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Easter Island / Rapa Nui

taras

Least Haunted
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If you're reading this... (in the UK)

You are either missing (until 10pm on Thursday) or have missed Horizon investigating Easter Island on BBC2.
 
I'm watching and surfing... :)

They seem to be blaming it all on the Europeans again :(

I always thought it was the lack of trees, but nevermind.

Jane (only half-watching, obviously)
 
Re: If you're reading this... (in the UK)

taras said:
You are either missing (until 10pm on Thursday) or have missed Horizon investigating Easter Island on BBC2.

No I saw it! Ha, Ha.

There was nothing on TV afterwards so I desided to email a friend and ended up here (as usual.)

And no, Mejane, they wheren't blaming the Europeans just pointing out that they brought Syphilis and slavery to Easter Island. Now that can't be said to be to blame for the colapse of the civalisation can it?
 
You're probably correct, James.

I'm not very good with visual formats* so I don't tend to take much attention to TV, but the impression I got was certainly "we introduced desease to a perfect community - we bad!"

I always thought that the civilization of Easter Island collapsed long before Europeans arrived as they had cut down all all the native trees on the island to "please the gods" by building and transporting those huge efigies (sp?) ... the arrival of the Spaniads and their viruses was just the last resort.

I could be wrong, of course :)

Jane.

*I'm not blind or "visually impaired"; I just think in terms of sound... I may be weird.
 
mejane said:
You're probably correct, James.

I'm not very good with visual formats* so I don't tend to take much attention to TV, but the impression I got was certainly "we introduced desease to a perfect community - we bad!"

I always thought that the civilization of Easter Island collapsed long before Europeans arrived as they had cut down all all the native trees on the island to "please the gods" by building and transporting those huge efigies (sp?) ... the arrival of the Spaniads and their viruses was just the last resort.

I could be wrong, of course :)

Jane.

*I'm not blind or "visually impaired"; I just think in terms of sound... I may be weird.

Actualy acording to the program you're half right.

They choped down all the trees but managed to pull themselfs back from the brink by inventing a new belief system that alowed the orderd proportoning of food.

Then the Europeans came...

On the subject of slavery: Scotland was one of the major european slave tradors. You dont get that on shortbread tins.
 
I thought some of the theorising was a bit dubious. Like the bit about them using the "birdman" ritual to decide who would get the biggest share of the limited resources.

Firstly, they didn't seem to back it up with any specific evidence other than the carvings, which could have symbolised anything.

Secondly, they had said that the lack of palm trees caused problems with the soil (erosion, lack of nutrients etc) so that the harvests failed, so consequently there was no food and they resorted to cannibalism - if this theory was correct then there wouldn't have been any food to share out in the first place.

And thirdly, if they knew how to grow and harvest crops then I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't have the necessary knowledge to be able to grow more palm trees so that they had a constant supply.

I felt that the depletion of the palm trees would more likely have resulted from climatic changes (which may have also caused the depletion of fish and birds in the area). But that's just my theory - I have no knowledge of this subject :err:

Still, an interesting program, and those statues really are magnificent :)
 
MadCat said:
I felt that the depletion of the palm trees would more likely have resulted from climatic changes (which may have also caused the depletion of fish and birds in the area).

Actualy that's what I thought. But alas, I also have no knowlage on this subject.
 
The programme was billed as having revoluntionary new information and ideas about the down-fall of the Easter Island civilisation. Was it just me or was the idea of deforestation being the route cause a rather old theory? Most disappointing. (although it did pander to my ego as I told me wife this theory before watching and was superbly proved right by the programme - thus making me look more intelligent than I am;) ).

Still, well made programme - very entertaining.

It is inevitable that many people will say "not sure about that part of the programme - where were the total facts?" I always think that misses the point - the programme is about a theory (or set of theories) and such programmes never claim to be telling a full factual account. If an academic is extrapoloating from evidence, I always assume that people have the sense to see that they are just talking about a theory from the evidence - not claiming 100% accuracy.

If we lived in a world where nothing can be said unless there is 100% evidence - archaeology would be a dead subject.
 
Damn, Missed it!

There was a film about Easter Island wasn't there? 'Rapa Nui'? with Jason Scott Lee?
 
