This is a volcanic island, its size is relatively small, only 166 square meters. km, and the height is 539 meters, located in the eastern part Pacific Ocean. The island has 70 extinct volcanoes that have never erupted in the 1,300 years since colonization. The island belongs to Chile (3,600 km to the west of the Chilean city of Valparaiso). Its population is only about 2,000 people, so it is said that it is the most secluded corner of the world.
Ancient sculptors tried to use natural material sparingly and not do unnecessary work; for this, when marking future statues, they used -
they cut down the slightest cracks in the stone monolith and cut down the statues in whole series, and not one at a time. ■
Easter Island and its entire history are shrouded in mystery. Where did its first settlers come from? How did they even manage to find this island? Why did they make and install 600 multi-ton trucks? stone statues? In 1772, the island was discovered by the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen, this happened on Easter Sunday, hence the name - Easter Island (in the language of the Polynesians the island was called Rapanui). Imagine J. Roggeveen’s surprise when he discovered that three different races, blacks, redskins and completely white people, were living peacefully here. They were all welcoming and friendly to guests.
The Aborigines worshiped a god they called Mak-Mak. Researchers found carved writings made on wooden tablets. Most of them were burned by Europeans and it can be called a miracle that something survived.
Researchers think these may be statues of leaders deified by local residents after their deaths.
These tablets, called rongo-rongo, were written first from left to right, and then from right to left. For a long time, it was not possible to decipher the symbols printed on them, and only in 1996 in Russia was it possible to decipher all 4 surviving tablets.
But the most mysterious and fascinating discovery on Easter Island is the giant monolithic statues, called moai by the aborigines. Most of them reach a height of up to 10 meters (some are smaller than 4 meters) and weigh 20 tons. Some reach even larger sizes, and their weight is simply fantastic, about 100 tons. The idols have a very massive head, long ears, a heavy protruding chin and no legs at all. A few have red stone caps on their heads (perhaps these are leaders deified after death in the form of statues).
To create the moai, builders used solidified lava. The moai were hewn straight out of the rock and were supported only by a thin bridge, from which, after processing was completed, the statue was chipped off and brought to the desired shape. The crater of the Rano Raraku volcano, as a visual aid, still preserves all the stages of processing stone giants. First, the general appearance of the statue was carved, then the craftsmen moved on to the contours of the face and carved the front part of the body. Then they treated the sides, ears and finally, hands folded on the stomach with disproportionately long fingers. After this, the excess rock was removed, and only the lower part of the back was still connected to the Rano Raraku volcano by a narrow strip. Next, the statue was moved from the crater, across the entire island, to the installation site (ahu).
How difficult it was to move the moai is evidenced by the fact that many of the statues were never installed on their ahu and a large number of them were left lying halfway to the goal. Sometimes this distance reached 25 kilometers. And now it remains a mystery how these statues, which weighed dozens of tons, were actually moved. Legends say that the idols themselves walked to the ocean shore. Scientists conducted an experiment where they swung a vertically mounted statue (with ropes tied to the top) and alternately pushed forward with either the left or the right shoulder. To those who watched the work, it gave the impression that the statue was moving on its own. And yet, simple calculations prove that a small population could not process, move and install even half of the finished statues.
Who are the inhabitants of Polynesia, who did they come from, how and when did they populate these islands? The mystery about the origin of the local residents has given rise to many different hypotheses. And since there were no records of the history of Easter Island, but only oral stories, it is clear that with the passing of generations, the culture and traditions of the islanders became increasingly vague.
It is believed that the local population of Polynesia originated from the Caucasus, India, Scandinavia, Egypt and of course from Atlantis. The islanders themselves claim that 22 generations have passed since then, when the leader Hotu Matua brought the first settlers to this paradise, but no one on the island knows where from.
Thor Heyerdahl put forward his hypothesis. He drew attention to the physical coincidences between the elongated appearances of Easter statues with certain peoples South America. Heyerdahl wrote that the sweet potatoes that grew in abundance on the island could only have been brought from the Amazon. Having studied local legends and myths, he concluded that all the poetic epics of the Polynesians are in one way or another connected with the god Tiki (son of the Sun), who once sailed here from the eastern mountainous country. Then Heyerdahl began to study the South American culture of ancient times. Legends have been preserved in Peru that people of white gods came from the north and established them in the mountains. giant statues made of solid stone. After a clash with the Incas at Lake Titicaca and complete defeat, this people, led by the leader Kon-Tiki, which translates as Sun-Tiki, disappeared forever. In legends, Kon-Tiki led the remnants of his people across the Pacific Ocean to the west. Thor Heyerdahl argued in his book that the Polynesians have an American past, but the scientific world did not pay due attention to his work. Can we seriously talk about the resettlement of American Indians to Easter Island if they did not have ships, but only primitive rafts!
Then Heyerdahl decided to prove in practice that he was right, but the methods by which he wanted to achieve this were not at all scientific. He studied the records of the Europeans who first came here and found many drawings describing Indian rafts, which were made from balsa wood; it was very durable and weighed half as much as cork. He decided to build a raft based on ancient models. The crew was immediately selected: Yorick Hesselberg the artist, Hermann Watzinger the engineer, the Swede Bengt Danielsson the ethnographer, Torstein Raaby and Knut Haugland..
The raft was built and in 1947, on April 28, they sailed from the port of Callao, many people gathered to see off the brave sailors. It should be noted that few people believed in the successful end of this expedition; they predicted its certain death. On the square sail was depicted Kon-Tiki himself, the great navigator who (as Heyerdahl was sure of) in 500 AD. discovered Polynesia. An unusual ship was named after him. In 101 days, the expedition members covered 8,000 km in the Pacific Ocean. On August 7, the raft reached the uninhabited island of Raroia, almost crashing on a coral reef at the very edge of the coast. After some time, the Polynesians sailed there on pirogues, they gave a worthy welcome to the brave sailors.
And after a few days, the travelers were picked up by the French schooner “Tamara,” which had specially sailed for them from Tahiti. A grand success of the expedition. Thor Heyerdahl proved that American Peruvians could reach the islands of Polynesia.
Obviously, the Polynesians were the first to populate the island, or maybe it was the Peruvians or even tribes from Southeast Asia. A. Metro, a professor who led the Franco-Belgian expedition to Easter Island in 1934-1935, came to the conclusion that the first settlers led by the leader Hotu Matua sailed here in the 12th-13th centuries. S. Englert is sure that the settlement of the island began even at a later time, and the installation of giant idols began in the 17th century, almost on the eve of the discovery of this island by Europeans. There are many more different versions. For example, supporters of mystical sects are confident that the cradle of humanity is Lemuria, a continent that died four million years ago and Easter may be part of it.
In scientific circles they are still arguing about the purpose of stone statues, why they threw ready-made moai in the quarry, who knocked down the already standing statues and why, why were some people given red hats? James Cook wrote that the moai were erected by the inhabitants in honor of the deceased rulers and leaders of the island; other researchers think that the Easter giants marked the boundaries between sea and land in this way. These are ritual "guards" that warn against any invasion from the sea. There were those who thought that the statues served as boundary pillars marking the possessions of tribes, clans and clans.
