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Easter Island / Rapa Nui

honestly though it really makes me wonder how much effort actually got put into some of the research done. why did people never think to dig up the buried Moai and look at the buried parts?
There have been excavations of the Moai

easter-island-heads-bodies-1200x675.jpg


https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/07/26/famous-easter-island-heads-have-hidden-bodies/
 
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It certainly took place in the South Seas.

But presumably for reasons other than economy

yes, my godson's mum was only the second generation that hadn't done it. Social reasons and not economic ones.
 
honestly though it really makes me wonder how much effort actually got put into some of the research done. why did people never think to dig up the buried Moai and look at the buried parts?

but some of them have been excavated! why did you think they haven't?

It is unfortunate that it was done imnsho. I'm all for knowledge and archaeology can be a destructive beast. I don't go for messing with what the locals think is/was a working system though.
 
but some of them have been excavated! why did you think they haven't?
I hadn't heard of one report of the Heads having a torso until today. That's quite something to take in.
Though personally I would have had them sitting.
 
but some of them have been excavated! why did you think they haven't?

It is unfortunate that it was done imnsho. I'm all for knowledge and archaeology can be a destructive beast. I don't go for messing with what the locals think is/was a working system though.
Ok, but.... what's the alternative? avoid touching them forever?

Also I have to question the idea that the people who made them wanted them to be buried. We know that many off them were placed on pedestals where they could be seen from miles at sea. What reason do we have to believe that these other ones are MEANT to be buried?

We know that the people making them didn't actually finish the project. Some of them never even left the quarry. How can we be certain that the buried ones were actually where their makers wanted them to be?

What I was getting at is that the more recent discoveries... are things that could have been easily done decades ago, if people had bothered looking.
 
Can anyone point me in the direction of some comprehensive engineering-style drawings of one of these statues?
 
Hmm... not bad, but I'd like to see all four sides.
Here's a set of 3 drawings illustrating a single moai (Hoa Hakananai’a) from the front, rear, and side.

d07_ei04_d0009.jpg
d07_ei04_d0010.jpg
d07_ei04_d0011.jpg

SOURCE: https://www.eisp.org/10/#more-10

It's important to understand the large (famous) moai statues are highly stylized and share the same general form. The rock art carvings on the moai's dorsal (rear) side are not part of the original moai tradition, and these carvings are all currently believed to be later modifications from a rock art tradition that arose and supplanted the classical moai works.

Fewer than 10 of the 887 inventoried moai exhibit these additional carvings.
 
Whatever.

They are ugly, nasty things and look like a public artists wet dream

Doubly so as the ideas been repeated ad nauseam.
 
Looks as if it was arson.

A fire has damaged the enigmatic statues on Easter Island, with some of the charring said to be irreparable.

An unknown number of the stone-carved statues have been affected by the blaze, Chile's cultural heritage undersecretary said. Easter Island has nearly 1,000 of the megaliths, known as moai. They have oversized heads and generally stand about 4m (13ft) high. They were carved by a Polynesian tribe more than 500 years ago.

The fire, which broke out on Monday, affected "nearly 60 hectares (148 acres)", Carolina Perez Dattari, the cultural heritage official, tweeted. It is reported to have been started deliberately, and is centred around Easter Island's Rano Raraku volcano - which is an Unesco World Heritage Site.

Easter Island lies 3,500km (2,174 miles) off the coast of Chile. It relies on tourism and reopened just three months ago following its closure during the Covid-19 pandemic. The site has now been closed again while a conservation team examines the extent of the damage.

The island's Mayor Pedro Edmunds told local media: "The damage caused by the fire can't be undone."

The director of the Ma'u Henua community which looks after the national park described it as "irreparable and with consequences beyond what your eyes can see. The moai are totally charred," Ariki Tepano said through the park's official social media pages.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-63167941
 
Looks as if it was arson.

A fire has damaged the enigmatic statues on Easter Island, with some of the charring said to be irreparable.

An unknown number of the stone-carved statues have been affected by the blaze, Chile's cultural heritage undersecretary said. Easter Island has nearly 1,000 of the megaliths, known as moai. They have oversized heads and generally stand about 4m (13ft) high. They were carved by a Polynesian tribe more than 500 years ago.