Too True...

jamesveldon said:
On the subject of slavery: Scotland was one of the major european slave tradors. You dont get that on shortbread tins.
And one of their major exports was Highlanders and the Scots poor to the West Indies and the Americas! As bonded slaves.
 
The program was a bit pants really. Nothing new was said. The whole business with the statues eyes was not entirely correct. The eyes weren't positioned to gaze over the land, they were looking skywards.
I'd like to see some serious research done into the beginnings of the moai cult. What prompted the islanders to erect all these statues? It must have a cosmological connection. Unfortunately a possible 'star map' was destroyed when the airport runway was built.
While we are on the subject of Easter Island I'd just like to say how totally unimpressed I am with the positioning of the British Museum's statue. It's on a big pedestal next to the coffee shop. The coffee shop! Jeez. The lighting in that area is appalling and so you can barely see the petroglyghs carved on the statue's back. This particular statue is in an excellent state of preservation (due to it being buried) and you can see feck all of 'classic' moai features. Ok, rant over:p
 
Errrrrrrrrr...........I think the programme made the point that the eyes were looking upward......heaven-ward........above the normal mortal day-to-day human.

Or did I just imagine this?
 
Oh No! I'm Having A Roland Barthes Moment!

Mana said:
While we are on the subject of Easter Island I'd just like to say how totally unimpressed I am with the positioning of the British Museum's statue. It's on a big pedestal next to the coffee shop. The coffee shop! Jeez. The lighting in that area is appalling and so you can barely see the petroglyghs carved on the statue's back. This particular statue is in an excellent state of preservation (due to it being buried) and you can see feck all of 'classic' moai features. Ok, rant over:p
The whole point of some museums, particularily the 'great' museums of Empire, is to contain and neutralise otherness, alieness and the 'savage.' To make it safe, for repressed and stunted petit bourgesois sensibilities.

Think of those fabulous Benin bronzes, stripped and looted from their African homeland and relegated to a stairwell in the BM.
 
Re: Too True...

AndroMan said:
And one of their major exports was Highlanders and the Scots poor to the West Indies and the Americas! As bonded slaves.

All to true Mr. Andro.
 
Bilderberger said:
Errrrrrrrrr...........I think the programme made the point that the eyes were looking upward......heaven-ward........above the normal mortal day-to-day human.

Or did I just imagine this?

I thought that the program was trying to say that the eyes were looking over the people. I may have been wrong. The computer simulations seemed to me to be showing the statues staring straight ahead rather than upwards.
 
I see your point - I just took "over people" as meaning upwards. Not really sure what they meant now - and, yes, the simulations were looking quite horizontal.

Off topic - "The Empire Never Ended"..............I am just finishing VALIS at the moment. What a crazy book. I don't read sci-fi as a rule but gave this a try and have been pretty impressed.
 
Bilderberger said:
I see your point - I just took "over people" as meaning upwards. Not really sure what they meant now - and, yes, the simulations were looking quite horizontal.

Off topic - "The Empire Never Ended"..............I am just finishing VALIS at the moment. What a crazy book. I don't read sci-fi as a rule but gave this a try and have been pretty impressed.

Indeed the empire never ended.

Great book! If you liked it try 'The Devine Invasion' by the same auther. Infact try anytning by him (and check out the side pannel on VALIS in the FT with the Minority report cover.)
 
I've renamed the thread, for the benefit of future searchers!

By coincidence, on the day this programme was shown there was a link in FT's breaking news about a couple of Easter Island heads which are in Florida. There is a dispute about whether they are genuine, and if so how did they get there.

As for the prog itself, it didn't say much that was new, and omitted entirely the evidence for the final war between the two factions of the original civilization.

BTW, I've revived the TV and Radio Reminders thread, in this forum.
 
I found the link - Miami Herald

Begins
The inscrutable and mysterious stone giants of Easter Island have had archaeologists scratching their heads for generations, puzzling over the massive monoliths and the South Pacific natives that carved them centuries ago.

Now there's another riddle: whether two of the legendary sculptures -- peddled by a Miami art gallery on behalf of a one-time aide to former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet -- are authentic artifacts that may have been spirited illegally from Chile.

Or are they fakes?
 
I have a lot of info on this story if anyone's interested. I'll post it when I'm sober.
Edit: Actually the article pretty much says it all. Interestingly the gallery came to my attention on an EI message board the day before this story broke on the BBC news website. Isn't the internet wonderful!