Jacob Roggeveen thought that statues were idols. In the ship's log he wrote: “About their services... we only noticed that they made a fire near tall statues and squat down next to them, bowing their heads. Then they fold their hands and swing them up and down. They placed a basket of cobblestones on the head of each statue, painting them white in advance.”
On Easter Island there are statues that reach a height of 22 meters (the height of a 7-story building!) The head and neck of such statues are 7 meters high with a diameter of 3 m, the body is 13 m, the nose is a little more than 3 m, and the weight is 50 tons! In the whole world, even nowadays, there are not many cranes that can cope with such a mass! 
When mentioning this island, an association usually arises with huge stone idols, installed by no one knows who, how, when and why. However, on a small piece of land in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, so many different mysteries are concentrated that it would be more than enough for an entire continent.
The Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen, who set out from Amsterdam in search of the mysterious South Land, was perhaps not the first European to discover Easter Island. But he was the first to describe it and determine the coordinates. And the European name for the island was given by Roggeveen, whose ships moored to it on April 5, 1722. It was Easter Sunday.
The sailors were met by blacks, redskins and, finally, completely white people who had unusually long earlobes. The ship's log noted that local residents “lit fires in front of very tall stone statues with ...>, which amazed us, since we could not understand how these people, having neither timber nor strong ropes, were able to erect them.” .
The famous captain James Cook landed on the island half a century later, in 1774, and was no less amazed than Roggeveen, noting the incredible contrast between the giant statues and the wretched life of the indigenous population: “It was difficult for us to imagine how the islanders, deprived of technology, were able to install these amazing figures and, in addition, place huge cylindrical stones on their heads,” he wrote.
According to both Cook and Roggeveen, about 3,000 natives lived there, calling their island either Mata-ki-te-Ragi, which means “eyes looking at the sky”, or Te-Pito-o-te-henua, that is, “navel” Earth." Thanks to Tahitian sailors, the island is often called Rapa Nui (translated as “Big Rapa”) to distinguish it from the island of Rapa Iti, which lies 650 km south of Tahiti.
It is now a treeless island with infertile volcanic soil and a population of less than 5,000 people. However, before it was densely forested and bustling with life, witnessed by giant stone statues - moai, as the aborigines called them. According to local beliefs, the moai contains the supernatural power of the ancestors of the first king of Easter Island, Hotu Matu'a.
Strange, similar to each other, with the same facial expression and incredibly elongated ears, they are scattered throughout the island. Once upon a time, the statues stood on pedestals, facing the center of the island - this was seen by the first Europeans who visited the island. But then all the idols, and there are 997 of them, found themselves lying on the ground.
Everything that exists on the island today was restored in the last century. The last restoration of 15 moai, located between the Rano Raraku volcano and the Poike Peninsula, was carried out by the Japanese in 1992-1995.
On the slopes of this volcano there is a quarry where ancient craftsmen, using basalt cutters and heavy stone picks, carved moai from soft volcanic tuff. The height of most statues is 5-7 m, the height of later sculptures reached 10-12 m. The average weight of a moai is about 10 tons, but there are also much heavier ones. The quarry is full of unfinished statues, work on which was interrupted for an unknown reason.
The moai are located on massive ahu pedestals along the coast of the island at a distance of 10-15 km from the quarries. Ahu reached 150 m in length and 3 m in height and consisted of pieces weighing up to 10 tons. It is not surprising that these giants amazed European sailors, and then the world community. How did the ancient inhabitants of the island manage to do this, whose descendants eked out a miserable existence and did not give the impression of being heroes?
How did they drag fully finished, processed and polished statues through mountains and valleys, while managing not to damage them along the way? How did they perch them on the ahu? How did they then place stone “hats” weighing from 2 to 10 tons on their heads? And finally, how did these sculptors appear on the world's most inland inhabited island?
But these are not all the secrets of Rapa Nui. In 1770, they decided to annex the abandoned piece of land under the name of San Carlos to the possessions of the Spanish crown. When the leader of the Spanish expedition, Captain Felipe Gonzalez de Aedo, drew up an act of annexation of the island and signed it, the leaders of the local tribes also put their signatures under the text - they carefully drew some strange signs on the paper. As intricate as the tattoos on their bodies or the drawings on the coastal rocks. So, there was writing on the island?!
It turns out that there was. In every aboriginal home there were wooden tablets with signs carved on them. The Rapa Nui people called their writing kohau rongorongo. Now in museums around the world there are 25 tablets, their fragments, as well as stone figurines, dotted with the same mysterious signs.
Alas, this is all that remains after the educational activities of Christian missionaries. And even the oldest inhabitants of the island cannot explain the meaning of even one sign, let alone read the text.
In 1914-1915 The leader of the English expedition to Rapa Nui, Mrs. Catherine Scoresby Roughledge, found an old man named Tomenika who was able to write several characters. But he did not want to initiate the stranger into the secret of Rongorongo, declaring that the ancestors would punish anyone who revealed the secret of the letter to the aliens. Catherine Routledge's diaries had barely been published when she herself suddenly died, and the expedition materials were lost...
Forty years after the death of Tomenica, the Chilean scientist Jorge Silva Olivares met his grandson, Pedro Pate, who inherited the rongo-rongo dictionary from his grandfather. Olivares managed to photograph the notebook with the words of the ancient language, but, as he himself writes, “the reel of film turned out to be either lost or stolen. The notebook itself has disappeared.”
In 1956, the Norwegian ethnographer and traveler Thor Heyerdahl learned that the islander Esteban Atan had a notebook with all the ancient writing signs and their meanings in Latin letters. But when famous traveler tried to look at the notebook, Esteban immediately hid it. Soon after the meeting, the native sailed in a small homemade boat to Tahiti, and no one heard from him or the notebook again.
Scientists from many countries have tried to decipher the mysterious signs, but they have not succeeded so far. However, similarities between the Easter Island writing and hieroglyphics were discovered Ancient Egypt, ancient Chinese picture writing and Mohenjo-Aaro and Harappan scripts.
Another mystery of the island is related to... its regular disappearance. Only in the 20th century. Several amazing cases have been documented when he quite cleverly “hid” from sailors. So, in August 1908, the Chilean steamer Gloria, after a long voyage, was going to replenish its supply of fresh water there. But when the ship reached the point marked by the navigator, there was no island there!
The calculation showed that the ship had passed straight through the island and was now moving away from it. The captain ordered to turn back, but calculations showed that the Gloria was located right in the center of the island!
20 years later, a tourist liner was supposed to pass several miles from Easter Island, but it was nowhere to be seen even with the most powerful binoculars. The captain immediately sent a sensational radiogram to Chile. The Chilean authorities reacted quickly: the gunboat left the port of Valparaiso to mysterious place, but the island was again in its usual place.
