Остров Пасхи (english)

One of the world s most famous yetleast visited archaeological sites, Easter Island is a small, hilly, nowtreeless island of volcanic origin.Located in the Pacific Ocean at 27 degreessouth of the equator, some 2200 miles 3600 kilometers off the coast of Chile,the island is 63 square miles in size and has extinct volcanoes rising to 1500feet. In the early 1950s, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl famous for hisKon- Tiki raft voyages across the oceans popularized the idea that the island,called Rapa Nui by the natives, had been originally settled by advancedsocieties of Indians from the coast of South America.

Extensive archaeological,ethnographic, and linguistic research has conclusively shown this hypothesis tobe inaccurate.It is now recognized that the original inhabitants of EasterIsland are of Polynesian stock DNA extracts from skeletons have recentlyconfirmed this , that they most probably came from the Marquesas or Societyislands, and that they arrived around AD 380 to 400. At the time of theirarrival, the island was entirely covered in thick forests and was teeming withland birds.

It was the richest seabird breeding site in Polynesia and probablyin the whole Pacific. Within a matter of centuries this profusion of wildlifewas entirely destroyed by the islanders way of life. The reasons are todayeminently clear.It is estimated that the originalcolonists, who were quite probably lost at sea, arrived in just a few canoesand numbered fewer than 100. Because of the plentiful bird, fish, and plantfood sources, the population grew rapidly and gave rise to a rich religious andartistic culture.

However, the resource needs of the growing populationinevitably outpaced the island s capacity to renew itself ecologically and theensuing environmental degradation triggered a social and cultural collapse.Pollen records show that the destruction of the forests was well under way bythe year 800, just a few centuries after the start of the first settlement.These forest trees were extremely important to the islanders, being used forfuel, for the construction of houses and ocean-fishing canoes, and as rollersfor transporting the great stone statues.

By the 1400s the forests had beenentirely cut, the rich ground cover had eroded away, the springs had dried up,and the vast flocks of birds coming to roost on the island had long sincedisappeared.With no logs to build canoes for offshore fishing, with depletedbird and wildlife food sources, and with declining crop yields because of theerosion of good soil, the nutritional intake of the people plummeted.

Firstfamine, then cannibalism, set in. Because the island could no longer feed thechiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who kept the complex society running, chaosresulted, and by 1700 the population dropped to between one-quarter andone-tenth of its former number. During the mid 1700s rival clans began totopple each other s stone statues.By 1864 the last of the statues was throwndown and desecrated.Easter Island was unknown toEuropeans until 1722 when it was accidentally sailed upon by the Dutch admiral,Jacob Roggeveen, on Easter Day. The barren lands and social strife thatRoggeveen first recorded make it difficult to imagine the extraordinary culturethat had flowered on the island during the previous 1400 years.

That culture smost famous features are its enormous stone statues called moai, more than 200of which once stood upon massive stone platforms called ahu. At least 700 moremoai statues, in various stages of completion, are scattered around the island,either in quarries or along ancient roads between the quarries and the coastalareas where the statues were most often erected.

Nearly all the moai are carvedfrom the tough stone of the Rano Raraku volcano.The average statue is 14 feet,6 inches tall and weighs 14 tons some moai were as large as 33 feet andweighed more than 80 tons one statue only partially quarried from the bedrockwas 65 feet long and would have weighed an estimated 270 tons . The moai andahu were in use as early as AD 700, but the great majority were carved anderected between AD 1000 and 1500. Depending upon the size of the statue,between 50 and 150 people were needed to drag it across the countryside onsleds and rollers made from the island s trees.

While many of the statues weretoppled during the clan wars of the 1600 and 1700s, other statues fell over andcracked while being transported across the island.

Recent research has shownthat certain statue sites, particularly the most important ones with great ahuplatforms, were periodically ritually dismantled and reassembled with everlarger statues. A small number of the moai were once capped with crowns or hats of red volcanic stone.The meaning andpurpose of these capstones is not known, but archaeologists have suggested thatthe moai thus marked were of pan-island ritual significance or perhaps sacredto a particular clan.Scholars are unable to definitivelyexplain the function and use of the moai statues. It is assumed that theircarving and erection derived from an idea rooted in similar practices foundelsewhere in Polynesia but which evolved in a unique way on Easter Island.Archaeological and iconographic analysis indicates that the statue cult wasbased on an ideology of male, lineage-based authority incorporatinganthropomorphic symbolism.

The statues were thus symbols of authority andpower, both religious and political. But they were not only symbols.

To thepeople who erected and used them, they were actual repositories of sacredspirit.All carved objects in ancient Polynesian religions were, when properlyfashioned and ritually prepared, believed to be charged by a magical spiritualessence called mana. The ahu platforms of Easter Island were the sanctuaries ofthe people of Rapa Nui, and the moai statues were the ritually charged sacredobjects of those sanctuaries. While the statues have been toppled andre-erected over the centuries, and while great social and environmentalcalamity afflicted the island, the mana or spiritual presence of Rapa Nui isstill strongly present at the ahu sites and atop the sacred volcanoes.