The main fault with the horizon program was that it skipped around too much and ignored some of the latest research. The environmental catastrophe may not have been entirely man-made. Take El Nino for instance. EI is tiny and entirely at the mercy of the elements. In the 1960's a tidal wave scattered the already fallen statues at Ahu Tongariki (the one with 15 statues re-erected for the tourists;) )

Off-topic. Valis blew me away and probably changed my life. I'm glad to see also that someone else gets the reason for me putting that quote in my sig:p
 
Update on 'heads for sale'

Apparently all the artifacts are fakes and the gallery owner has gone into hiding.
I can't provide any links yet, sorry.
 
Easter Island Medicine

http://rdu.news14.com/content/health_report/?ArID=45434&SecID=247
Easter Island Cancer Drug
4/6/2004 5:25 AM
By: Medstar.com

Far-away Easter Island has become an exotic port-of-call for medical researchers. First, they discovered a drug made from its bacteria can help kidney transplant patients. Now a similar drug may be a kidney cancer fighter.

Ed Onley, 68, gets a blood test every week to monitor his treatment. Two years ago, he lost a kidney to cancer. Last year tests found it had spread to his lungs. He’s in a study for an experimental drug called CCI-779.

“I play golf,” Ed said. “I live my normal life so I think it's going very well."

CCI-779 is a derivative of an anti-rejection drug found in the soil of Easter Island, a tiny Pacific island best known for its giant stone carvings. The drug appears to disrupt the growth and survival signals of cancer cells.

“By blocking the activity of a key protein, it's able to halt cancer growth and cause tumor regressions in animal models,” Medical Oncologist Dr. Gary Hudes said.

So far, Ed's results are encouraging. “After eight weeks, I had a CAT scan taken and it showed significant improvement. My cancer nodules had reduced in size, and of course we're hopeful that that continues."

Patients don't seem to be sidelined by severe side effects.

“So it doesn't slow them down too much, and that's what we really seek in a cancer treatment,” Dr. Hudes said. “Not only to control the cancer, hopefully extend life, but also to make that life a quality life, without too many compromises."

The earth beneath the mysterious Easter Island statues may help defeat kidney cancer.

A new phase of this research is set to begin in Summer 2004 at 100 sites worldwide.

For more information and to learn more about renal cell carcinoma and clinical trials, call 1-800-4-CANCER.

CCI-779 for Cancer

More than 30 years ago, researchers discovered a bacterial-produced compound in soil samples taken from Easter Island. The natural compound, given the name rapamycin (sirolimus), is now an important immunosuppressant medication. More recently, researchers began testing analogues, or chemical derivatives, of rapamycin. In laboratory tests, one of those analogues, CCI-779, was found to have activity against several types of solid tumors.

CCI-779 appears to work by inhibiting the activity of a certain protein (mTOR) that regulate growth of cancer cells. Researchers will soon begin phase III trials of CCI-779 for patients with kidney cancer. Participants will be randomized into one of three study groups. One group will get only the CCI-779. A second group will get only alpha-interferon, a standard medication for kidney cancer. The third group will get a combination of CCI-779 and alpha-interferon. The international trial will take place at sites in the U.S. and worldwide.

The Food and Drug Administration has placed CCI-779 on fast-track development for kidney cancer. The drug is also being tested for several other types of cancer, such as multiple myeloma, pancreatic cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, prostate cancer, breast cancer, several types of brain tumors, melanoma, and lung cancer.
 
New Easter Island theory presented

A University of Hawaii anthropologist and colleagues are blaming rats and Dutch traders for the mysterious abandonment of Easter Island.

Nearly all Polynesians on the South Pacific island, who built hundreds of 10-ton stone statues, inexplicably vanished. Conjecture has included the natives deforested the island to transport the statues, triggering catastrophic erosion, USA Today reported. According to the theory, the remaining inhabitants then were decimated during a cannibalistic civil war in about 1650.

But anthropologist Terry Hunt blames the Polynesian rat for deforesting the 66-square-mile island's 16 million palm trees.

He and his colleagues told USA Today the disappearance of Easter Islanders probably was caused by visiting 18th-centruy Dutch traders, who took diseases and slave raiding to the island.

Easter Island is located more than 2,000 miles from the nearest population centers, making it one of the most isolated places on Earth.