During World War II, two German submarines were heading to Easter Island, where a refueling tanker was waiting for them. But there was neither a tanker nor an island at the meeting place. For several hours, the boats plowed the ocean in fruitless searches. Finally, the commander of one of the submarines decided to break the radio silence and got in touch with the tanker. They met only 200 miles from Easter Island, and the second submarine disappeared without a trace...
Many researchers assumed that the local population originated from India, Egypt, the Caucasus, Scandinavia and, of course, Atlantis. Heyerdahl hypothesized that the island was inhabited by settlers from Ancient Peru. Indeed, the stone sculptures are very reminiscent of the figurines found in the Andes. Sweet potatoes, common in Peru, are grown on the island. And Peruvian legends spoke of the battle of the Incas with the people of the northern white gods.
After losing the battle, their leader Kon-Tiki led his people west across the ocean. On the island there are legends about a powerful leader named Tupa who arrived from the east (perhaps this was the tenth Sapa Inca Tupac Yupanqui). According to the Spanish traveler and scientist of the 16th century. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, at that time the Incas had a fleet of balsa rafts on which they could reach Easter Island.
Using folklore descriptions, Heyerdahl built the Kon-Tiki raft from 9 balsa logs and proved that it was possible to overcome the distance between South America and Polynesia in ancient times. Nevertheless, the theory of the Peruvian origin of the ancient population of Easter Island did not convince the scientific world. Genetic analysis rather points to its Polynesian origin, and the Rapa Nui language belongs to the Polynesian family. Scientists also argue about the date of settlement, calling the time from 400 to 1200.
The possible history of Easter Island (according to later reconstructions) looks like this.
The first settlers erected small statues without “hats” made of stone on their heads, built ceremonial buildings and held festivals in honor of the god Make-Make. Then strangers arrived on the island. Because of their artificially elongated ears, they were nicknamed Hanau-eepe - “long-eared” (Heyerdahl argued that the long-eared ones were the Peruvian Indians who settled on the island around 475, and the aborigines were Polynesians).
Having settled on the Poike Peninsula, they initially lived peacefully, distinguished by their unique culture, the presence of writing and other skills. Arriving on Rapa Nui without women, the newcomers married representatives of the indigenous tribe, who began to be called hanau-momoko - “short-eared”. Gradually, the Hanau-Eepe settled the entire eastern part of the island, and then subjugated the Hanau-Momoko, which aroused hatred from the latter.
From this time on, the construction of stone giants with rough faces began, far from the previous realistic manner. The ahu platforms are constructed with less care, but now they are topped with statues with their backs facing the sea. Perhaps they were transported to the coast on wooden sleds lubricated with fish oil. At that time, most of the island was covered with palm trees, so there were no problems with wooden skating rinks.
But local residents, whom Thor Heyerdahl asked about how giant stone figures were transported in ancient times, answered him that they walked themselves. Heyerdahl and other enthusiasts have found several ways to transport stone idols in an upright position.
For example, with the help of ropes, the moai were tilted, resting on one of the corners of the base, and rotated around this axis using wooden levers. At the same time, groups of riggers used ropes to keep the block from tilting excessively.
From the outside it really seemed that the moai themselves were moving along the paved roads that were actually laid on the island. The problem is that the terrain of the volcanic island is literally rugged, and it is not clear how to move multi-ton giants up and down the hills surrounding Rano Raraku.
Be that as it may, the moai were created, moved and placed on pedestals by hanau-momoko under the leadership of hanau-eepe. Such hard labor could not do without victims, and the population of the island, even in better times, according to scientists, did not exceed 10-15 thousand people. In addition, cannibalism was practiced on Rapa Nui.
The Rapanui people were a warlike people, as evidenced by the numerous clashes between local residents described in legends. And the defeated often became the main dish during the celebration of victory. Given the dominance of long-eared animals, it is not difficult to figure out whose fate was worse. And the short-eared one eventually rebelled.
The few long-eared ones fled to the Poike Peninsula, where they took refuge behind a wide ditch 2 km long. To prevent the enemy from overcoming the barrier, they cut down the surrounding palm trees and dumped them in a ditch to set them on fire in case of danger. But the short-eared ones in the darkness bypassed the enemies from the rear and threw them into the burning ditch.
All Hanau-Eepe were exterminated. The symbols of their power - the moai - were thrown off their pedestals, and work in the quarries stopped. This epoch-making event for the island probably occurred just shortly after the discovery of the island by Europeans, because at the end of the 18th century. The sailors no longer saw the idols standing on the pedestals.
However, by that time the degradation of the community had become irreversible. Most of the forests were destroyed. With their disappearance, people lost the building materials to make huts and boats. And since the best craftsmen and agronomists were destroyed with the extermination of the long-eared animals, life on Easter Island soon turned into an everyday struggle for existence, the companion of which was cannibalism, which again began to gain momentum.
However, missionaries fought quite successfully against the latter, converting the natives to Christianity. But in 1862, the island was invaded by Peruvian slave traders, who captured and carried away 900 people, including the last king. They destroyed some of the statues, after which many aborigines and missionaries who lived there fled from the island.
And diseases brought by pirates - smallpox, tuberculosis, leprosy - reduced the size of the island’s already small population to a hundred people. Most of the priests of the island died, who buried with them all the secrets of Rapa Nui. The following year, missionaries landing on the island found no signs of the unique civilization that had recently existed, which the locals placed at the center of the world.
Almost everyone who is interested in mysteries knows about Easter Island with its famous stone idols. ancient history our civilization. Huge stone statues, the still undeciphered writing Kohau Rongorongo, mysterious bird people supposedly living in the dungeons of the island - these are just some of the secrets of a small piece of land lost in the vast ocean.
The Davis Land Mystery
For almost two centuries, Spanish, English and Dutch sailors sailed the Pacific Ocean, hoping to discover " Terra incognita australis" - "the unknown southern land." However, instead of the “big prize” - the supposed impressive mainland - they became the discoverers of tens and hundreds of islands of various sizes, both uninhabited and inhabited. No one saw any particular tragedy in the failures; the ocean was so large that the hope of discovering something more significant in its vastness than an ordinary island remained for a long time.
In 1687, the English filibuster Edward Davis set off in search of the Southern continent on a ship with a rather curious name - “Bachelor's Pleasure”. From the coast of South America, Davis directed his ship to the Galapagos Islands. About 500 nautical miles off the coast of Chile, he discovered a low sandy island, 20 miles to the west of which a fairly long and high strip of land could be seen. Surprisingly, Davis did not explore the lands he had discovered, but continued on his way, apparently hoping to find something more significant.
This is how the mystery of “Davis Land” arose, because after the filibuster and the crew of his ship, no one saw these lands again. They tried to find the islands discovered by Davis more than once, but all attempts were in vain. Was it a mirage, or did the islands discovered by Davis plunge into the abyss of water in a short time? Or maybe the filibuster did not very accurately determine the coordinates of the lands he discovered and later his islands were discovered by other navigators?
