The giant carved stone heads of Easter Island remain one of the World’s great unsolved mysteries. Teresa Levonian Cole reports
Tito’s ancestor stands 10 metres tall, weighs in at 60 tonnes and sports a red topknot that marks him as a person of distinction. He was restored in the 1990s by a joint Chilean and Japanese team, his broken body knitted together and re-erected on its platform, whence he can once again exert his power. Tito is happy with the result. Gazing up at his mighty forebear, he says: ‘I really feel energised whenever I am in his presence.’
Tito is my guide, a descendant of a once-eminent tribe. His ancestor is one of 15 figures represented atop the impressive 130-metre-long Tongariki Ahu by a moai – one of the giant monoliths for which Easter Island is famed. A nearby settlement of canoe-shaped stone houses, peppered with petroglyphs of turtles and tuna – food for kings – is further evidence that this was an important site.
Easter Island is shrouded in mystery, its history entwined with myths and legends, enhanced by a handful of extraneous theories that evoke supernatural powers and the presence of alien civilisations. From the chronology of events to the meaning of the island’s unique and undeciphered Rorongo script, scholars are embroiled in controversy. ‘Ours was an oral tradition,’ says Tito, an intelligent and articulate Rapa Nui – as both the island and its inhabitants are known in the local Polynesian language. ‘When the slavers raided our island in the 19th century and all but destroyed our population, historical knowledge died with our people.’
This much, however, is certain. Easter Island is a triangular speck of 76sq km formed by the explosion of three underwater volcanoes some 3 million years ago, and floats like a corregidor’s tricorn in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was named because the first Europeans to sight it, led by Dutch admiral Jakob Roggeveen, glimpsed it on that eponymous Sunday in 1722. This ‘most insular of islands’, as the locals have it, is one of the most remote inhabited places in the world. It lies 1,930km away from its nearest neighbour, Pitcairn Island, and 3,700km from Chile, to which this most easterly outpost of Polynesian culture has belonged since 1988.
Outside these dates, Easter Island’s history is punctuated with question marks. According to tradition, King Hotu Matua arrived, some time between 400AD and 800AD, from the island of Hiva in Polynesia, landing his canoes at Anakena, one of the only two small beaches on the island. The first settlers brought with them rats and chickens – the second of which, with sweet potatoes, became the staple diet. In time, Hotu Matua’s descendants formed what were to become the 12 tribes of the island. They created an hierarchical, religious society marked, initially, by the building of ceremonial sites of which the ahu, or stone platform, was the most sacred part.
Only after the 10th century did the cult of ancestor worship develop, as exemplified by the 887 registered moai on the island. Between one and 15 giant statues would be placed atop the ahu, and invested with the prestige, spiritual and protective power, or mana, of the ancestor it represented. Then quite suddenly, at some point between the 14th and 17th centuries, moai worship met a mysterious demise. Yet, even today, it remains taboo to step on an ahu, or to touch a moai. Unless, that is, it happens to be that of your own ancestor…
My initiation began, appropriately, at the birthplace of the moai: the Rano Raraku volcano, whose tufa walls surrounding a peaceful crater lake served as the quarry for the giant statues. Some 397 moai can be seen here. Remarkably, blocks were not first hewn from the rock, then carved. Rather, the moai were excavated directly from surrounding stone, using obsidian tools. They emerge from the rock face, in various stages of completion, in a grid of horizontal and vertical bands, like a prototype Mount Rushmore. The largest monolith on the island, Te To Kanga, stands here, still imprisoned in the rock, 22m high and weighing an estimated 200 tonnes.
From the windswept rim of Rano Raraku, I could see across the sparsely populated island to Terevaka, the highest point, and out to a Pacific Ocean whose white surf crashed menacingly against black rocky shores. Beneath us, lower down the slopes, stood completed moai, eroded and half buried by time, standing sentinel and patiently awaiting transport to their ahu, as though in an open-air depot. We made our way down the path to examine them more closely. One particularly handsome specimen, Hinariru by name, gazed blankly at me, typifying the tufa moai of the classical period: long upturned nose, pursed lips, high cheekbones, long ears, prominent jaw. His eye sockets would have been hollowed and his eyes of white coral and obsidian inserted only once he had been erected atop his ahu. The topknot, of red scoria from the Puna Pau crater, would similarly be individually coiffed and added in situ, resembling a Bolivian bowler hat.
‘Each moai faces the direction in which it was going,’ says Tito. ‘They would have been transported hence along one of five paths from the mountain to their final resting place.’
The question of how these monoliths were transported has inspired the most inventive flights of fancy, culminating in Erich von Däniken’s theory of extra-terrestrials. More prosaically, it is believed the statues were either ‘walked’ – tilted vertically from side to side– along the paths or, more probably, rolled on logs pulled by ropes. Some 288 moai reached their destination in this way. We followed one so-called ‘route of the moai’, strewn with what at first looked like enormous boulders, covered in lichen. ‘Don’t touch!’ yelps Tito, as I make to rest against one. ‘It is a fallen moai.’