Hunt presented his findings during an American Anthropological Association meeting last week in Washington.

http://www.physorg.com/news8793.html
 
http://www.americanscientist.org/templa ... ltext=true



First few paragraphs shown

Every year, thousands of tourists from around the world take a long flight across the South Pacific to see the famous stone statues of Easter Island. Since 1722, when the first Europeans arrived, these megalithic figures, or moai, have intrigued visitors. Interest in how these artifacts were built and moved led to another puzzling question: What happened to the people who created them?

click for full image and caption


In the prevailing account of the island's past, the native inhabitants—who refer to themselves as the Rapanui and to the island as Rapa Nui—once had a large and thriving society, but they doomed themselves by degrading their environment. According to this version of events, a small group of Polynesian settlers arrived around 800 to 900 A.D., and the island's population grew slowly at first. Around 1200 A.D., their growing numbers and an obsession with building moai led to increased pressure on the environment. By the end of the 17th century, the Rapanui had deforested the island, triggering war, famine and cultural collapse.

Jared Diamond, a geographer and physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has used Rapa Nui as a parable of the dangers of environmental destruction. "In just a few centuries," he wrote in a 1995 article for Discover magazine, "the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?" In his 2005 book Collapse, Diamond described Rapa Nui as "the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources."

Two key elements of Diamond's account are the large number of Polynesians living on the island and their propensity for felling trees. He reviews estimates of the island's native population and says that he would not be surprised if it exceeded 15,000 at its peak. Once the large stands of palm trees were all cut down, the result was "starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism." When Europeans arrived in the 18th century, they found only a small remnant of this civilization.

continues at the link

It written by Terry Hunt an Archaeologist I met while visiting Easter Island a few years ago.
 
Easter Island statue to make a pilgrimage to Paris
Moai has a mission to reform the conscience of humanity, say islanders

By John Lichfield in Paris
Tuesday, 16 December 2008

An unusually large tourist will visit Paris in 2010. One of the vast statues of elongated human heads and torsos from Easter Island in the Pacific has "expressed the wish" to visit the French capital to preach – silently – against Western materialism.

The statue has let it be known to the island's leaders that it wanted to make the pilgrimage, the French newspaper Le Figaro reported yesterday. Two islanders, including the governor's nephew, have made a preparatory visit and concluded that one of the statues or moais, which range up to 30ft high and 90 tons in weight, should stand in the middle of the Tuileries gardens, halfway between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde.

"Everyone on the island knows that a moai is going to Paris," Edgard Hedreveri, the Easter Island tourism director, told Le Figaro. "It is going to find a platform in Paris to spread spiritual energy which will change the conscience of humanity. It is going to transform the materialistic conscience of the world into something more humane."

The nearly 10,000-mile journey to Paris from Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean, the world's most isolated inhabited island, will be organised by an Italian foundation. The cost of the anti-materialist pilgrimage will be covered – somewhat inappropriately – by the French luxury goods company Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH). There are almost 900 Easter Island statues, carved from compressed volcanic ash between 400 AD and the early 1700s. Although other statues have been stolen or removed to museums, this will be the first time one has been sent on a spiritual journey by the island's government.

Mr Hereveri said the disappearance of the original Easter Island culture, possibly as a result of a man-made ecological calamity, had universal lessons for the planet. "A moai is not just a lump of stone," he said. "It's a connection [with the past]. We will show the world that, by destroying nature, mankind destroys itself. The history of Easter Island is the history of humanity."

He and another island delegate, Pedro Edmonds Paoa, nephew of the governor, toured Paris this year. "With the help of our ancestors, we were searching for the right place for the moai," M. Hereveri said. "In the Tuileries, I knew this was the spot where it [the statue] wanted to stand. A strong current of energy passes through that place."

The particular moai has not yet been chosen by the island's 4,900 inhabitants. It will make the journey to France by sea, then, probably, up the river Seine by barge. Mystery still surrounds the Easter Island statues and the reasons for the disappearance of the elaborate culture which produced them. One theory is that the island's forests were destroyed to create wooden sledges to haul the statues more than 10 miles from volcanic hills to the shore. The resulting ecological calamity produced a revolt and many of the statues were pushed over or destroyed.