The fire, which broke out on Monday, affected "nearly 60 hectares (148 acres)", Carolina Perez Dattari, the cultural heritage official, tweeted. It is reported to have been started deliberately, and is centred around Easter Island's Rano Raraku volcano - which is an Unesco World Heritage Site.

Easter Island lies 3,500km (2,174 miles) off the coast of Chile. It relies on tourism and reopened just three months ago following its closure during the Covid-19 pandemic. The site has now been closed again while a conservation team examines the extent of the damage.

The island's Mayor Pedro Edmunds told local media: "The damage caused by the fire can't be undone."

The director of the Ma'u Henua community which looks after the national park described it as "irreparable and with consequences beyond what your eyes can see. The moai are totally charred," Ariki Tepano said through the park's official social media pages.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-63167941

How much damage does a grass fire do to stone? How many moai have allegedly been damaged, to what degree, and over what area?

While it may well be a genuine archaeological disaster, l can’t help suspecting that it sounds like an excuse to ask for a handout.

maximus otter
 
How much damage does a grass fire do to stone? How many moai have allegedly been damaged, to what degree, and over what area? ...

First and foremost - personnel have been dispatched to survey the scene and evaluate the effects on those moai that were directly exposed to the wildfire. In other words, there hasn't been a reliable report on the type(s) and extent of suspected damage yet.

Still ... Some damage has already been cited. The moai are carved from basalt, which is sensitive to heat. A few of the reports to date state some of the moai in the wildfire's path had cracked from the heat. I haven't yet found any photos illustrating cracks or crumbling.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
 
Hasnt this ever happened in the past?

Why is it happening now?
 
Hasnt this ever happened in the past?

Why is it happening now?
''It is reported to have been started deliberately, and is centred around Easter Island's Rano Raraku volcano - which is a Unesco World Heritage Site''.

Maybe tourists are more idiotic than they used to be?
 
Still finding new statues.

A new Moai, one of Easter Island's iconic statues, was found in the bed of a dry laguna in a volcano crater, the Indigenous community that administers the site on the Chilean island has said.

"This Moai has great potential for scientific and natural studies, it's a really unique discovery as it's the first time that that a Moai has been discovered inside a laguna in a Rano Raraku crater," said the Ma'u Henua Indigenous community in a statement on Tuesday.

The statue was found on February 21 by a team of scientific volunteers from three Chilean universities collaborating on a project to restore the marshland in the crater of the Rano Raraku volcano.

Several Moai in that area suffered charring in an October forest fire on the island, which is also known as Rapa Nui and lies some 3,500 kilometers (2,175 miles) off the west coast of Chile.

"This Moai is in the center of a laguna that began drying up in 2018," Ninoska Avareipua Huki Cuadros, director of the Ma'u Henua Indigenous community that administers the Rapa Nui National Park, where the volcano is found, told AFP.

https://phys.org/news/2023-03-moai-statue-easter-island-volcano.html
 
An original script.

A wooden tablet inscribed with the undeciphered rongorongo script from Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island) dates to the 15th century, long before Europeans arrived. This early date suggests that the Rapa Nui people invented their own script without European influence.

A wooden tablet with glyphs carved onto it.

Radiocarbon dating shows the wood from one of the rongorongo tablets preserved in Rome came from a tree felled in the late 15th or early 16th century — centuries before Europeans arrived on Rapa Nui. (Image credit: INSCRIBE and RESOLUTION ERC Teams)

A tablet of wood inscribed with the undeciphered "rongorongo" script from the Eastern Pacific island Rapa Nui, also called Easter Island, predates the arrival of Europeans there, strengthening the likelihood that the script is one of the few independently invented writing systems.

The wood from one of four rongorongo tablets preserved in a collection in Rome dates to between 1493 and 1509 — more than 200 years before the first recorded arrival of Europeans on the island in the 1720s, according to new research published Feb. 2 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Silvia Ferrara, the study's lead author and a philologist (someone who studies languages) at the University of Bologna in Italy, told Live Science that the results support the idea that rongorongo was an original invention by the Rapa Nui islanders rather than being influenced by the writing they'd seen used by Europeans.