No one quite knows what momentous event precipitated the sudden abandonment of the ancestor cult. But these statues, fallen face down in the ground, never reached journey’s end. It is believed that a cocktail of factors led to an unsustainable order. Slash-and-burn agricultural techniques, the destruction of the lush subtropical forest to build rollers for transporting the moai, soil erosion, the lack of attention paid to farming as rival tribes vied to create ever-larger and more powerful statues, the growth in population and the consequent depletion of natural resources all contributed to creating conditions of famine. The civil wars that followed saw rival tribes’ moai being toppled and ahu smashed to smithereens. Clans sought refuge in caves as starving people turned to cannibalism. James Cook, during his visit in 1744, wrote of seeing some moai still upright on their ahu. By the time English surgeon Linton Palmer arrived on the island in 1868, he recorded that not a single one remained standing.
Since the 1950s, however, there have been a number of attempts at restoration, and around 50 statues have been re-erected. They line the coast, gazing protectively inland, their isolated, often cliff-top locations providing a dramatic backdrop both for walkers and the hundreds of wild horses that roam the island.
Later we trek to Tepito Kura where Paro – at 11m the largest moai to be placed on an ahu – lies toppled and broken, awaiting resurrection. Even in this condition, the moai exert a numinous force field. Perhaps this is enhanced by the nearby presence of Tepito Tehenua. This perfectly smooth, round stone, of a type found nowhere else on the island, is said to have been brought from Hiva, as ballast in King Hotu Matua’s canoe. It has been placed miraculously at the spot that marks the centre of the world by these precocious astronomers. ‘Westerners say the stone has magnetic properties,’ says Tito. ‘We say it has soul.’
We visited the restored Ahu Akivi, unusual in that it is located inland, its statues facing seawards. According to legend, its seven moai represent not ancestors, but the explorers who preceded Hotu Matua to the island. At Vinapu, I admired Ahu Tahira’s enormous base blocks of basalt, perfectly carved and reminiscent of fine Inca workmanship, which led Thor Heyerdahl to his now-discredited hypothesis of Peruvian settlers on Easter Island, and to the 1955 Kon- Tiki expedition. The most impressive sight we saved till last. Koteriku, at Ahu Tahai, stands perfectly restored with his pukao topknot, the only moai to have had his sight restored with eyes of white coral and obsidian. In brilliant green pasture framed by the angry Pacific he embodies the apogee of a lost culture.
With the arrival of French missionaries and Chilean colonisers in the 19th century, what was left of Rapa Nui culture was obliterated. In 1862 Peruvian slave traders abducted the King, priests and some 2,000 islanders to work in the guano mines on the mainland. A mere handful of survivors returned two years later, with smallpox, so that by 1877 the population fell from 7,000 in 1862, to an endangered 111
The final death knell sounded when a land deal with the Scottish-Chilean company Williamson Balfour turned the island into a sheep ranch in 1895, confining all the islanders to the village of Hanga Roa, where they remained virtual prisoners until the indigenous population acquired Chilean citizenship in 1966. For good measure, imported sheep and horses wrought further havoc on the ruins, aided and abetted by the weather and the spread of destructive lichens on the stones.
Yet there is hope. In the past 10 years, since the designation of 70 per cent of the Easter Island as a National Park and World Heritage Site, things have been looking up. Tito and his generation represent a new beginning. Fiercely proud of their culture, tattooed with ancient designs, and sporting traditional hairstyles, they are resurrecting their customs – from not-to-be-missed evenings of traditional music and dance, to the annual Tapati Rapa Nui where a maiden is symbolically selected, as much for the skills of her family as for her own beauty (the importance of family is writ large in tradition). Interest in history is keen, interwoven with myth, and is enthusiastically disseminated to visitors. Most importantly, the Rapa Nui tongue, threatened by extinction according to a report in 1992, is now being revived and taught in schools, with an estimated 2,500 out of the population of 4,000 now speaking the language.
Laws permit only the indigenous Rapa Nui to own land, and the recent granting of autonomy to the islanders has given them some control over their fate.
Is it too late? This year sees the 30th anniversary of the building of the airport at Mataveri, which opened the island both to scholars of the Rapa Nui culture and also to tourism. Visitors have multiplied from an annual 700 in the 1970s to 50,000 in 2006 – a double-edged sword, bringing much-needed income but also raising concerns of sustainability as the strain of numbers begins to tell on the island’s electricity, sewage and water services. Some even fear their national identity will be threatened
PRACTICALITIES
Cox & Kings arranges tailor-made trips to Easter Island. From £2,995 ($5,960) per person including international and internal flights, seven nights at Explora’s Casas Rapa Nui on Easter Island and two nights in Santiago at Hotel Plaza San Francisco (b&b basis) and private airport transfers. Tel: (+44) 207 873 5000 www.coxandkings.co.uk
WHEN TO VISIT
Flying time from Santiago to Easter Island is five hours. A good all-year destination, October to March are the warmest and driest months to visit
WHERE TO STAY
The island’s only five-star accommodation, a new Explora hotel set in a dramatic location overlooking the ocean, is due to open in January 2008. www.explora.com
FIND OUT MORE
The Sebastián Englert Anthropological Museum, in Hanga Roa, is a must for an introduction to the island and its culture. The German Capuchin missionary and archaeologist lived on the island from 1935-1969, and is revered by locals.
FURTHER READING
Much has been written, including: The Complete Guide to Easter Island by Shawn McLaughlin; Island at the End of the World by Steven Fischer; La Tierra de Hotu Motua by Sebastián Englert