Stone statues amazed the Dutch
It was during the search for Davis Land that the famous Easter Island was discovered by the Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen. In April 1722, on Easter Sunday, three Dutch frigates approached a previously unknown island to Europeans, which Admiral Roggeveen, the commander of the flotilla, named Easter Island in honor of the holy day. At first glance, it was clear that this island had nothing to do with Davis Land. The Dutch were amazed by the giant stone statues they saw on the shore, some of which had already been knocked down by that time.
Roggeveen wrote in the ship's log:
“These stone statues at first amazed us, for we could not understand how people who had neither heavy, thick logs to make tools, nor strong enough ropes, could erect statues that were at least thirty feet high and a corresponding width."
Friedrich Behrens, Roggeveen's companion, made an interesting observation concerning the inhabitants of the island. The natives, according to his testimony,
“The colors were brown, like the Spaniards, but among them there were also blacker ones and even completely white ones, as well as many red ones, as if burned by the sun. Their ears were so long that they hung down to their shoulders; some wore white tubers in their ears as a special decoration.”
Such differences in skin color could indicate settlement of the island from several directions, although based on its size this was unlikely.
Alas, the very first meeting with the Europeans ended in tragedy for the islanders: the Dutch decided to roughly punish them for petty thefts and shot several people. In subsequent years, ships visited the island more and more often; their visits usually ended in epidemics of disease, violence and other misfortunes for its inhabitants. The worst thing happened on December 12, 1862, when Peruvian slave traders descended on the island and took away 1,000 of the healthiest men and women from the island. After public protests, the survivors (only 100 people!) were returned to the island, but they brought smallpox with them. Of the 5,000 islanders, only 600 survived! The dead took with them to the grave the solution to many of the island's secrets.
The last fragment of the sunken continent?
And there are plenty of secrets on the island! The English ethnographer MacMillan Brown, in his book “Mysteries of the Pacific Ocean,” dedicated to the Pacific Ocean, paid great attention to Easter Island. In his opinion, this island was the last fragment of a sunken continent, on which cultural monuments of a vanished civilization were preserved. Brown called the island a kind of “mausoleum” for the kings and nobles who once reigned over the Pacific. In the stone idols he saw sculptural portraits of the most noble inhabitants of the continent swallowed up by water. The scientist also paid attention to the still undeciphered Kohau Rongorongo writing system that existed on the island.
Brown believed that the last fragments of the Pacific were the islands discovered by Davis, which sank between 1687 and 1722, when Roggeveen found only a small island in the area, only 22 kilometers long and 11 kilometers wide. The ethnographer believed that the catastrophe that destroyed the Pacific and sent it to the bottom of the ocean occurred suddenly. In his opinion, their continuation was under water as a result of the disaster.
The English scientist, like other supporters of the Pacifida, pointed out the presence of ruins of ancient buildings and even stone sculptures on a number of islands in Oceania. For example, quite large statues were discovered on the Marquesas Islands, somewhat reminiscent of the Easter Island statues. Even on the tiny island of Pitcairn, stone sculptures have been found. Maybe the researchers who consider the islands of Oceania to be fragments of the Pacific Ocean are right?
Island of Unsolved Mysteries
Alas, according to geologists, Easter Island has never been part of the mainland; however, once due to a volcanic eruption, part of the island sank, but it cannot be called very large. A few years ago on this mysterious island The famous Russian researcher Professor Ernst Muldashev visited with his group. He managed to make a number of interesting discoveries on the island. The scientist, for example, studied the mysterious caves of the island, in which about 60 researchers have already died. According to local residents, mysterious bird people live in these caves.
In an interview with an AiF journalist about one of these caves, Ernst Muldashev said the following:
“This cave is located on a high steep bank of the island. A pipe begins right from the cliff, going deep into the coastal hill. Its diameter is about 1.5 meters. It is noticeable from the broken parts that the walls of the pipe are made of a material similar to ceramic, gray in color, about 20 cm thick. At the places where the pipe turns, additional inserts made of the same material are visible. Incomprehensible hieroglyphs are engraved here and there on the walls of the pipe, as well as images of bird people.”
Amazingly, the natives of Easter Island could hardly have created such a pipe made of artificial material and with such parameters!
The most interesting thing is that Ernst Muldashev, who crawled into the cave, saw red glowing eyes in the depths of the pipe, then his partner screamed about numerous strange balls that literally stuck around the professor. He saw them on the screen of a digital camera. The explorers hurried to leave the cave; Having got out of it, they felt very weak and took a long time to come to their senses. The red eyes in the depths of the pipe clearly indicated that the stories about the bird people had some basis; some mysterious creatures clearly lived in the caves of the island.
According to Ernst Muldashev, there are now 887 stone idols on the island, made from volcanic tuff, and the largest of them reaches a height of 22 meters (the size of a 7-story building!) and weighs 300 tons. The researcher believes that much more stone statues were made, as evidenced by the fragments of idols lying on the island. Muldashev's observation that the pedestals of the statues, the so-called ahu, are made of very hard rock, the outcrops of which are not observed on the island, seems extremely important. So this stone was mined somewhere off the island?
Are there too many mysteries and oddities for such a small island? How did people of different skin colors end up on it, why did the islanders do a gigantic amount of work making, moving and installing huge stone statues, why did they need writing, what kind of bird-people live in the dungeons of the island? All these questions are much easier to answer if we consider that Easter Island is actually a fragment of the Pacific Islands. Or maybe that's how it is?
Thor Heyerdahl
“I am interested in archeological topics - the history of excavations, descriptions and photographs of finds. V. Karelsky, Ivanovo.”
The sculptures at the foot of the Rano Raraku volcano are half buried in the soil.
Archaeologists have found a previously unknown type of statue.
The observatory at the top of the Rano Kao volcano was surrounded by religious buildings with images of a bird-man carved into lava outcrops.
The first settlers were excellent at processing basalt blocks. This type of masonry was the earliest on Easter Island.
Kneeling statue on Easter Island (Early period).
Kneeling statue in Tiahuanaco (Peru).
Excavations have refuted the assumptions; there is no soil layer on the island.
Lifting the statue. The statue is almost straight.
“I am interested in the history of peoples, archaeology,” writes Comrade. Bessonova from Perm.
V. Pulatov (Odessa) asks to talk about ancient Cyclopean structures.
There are a lot of letters in which our readers ask us to systematically publish articles on history and archeology in the journal. We are posting an excerpt from an article by the famous foreign researcher T. Heyerdahl about his excavations on Easter Island. The full article will be published in the book “Science and Humanity. 1963."