Research at an exhibition in Paris (open until March) presents a different story. The Easter Islanders were a "great people" who fell victim to a drought in the southern hemisphere halfway through the 17th century, say the French archaeologists Michel and Catherine Orliac.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 28215.html
 
Easter Island’s Controversial Collapse: More To The Story Than Deforestation?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 095435.htm

The famous stone sculptures on Easter Island where Dr. Stevenson and Rapanui scientist Sonia Haoa have worked with Earthwatch volunteers for the last 20 years to uncover new twists in the story of Easter Island. (Credit: Charles H. Whitfield)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2009) — Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has gained recognition in recent years due in part to a book that used it as a model for societal collapse from bad environmental practices—ringing alarm bells for those concerned about the health of the planet today. But that’s not the whole story, says Dr. Chris Stevenson, an archaeologist who has studied the island—famous for its massive stone statues—with a Rapa Nui scientist, Sonia Haoa, and Earthwatch volunteers for nearly 20 years.

The ancient Rapanui people did abuse their environment, but they were also developing sustainable practices—innovating, experimenting, trying to adapt to a risky environment—and they would still be here in traditional form if it weren’t for the diseases introduced by European settlers in the 1800s.

“Societies don’t just go into a tailspin and self-destruct,” says Stevenson, an archaeologist at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “They can and do adapt, and they emerge in new ways. The key is to put more back into the system than is taken out.”

While evidence suggests the Rapa Nui people cut down 6,000,000 trees in 300 years, for example, they were also developing new technological and agricultural practices along the way—such as fertilization techniques to restore the health of the soil and rock gardens to protect the plants. As a result, every rock on Easter Island has probably been moved three or four times, Stevenson said.

“The story that Chris’s research team is piecing together on Easter Island with the help of Earthwatch volunteers—rock by rock, sample by sample—is one that offers us hope in the human spirit of innovation, and the power of people to change. What a timely lesson,” said Ed Wilson, President and CEO of Earthwatch.

Other archaeological evidence indicates that the Rapanui people radically changed their societal structure from one dominated by chiefs to one that was much more egalitarian in nature, too, which effectively leveled out their consumption patterns.

“That was the big adjustment that gets the population back to being more or less sustainable,” Stevenson says. “It was like telling today’s corporate head that the company can’t afford the million-dollar remodel of his office,” Stevenson says. “But it didn’t matter because BANG, the Europeans arrive with their dirty diseases”: the final nail in the coffin, he said.
 
Giant statues give up hat mystery
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8236349.stm
By Sudeep Chand
Science reporter, BBC News



The ancient statues have giant red hats


Archaeologists have solved an ancient mystery surrounding the famous Easter Island statues.

At 2,500 miles off the coast of Chile, the island is one of the world's most remote places inhabited by people.

Up to 1,000 years ago, the islanders started putting giant red hats on the statues.

The research team, from the University of Manchester and University College London, think the hats were rolled down from an ancient volcano.

Dr Colin Richards and Dr Sue Hamilton are the first British archaeologists to work on the island since 1914.

They pieced together a series of clues to discover how the statues got their red hats. An axe, a road, and an ancient volcano led to their findings.

Dr Richards said: "We know the hats were rolled along the road made from a cement of compressed red scoria dust."

Each hat, weighing several tonnes, was carved from volcanic rock. They were placed on the heads of the famous statues all around the coast of the island.

Precisely how and why the hats were attached is unknown.

Like an altar

An axe was found in pristine condition next to the hats. The scientists think it might be an ancient offering.


A ceremonial axe, known as an adze, was found next to the hats
Dr Richards told BBC News: "These hats run all the way down the side of the volcano into the valley.

"We can see they were carefully placed. The closer you get to the volcano, the greater the number.

"It's like a church; you can't just walk straight to the altar.

"The Polynesians saw the landscape as a living thing, and after they carved the rock the spirits entered the statues."

Dr Richards and Dr Hamilton are joint directors of the "Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Landscapes of Construction Project". They will be working on the island over the next five years.

Dr Richards added: "We will look to date the earliest statues. Potentially this could rewrite Polynesian history."
 
I never thought there was any mystery about the hats.
This sounds like someone trying to justfy their grant money...
 
rynner2 said:
I never thought there was any mystery about the hats.
This sounds like someone trying to justfy their grant money...

Researchers always have to go cap in hand to get the next grant.
 
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