The intricate rongorongo glyphs look completely unlike any European letters, lending further support to the idea that the language was developed independently. "Historically speaking, if you borrow a writing system, then you keep it as close to the original as possible," she said.

https://www.livescience.com/archaeo...ster-island-may-predate-european-colonization
 
An original script.

A wooden tablet inscribed with the undeciphered rongorongo script from Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island) dates to the 15th century, long before Europeans arrived. This early date suggests that the Rapa Nui people invented their own script without European influence.

A wooden tablet with glyphs carved onto it.

Radiocarbon dating shows the wood from one of the rongorongo tablets preserved in Rome came from a tree felled in the late 15th or early 16th century — centuries before Europeans arrived on Rapa Nui. (Image credit: INSCRIBE and RESOLUTION ERC Teams)

A tablet of wood inscribed with the undeciphered "rongorongo" script from the Eastern Pacific island Rapa Nui, also called Easter Island, predates the arrival of Europeans there, strengthening the likelihood that the script is one of the few independently invented writing systems.

The wood from one of four rongorongo tablets preserved in a collection in Rome dates to between 1493 and 1509 — more than 200 years before the first recorded arrival of Europeans on the island in the 1720s, according to new research published Feb. 2 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Silvia Ferrara, the study's lead author and a philologist (someone who studies languages) at the University of Bologna in Italy, told Live Science that the results support the idea that rongorongo was an original invention by the Rapa Nui islanders rather than being influenced by the writing they'd seen used by Europeans.


The intricate rongorongo glyphs look completely unlike any European letters, lending further support to the idea that the language was developed independently. "Historically speaking, if you borrow a writing system, then you keep it as close to the original as possible," she said.

https://www.livescience.com/archaeo...ster-island-may-predate-european-colonization
Hunh? Who actually took that idea seriously? I don't remember hearing anyone actually try to make a serious case of it. Especially since if you count the characters in the examples of text we have there's too many to be an alphabet.

Now arguing they're derived from Central American glyphs? hmm... that's a maybe. We know the island had two main cultures, one Polynesians, the other... not. Oh and they fought a war for control that ended when one of the two was nearly wiped out. One hypothesis is that the non-Polynesians were Incans from South America. And we know the Incans used a glyph based writing system.

Also it helps explain why a Polynesian group would do stonework... Incans were big on stonework. Although, an alternate theory is that before the migration, the Polynesians were a people that DID know Stonework, and they kinda forgot it over the generations. Why is this a theory? Nan Madol exists, that sort of construction takes serious skill.
 

Obsidian blades with food traces reveal 1st settlers of Rapa Nui had regular contact with South Americans 1,000 years ago


One thousand years ago, the first settlers of Rapa Nui — also known as Easter Island — feasted on a fusion cuisine of plants native to Polynesia but also ones indigenous to South America, around 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away, a new study finds.

Researchers discovered the food remnants by identifying starch grains clinging to obsidian blades at the archaeological site of Anakena, the earliest known settlement on Rapa Nui, which was occupied from about A.D. 1000 to 1300, according to the study. The finding suggests that the early Polynesians had regular contact with the people of South America as far back as a millennium ago.

QdUg6JExj5Gu78fkiw3YFR-1200-80.jpg


The researchers looked at 20 obsidian blades excavated from under the ahu at Anakena in 1987, which revealed evidence of 46 starch grains. Due to their size and preservation, though, only 21 grains could be classified, belonging to eight species: breadfruit, cassava (also known as yuca or manioc), taro, purple yam, sweet potato, Tahitian apple, achira and ginger. There were, in some cases, multiple species on a single obsidian blade, so the researchers suggested that the tools were multipurpose, used for cutting, scraping off peels, grating or other kinds of processing.

https://www.livescience.com/archaeo...r-contact-with-south-americans-1000-years-ago

maximus otter
 
I mean, one of the most popular theories about why there was two distinct cultural groups is that one of them was Native Americans. If true... then it makes sense they'd have trade.
 
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