The major land masses bordering the Pacific Ocean were inhabited by ancient Asians long before the first sailors sailed into the central Pacific Ocean in search of unknown ocean islands. Having the simplest seafaring means, ancient man from the Asian continent penetrated through Indonesia to the southeast - to Australia and Papua Melanesia, and through the Bering Sea region to the northeast - to North, then Central and South America. This happened many thousands of years BC. Thus, immigrants from Asia populated the entire Pacific coast long before ships were created that could take advantage of or withstand the winds and currents that dominate the vast expanses of the gigantic ocean, which covers half the circumference of the globe.
The last vast area to be settled by humanity was a world of ocean islands in the center of a vast watery plain. Not long before our era, Aboriginal ships flocked to this part of the ocean, taking the discoverers to all the uninhabited islands, where they lived in safety and isolation until the Europeans discovered the way to America, and then, with the wind and currents, rushed to discover, or rather , rediscover, the islands of the Great Ocean.
The most secluded of these islets was the one which its first inhabitants called Te Pito-o-te-Henua - "Navel of the Earth", and Roggeveen, the European who rediscovered it in 1722, christened it Easter Island - in honor of the day when sailed here. Coming close to the shore, the Dutch, to their surprise, saw people whom they considered primitive representatives of Stone Age culture. These people lay face down on the ground, with their heads towards the rising sun. Bonfires were lit in front of huge humanoid statues. Grandiose cylinders made of red stone were erected on the heads of the majestic idols. Hundreds of such sculptures towered over a treeless island, where not even trees were visible that could be used to transport and lift the statues.
These humble idolaters and their ever-present huge monuments were surrounded by a barren, rocky plain with occasional patches of cultivated land where sweet potatoes and bananas grew. Above them rose the slopes of extinct volcanoes covered with trawl and ferns, the dead craters of which were the only reservoirs of fresh water on the island. On all sides of the island, sheer cliffs fell into the sea, onto which the surf crashed; underneath them there were very few places suitable for landing on the shore.
Created before the appearance of man on Earth by an underwater volcanic eruption, this piece of land rose lonely from the abyss of the ocean in the path of currents eternally moving from South America - 2 thousand miles from here to the east, past the nearest inhabited island - 1,600 miles to the west, and from there to the shores of Asia - another 7 thousand miles.
Naturally, scientists and the general public in general were faced with the question: how did civilization originally get to this highly isolated island?
They began to solve this problem in an indirect way at the end of the last century, by starting to study the oral traditions of the islanders. In the first half of this century, a primary archaeological survey of the island took place, and the study of the local population, its culture and language began.
By the beginning of the second half of this century, neither systematic archaeological excavations nor collection of samples for pollen analysis had yet been carried out on Easter Island. This omission on the part of scientists is explained by the fact that we are talking about an extremely barren island, on which, it would seem, enough humus could not accumulate to hide the traces of ancient cultures. The researchers believed that due to the lack of soil there was nothing to excavate. In addition, the remote position of Easter Island led scientists to conclude that immigrants from Asia could have reached it only as a last resort and, therefore, its period of habitation should be shorter than that of any other Pacific island.
Both of these assumptions did not seem reasonable to the author of the article. In 1937-1938, while conducting research in the Marquesas Islands, I noticed how, as a result of the activities of man and his domestic animals, the island of Motane had already in historical times changed from being covered with dense tropical forest to being devoid of almost all vegetation except grass. Until paleobotanical studies were carried out on Easter Island, we could not judge whether or not there was a forest on the island before the arrival of Europeans.
Further, since immigrants from Asia populated all the continents bordering the Pacific Ocean before the arrival of man on Easter Island, it could not be said with certainty that the first transoceanic voyage to Easter Island necessarily took the longest route, against the trade winds and westward currents, and not the shortest route - from nearby South America, with favorable winds and currents. If people moved from South America, then it is very likely that they encountered Easter Island earlier than others; in this case, it has been inhabited for a relatively long time.
Before our excavations on Easter Island in 1955-1956, only two archaeological expeditions visited here. The first, a private English expedition in 1914 led by Mrs. K. Rutledge, did not include professional archaeologists and did not attempt stratigraphic excavations. Nevertheless, K. Routledge's popular book of travelogues is replete with important observations and was until recently the main source of information about the archeology of the surface strata of Easter Island.
In 1934, a Franco-Belgian expedition arrived on the island, but the French archaeologist died on the way, and the only remaining archaeologist A. Lavacherie concentrated his efforts on studying the petroglyphs. At the same time, the French ethnographer A. Metro conducted ethnographic observations of modern islanders. In addition, Capuchin missionary S. Englert, who has lived on Easter Island since 1935, studied the archeology of surface layers and ethnography.
Lacking data for scientific dating, the first explorers of Easter Island purely speculatively concluded that man could have reached this secluded eastern outpost no earlier than the 12th century (Metro), the 13th century (Lavacherie), the 14th century (Routledge) or the 16th century (Englert).
There was no unanimity in solving the famous Easter Island riddle. Routledge and Englert argued that the island showed traces of cultural stratification (stratification) and that ancient stone structures could be divided into two types. They came to the conclusion that two different cultures came to this piece of land one after another, and saw confirmation of this in local legends. Objecting to them, Lavacherie and Metro said that there were no signs of stratification on the island, that the local archeology was homogeneous, that there was only a purely Polynesian culture on the island. They rejected the Easter legends, declaring that they were deliberately composed to explain the origin of the large ditch - the same ditch that, according to legend, people dug for a huge defensive fire. Metro and Lavacherie considered the moat to be a natural formation.
The enormous engineering work carried out by the first inhabitants of Easter Island captured Routledge's imagination, and she concluded that the problem remained mysterious. However, Metro solved the riddle simply. He suggested that the Polynesians, accustomed to wood carving, having arrived here from the wooded islands in the west, did not find wood on treeless Easter Island and therefore switched to stone processing, very quickly developing the world's most advanced technique of megalithic masonry (megaliths are ancient structures made of large stones) and erected the largest sculptures of all created by any of the Neolithic peoples of the Earth.
There was no consensus on how the ancient sculptors transported and raised gigantic statues, why these idols were created and why the Easter people did not worship the Polynesian gods Tana and Tangaroa, but professed a completely different religion, and also why they did not use common Polynesian products.
It was obvious that the surface of Easter Island could not tell the whole story of the dramatic events and cunning plans carried out on the most secluded island in the world. To delve deeper into the mystery and search for hidden clues to the mysterious past of the Easter people, I decided to bring a team of qualified archaeologists to the island and conduct the first stratigraphic excavations; Despite the prevailing belief that there was no soil on the island, I hoped to find something beneath the surface. An important task was to study the stratification of the architecture, as well as to collect coal samples at key points on the island for radiocarbon analysis.
There is not a single stream on barren Easter Island, but rainwater accumulates in three extinct volcanoes- Rano Kao, Rano Raraku and Rano Oroi. For many centuries, the wind carried pollen from island vegetation into open crater lakes; the study of the well-preserved fossil pollen layered here should have helped to reconstruct the history of the Easter flora. To do this, a number of wells up to eight meters deep were laid along the edges of lakes Rano Kao and Rano Raraku. The specimens were subsequently examined and identified by Professor W. H. Selling, head of the paleobotanical department of the National Museum of Natural History in Stockholm.
