heads surprised us. We could not understand how these people, who do not have load-bearing wood to make machinery, or strong rope, succeeded in erecting these statues, statues that measure ten metres in height and width.” Roggeveen had just added one more entry in the growing list of mysteries: the more Westerners travelled the globe, the more enigmas they came across.
When Roggeveen arrived, there were two tribes on the island. The first was the Ha-nau-aa-epe, which was distinct because of their long ears. They were tall, white-skinned with red hair and ca. two metres tall. The other tribe was the Ha-nau-mo-moko, which had short ears. Though it is assumed that the statues were created by the short-eared tribe, under the command of the long-eared people, portraying the latter, there was also a massacre of the long-eared people in 1760; apparently only three of them survived. The massacre is normally interpreted as a revolt of the short-eared people against their oppressive elite of the long ears.
The type of “diplomacy” used when liaising with the local people often meant that no further knowledge about the stone heads was easily recorded. Roggeveen himself felt he had found a quick answer to “his” mystery. He chopped off the head of one statue, in the supposition that the heads were not really made of stone, but of clay, covered with a coating of seashells. His theory proved incorrect. It lasted until 1770 before the Spanish decided to send an expedition in search of this island that had been left to its own devices for the past five decades. The expedition proved that the heads were definitely made of stone. The local population had to contend with great tribulations between 1770 and 1774, by which many statues had also fallen from their bases. James Cook identified that the only hill on the island was actually a volcano and identified it as the main cause for the destruction that had occurred by 1774. Cook also concluded that the current inhabitants of the island were not the creators of the heads.
But who was then? Two hundred years later, the Swiss controversial author Erich von Däniken speculated that the statues were the work of extraterrestrial beings. These beings were believed to have been stranded on the island and with nothing better to do, they had begun to erect these statues. Von Däniken argued that the local population, with the primitive tools they had at their disposal, were unable to create the heads.
His was just one opinion amongst several. Others believed that the statues were millennia old, the last remnants of a lost civilisation, Mu, the Pacific Ocean colleague of Atlantis. There were, however, more conservative views. Cook and other expedition leaders concluded that the platforms on which the heads stood were used for funerals. The statues were also named after former rulers of the local people. But no further information was learned from the local people, if only because those were exported from the island as slave labour. Indeed, by 1877, only 111 people were still living on the island. The civilisation of Easter Island was eventually made famous by the British pioneering expedition of Katherine Routledge, who arrived on the island in 1914 and began what amounted to the first serious archaeological campaign into the mysteries of the island and – specifically – its enigmatic stone heads. With help from the locals, she and her husband eventually excavated thirty figures and recorded the island’s legends and history.
A century onwards, the origin of almost thousand stone heads remains nevertheless extremely difficult to assess. All statues gaze towards the land, even though many of the statues stand very close towards the sea. They measure between two and eleven metres high and all have the same appearance: a long shaped head with an upper torso, a chin and long ears, with arms along the body or arms that rest on the stomach. Some statues still contain eyes, made in white and red stone and coral. Only ca. seventy of the more than thousand statues have a “pukao”, or “hats”, on their head. The name originated from reports of the first visitors, who had spotted certain local people with a headdress made of red feathers. This small number of hatted heads has puzzled archaeologists for many decades. The volcanic rock used for the hats came from a sacred quarry inside a crater full of red scoria, a volcanic pumice. The rock had to be transported for several miles on rolling tree trunks. Sue Hamilton believes that the hats were, in fact, a plait or top knot that was only worn by the elite chieftains.
Source