Pollen research has shown that when - even before our era - man first set foot on these shores, the now treeless Easter Island was covered with trees and shrubs of numerous species. There were streams on the island, and the surface of the fresh crater lakes was not yet covered with aquatic vegetation; palm trees and virgin forest rose around the lakes.
But then a man appeared. Studying pollen samples, we see how the primary forest was cleared, and the lake surface was gradually occupied by aquatic plants that had only now appeared. With the arrival of man, for the first time, polygonum was planted along the shores of fresh water bodies, a typically South American plant that was used as a medicinal plant by Andean residents and Easter people. Along with it, the extremely important totora reed, also a typically South American freshwater plant, not known either in the Old World or on other Pacific islands, came to the island. With their appearance, the flora of the island began to change dramatically. Both plants spread quickly and soon partially covered most of the crater lakes with a floating carpet.
At the same time, people began to burn the first bonfires on the island, and a little later the vegetation began to disappear. For the first time, ash particles are mixed with previously clean soil and pollen residues. They indicate limited forest fires that the aliens started to clear areas for residential buildings and places of worship. The original forest disappeared, and its place was taken by quaint temples and monuments made of durable stone. These structures, later destroyed or covered by others, have given us the most reliable clues for studying the level of culture of the first islanders and the subsequent local evolution.
The four archaeologists of our expedition - E. N. Ferdon, W. Melloy, A. Shelsvold and K. S. Smith - began with excavations of housing and cult platforms. And all of them, independently of each other, discovered the alternation of two different cultures with different architecture and different religious views. These cultures were replaced by war and a period of decline - this was immediately before the first Europeans appeared on Easter Island. Radiocarbon dating has shown that man came to Easter Island at least a thousand years earlier than modern science assumed.
Three successive periods in the archeology of Easter Island have been called: Early, Middle and Late.
Early period
The people who first reached Easter Island clearly came from an area where they were engaged not so much in wood carving as in stone processing. They cut down trees to get to the rocks. These early settlers were already skilled stonemasons. They were excellent at processing huge blocks of solid basalt. The slabs in the masonry, which had a square, triangular or polygonal shape, nevertheless fit together so tightly that it was impossible to insert knife blades between them. Excavations have shown that this type of masonry was the earliest on Easter Island, and not the latest, not the end of local evolution, as Metro speculatively concluded.
This sophisticated megalithic technique was not known on any of the thousands of Pacific islands further west. We see such perfection, such technique and style only in the specialized stone-masonry culture of ancient Peru, on the mainland, which is the closest neighbor of Easter Island to the east. The purpose of the Easter buildings was more aesthetic or cultic than functional, and subsequent generations of islanders were either unable or unwilling to develop the unique high art of the early Easter era.
The first settlers used their skills to build huge platforms like altars needed for solar worship. The traditionally laid out, smoothly polished facade was very precisely astronomically oriented in relation to the point of sunrise at the time of the summer solstice or equinox.
Interest in the movement of the sun was also manifested in the fact that on the top of Rano Kao, the highest volcano on the island, the first Easter people built a solar observatory, specially adapted to mark the annual movement of the sun. This observatory was completely covered with earth, and we discovered it during excavations led by Ferdon. The observatory was surrounded religious building with solar symbols carved into lava outcrops. Easter rituals were accompanied by the lighting of bonfires. It is believed that the solar cult and solar observatories are not characteristic of Polynesian culture - they are also most typical of ancient Peru, both Inca and pre-Inca times.
In the solar observatory, and in the cleared and leveled areas behind the wide, astronomically oriented megalithic platforms, the early inhabitants of Easter Island erected large humanoid stone sculptures. These sculptures were markedly different from the more impressive busts that later made the island famous and were unknown to science until excavations revealed their existence. Here's one type: a small, flattened, quadrangular head with shallowly carved facial features - huge bulging eyes, puffy cheeks, arched eyebrows leading to a Y-shaped nose. The second, no less traditional type: a rectangular column, on the sides of which a full-length human figure was outlined in relief, with short legs and arms lowered so that the fingers meet below the navel. Third type: realistic sculpture of a kneeling man sitting on his heels; hands rest on knees, oval face with goatee turned to the sky.
No other island had such sculptures, but all three types are characteristic of Tiahuanaco, the cult center of sun worshipers in pre-Incan Peru.
The fourth and final variety served as the prototype for the large sculptures of the next Easter period. This variety represents a purely local style and evolution; there are no sculptures similar to it either on the mainland or on other islands.
We still don’t know exactly when exactly man first saw the wooded shores of Easter Island. But carbon dating shows that around 380, skilled military engineers supervised extensive work to create a powerful defensive structure at its eastern end. Bordered by sheer cliffs, the Poike Peninsula was cut off from the rest of the island by a specially dug ditch 12 feet deep, about 40 feet wide and almost 2 miles long. Gravel and earth thrown out of the ditch formed a defensive rampart with passages for counterattacks. If we discard the assumption that the first settlers of Easter Island were preparing to defend themselves against enemies who might follow them across the ocean, we can only conclude that the island was inhabited long before such extensive work began.
Previous expeditions, without conducting excavations, considered this sand-filled ditch to be a natural depression in the area, although Easter legends persistently indicated that the ditch was dug by the legendary “long-eared” for defense.
We still know very little about these first inhabitants of Easter Island, but we do know that they brought with them a highly developed culture, which naturally developed outside the island and which must have been traced in the surrounding areas. As we have already seen, this early imported culture was very distinctive, different from other Pacific island cultures known to us.
Middle period
Around 1100, as Carbon dating shows, the original Easter culture came to an abrupt end. Some of the ancient temples and other structures, including the solar observatory, were abandoned for a long time and fell into disrepair. But then they were again occupied by people and rebuilt according to a different plan, using a completely different masonry technique. The reason for this break is still unknown. Perhaps the entire island was abandoned by humans during this interregnum, or perhaps local wars reduced the population of the Early Period until only a handful of people remained living in remote areas. In any case, after a long break, the previous buildings were occupied by a different culture, with different religious ideas; began what we call the second, or Middle, period in the history of Easter cultures.
At the beginning of this period, huge stone sculptures began to be made, which subsequently attracted the attention of the whole world to the small Pacific island. In this era, the main desire and fanatical passion of the Easter people was to carve out gigantic images of their ancestors, which were erected on ancestral tombs raised above ground level.
The sculptures of the Middle Period are distinguished by extremely long, drooping ears, reviving the memory of the legendary “long-eared”, who, according to the Easter people, created these statues until almost all of them were burned in the already mentioned defensive ditch during the war with the “short-eared”. Now there is only one clan living on the island, whose members consider themselves direct descendants of the “long-eared” - this is the Atan clan. Their origins are confirmed by all the islanders, as well as Englert's genealogical research.
The working methods of the “long-eared” sculptors were a hidden family secret, which was passed down from father to son for twelve generations. Thanks to the good, friendly relations of our expedition with the Easter people, the secret was revealed to us. It has been tested in practical experiments. According to the instructions of the eldest of the Atan brothers, one statue was sculpted, transported and installed on a pedestal. Archaeological research, combined with the stories of the Easter people and our experiments, made it possible to recreate the working methods of sculptors of the Middle Period.
The statues were hewn directly on the slopes of the crater using roughly made axes from hard andesite; To make work easier, the rock was watered with water from dried pumpkins. Beneath the loose, weathered surface layer, the rock was very hard, and it took about a year to make an average-sized statue. In the quarries, the smallest details of the face, hands, and body of the sculpture were processed, right down to the polishing of ear jewelry and long exquisite nails. But the back remained unfinished until the last moment and was connected to a stone bed like a keel.
Finally, having separated the giant's back, they lowered him down a steep slope using rollers and ropes. At the same time, it was often necessary to overcome steep terraces and niches that arose as a result of previous work. The statue was temporarily installed somewhere at the foot of the volcano. To do this, a ledge or hole was dug out of the accumulated layer of rubble from the quarries, where they placed the statue with their feet, supporting it in a vertical position with ropes. Now, for the first time, sculptors could start working on the back. It was hewn and polished as carefully as the rest of the figure. The front of the statue was not decorated with any patterns: just the torso. But relief symbols were often applied to the back - an arc resembling a rainbow, one or two rings.
Tradition says that the Easter sculptors, the discoverers of the island, were called Hanau-epe - “long-eared” - for their custom of lengthening their earlobes by hanging large disks from them. In contrast, the ancestors of the current population were called hanau-momoko - “short-eared”.
For karau-karau, that is, two hundred years, the “short-eared” humbly worked for the “long-eared”, participating in the construction of huge structures. Big ahoos appeared; From the quarries of Rano Raraku, increasingly larger statues were delivered to the graves that belonged mainly to the “long-eared ones.” Although mixed marriages occurred between the two peoples, only six of the many hundreds of sculptures on the ahu have short ears; all the rest have elongated lobes: they clearly depict “long-eared people.”
Further, the legend says that the two-century period of peaceful cooperation ended when the “long-ears” forced the “short-ears” to clear the entire Poike Peninsula in the east of stones. The work was already completed, and Poike, unlike the entire island, black from lava debris, was completely covered with green grass, then the “short-eared” were ordered to clean the rest of the island’s surface in the same way. But then their long-suffering came to an end. Their entire tribe, united, rebelled and drove the “long-ears” to the Poike Peninsula, where they took refuge behind a long defensive ditch, which they filled with brushwood so that a fire could be lit if the “short-ears” went on the attack.
A betrayal committed by an old woman from the Short-Ears tribe, who was married to one of the Long-Ears, allowed the Short-Ears detachment to bypass the ditch, while others simulated an attack from the front. While the “long-ears” were setting fire to a defensive fire, they were unexpectedly attacked from the rear and everyone was thrown into the fire. Of the adult men, only one, Ororoina, was spared; he was allowed to continue the line of “long-ears.”
According to legend, this happened twelve generations ago; genealogists believe it must have been around 1680. The names of the descendants of Ororoina have survived to this day, right up to the already mentioned living Atan family, whom the Easter people consider the only ones descended in the direct male line from the previously so powerful “long-eared” people.
Meanwhile, Europeans for a long time mistook the sand-covered ditch on Poik for a natural formation, and the legend about the fire was not trusted until our expedition carried out excavations there. Research has shown that this is a skillful construction of human hands. Coal and ash from a huge fire were found along the entire ditch; Radiocarbon analysis made it possible to date the samples to approximately 1676, which perfectly coincides with the vivid traditions of the Easter people.
A small island in the South Pacific Ocean, the territory of Chile, is one of the most mysterious corners of our planet. This is about easter island. Hearing this name, you immediately think of the cult of birds, the mysterious writings of Kohau Rongorongo and the Cyclopean stone platforms of Ahu. But the most important attraction of the island can be called the moai, which are giant stone heads...
Total strange statues on easter island There are 997. Most of them are placed quite chaotically, but some are lined up in rows. The appearance of stone idols is unique, and the Easter Island statues cannot be confused with anything else.
Huge heads on puny bodies, faces with characteristic powerful chins and facial features as if carved with an ax - all these are moai statues.
Moai reach a height of five to seven meters. There are some specimens that are ten meters tall, but there are only a few of them on the island. Despite such dimensions, the weight of the statue on average is no more than 5 tons. Such low weight is due to the material from which all moai are made.
To create the statue, they used volcanic tuff, which is much lighter than basalt or some other heavy stone. This material is closest in structure to pumice, somewhat reminiscent of a sponge and crumbles quite easily.
In general, there are many secrets in the history of Easter Island. Its discoverer, Captain Juan Fernandez, fearing competitors, decided to keep his discovery, made in 1578, a secret, and some time later he accidentally died under mysterious circumstances. Although whether what the Spaniard found was Easter Island is still unclear.
144 years later, in 1722, the Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen stumbled upon Easter Island, and this event happened on the day of Christian Easter. So, quite by accident, the island of Te Pito o te Henua, which translated from the local dialect means the Center of the World, turned into Easter Island.
In his notes, the admiral indicated that the aborigines held ceremonies before stone heads, lit fires and fell into a trance-like state, swaying back and forth.
What were moai for the islanders, they never found out, but most likely the stone sculptures served as idols. Researchers also suggest that the stone sculptures could be statues of deceased ancestors.
It is interesting that Admiral Roggeveen and his squadron not only sailed in this area, he tried in vain to find the elusive land of Davis, an English pirate, which, according to his descriptions, was discovered 35 years before the Dutch expedition. True, no one except Davis and his team saw the newly discovered archipelago again.
In subsequent years, interest in the island declined. In 1774, James Cook arrived on the island and discovered that over the years some of the statues had been knocked over. Most likely this was due to a war between Aboriginal tribes, but official confirmation was never obtained.
The standing idols were last seen in 1830. A French squadron then arrived on Easter Island. After this, the statues, erected by the islanders themselves, were never seen again. All of them were either overturned or destroyed.
Distant masters carved “moai” on the slopes of the Rano Roraku volcano, located in the eastern part of the island, from soft volcanic tuff. Then the finished statues were lowered down the slope and placed along the perimeter of the island, over a distance of more than 10 km.
The height of most idols ranges from five to seven meters, while later sculptures reached 10 and 12 meters. The tuff, or, as it is also called, pumice, from which they are made, has a sponge-like structure and easily crumbles even with a slight impact on it. so the average weight of a “moai” does not exceed 5 tons.
Stone ahu - platform-pedestals: reached 150 m in length and 3 m in height, and consisted of pieces weighing up to 10 tons.
All the moai that are currently on the island were restored in the 20th century. The latest restoration work took place relatively recently - between 1992 and 1995.
At one time, Admiral Roggeveen, recalling his trip to the island, claimed that the aborigines lit fires in front of the “moai” idols and squatted next to them, bowing their heads. After that, they folded their hands and swung them up and down. Of course, this observation is not able to explain who the idols really were for the islanders.
Roggeveen and his companions could not understand how, without using thick wooden rollers and strong ropes, it was possible to move and install such blocks. The islanders had no wheels, no draft animals, and no other source of energy other than their own muscles.
Ancient legends say that the statues walked on their own. There is no point in asking how this actually happened, because there is no documentary evidence left anyway.
There are many hypotheses about the movement of the “moai”, some are even confirmed by experiments, but all this proves only one thing - it was possible in principle. And the statues were moved by the inhabitants of the island and no one else. So why did they do this? This is where the differences begin.
It still remains a mystery who created all these stone faces and why, whether there is any meaning in the chaotic placement of statues on the island, and why some of the statues were overturned. There are many theories that answer these questions, but none of them have been officially confirmed.
It is also surprising that in 1770 the statues were still standing. James Cook, who visited the island in 1774, mentioned the lying statues; no one had noticed anything like this before him.
The last time the standing idols were seen was in 1830. Then a French squadron entered the island. Since then, no one has seen the original statues, that is, installed by the inhabitants of the island themselves. Everything that exists on the island today was restored in the 20th century.
The last restoration of fifteen “moai” located between the Rano Roraku volcano and the Poike Peninsula occurred relatively recently - from 1992 to 1995. Moreover, the Japanese were involved in the restoration work.
Local aborigines could clarify the situation if they lived to this day. The fact is that in the mid-19th century, a smallpox epidemic broke out on the island, which was brought from the continent. The disease wiped out the islanders...
In the second half of the 19th century, the cult of the bird man also died. This strange, unique ritual for all of Polynesia was dedicated to Makemaka, the supreme deity of the islanders. The chosen one became his earthly incarnation. Moreover, interestingly, elections were held regularly, once a year.
At the same time, servants or warriors took the most active part in them. It depended on them whether their owner, the head of the family clan, would become Tangata-manu, or a bird-man. It is to this ritual that the main cult center, the rock village of Orongo on the largest volcano Rano Kao in the western tip of the island, owes its origin. Although, perhaps, Orongo existed long before the emergence of the cult of Tangata-manu.
Legends say that the heir to the legendary Hotu Matua, the first leader to arrive on the island, was born here. In turn, his descendants, hundreds of years later, themselves gave the signal for the start of the annual competition.
Easter Island was and remains a truly “blank” spot on the map of the globe. It is difficult to find a piece of land similar to it that would keep so many secrets that most likely will never be solved.
In the spring, messengers of the god Makemake - black sea swallows - flew to the small islands of Motu-Kao-Kao, Motu-Iti and Motu-Nui, located not far from the coast. The warrior who was the first to find the first egg of these birds and swim it to his master received seven beautiful women as a reward. Well, the owner became a leader, or rather, a bird-man, receiving universal respect, honor and privileges.
The last Tangata Manu ceremony took place in the 60s of the 19th century. After the disastrous pirate raid of the Peruvians in 1862, when the pirates took the entire male population of the island into slavery, there was no one left to choose the bird-man.
Why did the Easter Island natives carve moai statues in a quarry? Why did they stop this activity? The society that created the statues must have been significantly different from the 2,000 people Roggeveen saw. It had to be well organized. What happened to him?
For more than two and a half centuries, the mystery of Easter Island remained unsolved. Most theories about the history and development of Easter Island are based on oral traditions.
This happens because no one still can understand what is written in written sources - the famous tablets “ko hau motu mo rongorongo”, which roughly means a manuscript for recitation.
Most of them were destroyed by Christian missionaries, but those that survived could probably shed light on the history of this mysterious island. And although the scientific world has more than once been excited by reports that ancient writings have finally been deciphered, upon careful verification, all this turned out to be a not very accurate interpretation of oral facts and legends
Several years ago, paleontologist David Steadman and several other researchers carried out the first systematic study of Easter Island in order to find out what its flora and fauna were once like. The result is evidence for a new, surprising and instructive interpretation of the history of its settlers.
Easter Island was settled around 400 AD. e. The islanders grew bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, and mulberries. In addition to chickens, there were also rats on the island, which arrived with the first settlers.
The period of production of the statues dates back to 1200-1500. The number of inhabitants by that time ranged from 7,000 to 20,000 people. To lift and move the statue, several hundred people were enough, who used ropes and rollers from trees, which were available in sufficient quantities at that time.
Full size idol.
The painstaking work of archaeologists and paleontologists has shown that approximately 30,000 years before the arrival of people and in the first years of their stay, the island was not at all as deserted as it is now.
A subtropical forest of trees and undergrowth rose above the shrubs, grasses, ferns and turf. The forest contained tree daisies, hauhau trees, which can be used to make ropes, and toromiro, which is useful as fuel. There were also varieties of palm trees that are not now on the island, but formerly there were so many of them that the base of the trees was densely covered with their pollen.
They are related to the Chilean palm, which grows up to 32 m and has a diameter of up to 2 m. Tall, branchless trunks were ideal material for skating rinks and canoe construction. They also provided edible nuts and juice from which Chileans make sugar, syrup, honey and wine.
The relatively cold coastal waters provided fishing in only a few places. The main marine prey were dolphins and seals. To hunt them, they went out into the open sea and used harpoons.
Before the arrival of people, the island was an ideal place for birds, because they did not have any enemies here. Albatrosses, gannets, frigate birds, fulmars, parrots and other birds nested here - 25 species in total. It was probably the richest nesting site in the entire Pacific Ocean.
Museum in Paris
Around the 800s, forest destruction began. Layers of charcoal from forest fires began to appear more and more often, tree pollen became less and less, and pollen from grasses that replaced the forest appeared more and more.
No later than 1400, the palm trees disappeared completely, not only as a result of cutting down, but also because of the ubiquitous rats, which did not give them the opportunity to recover: a dozen surviving remains of nuts preserved in the caves showed signs of being chewed by rats. Such nuts could not germinate. The hauhau trees did not disappear completely, but there were no longer enough of them to make ropes.
In the 15th century, not only the palm trees disappeared, but the entire forest disappeared. It was destroyed by people who cleared areas for gardens, cut down trees to build canoes, to make skating rinks for sculptures, and for heating. The rats ate the seeds. It is likely that the birds died out due to polluted flowers and a decrease in fruit yield.
The same thing happened that happens everywhere in the world where forests are destroyed: most of the forest inhabitants disappear. All species of local birds and animals have disappeared on the island. All coastal fish were also caught. Small snails were used as food. From the diet of people by the 15th century. the dolphins disappeared: there was nothing to go out to sea on, and there was nothing to make harpoons from. It came down to cannibalism.
The paradise that opened to the first settlers became almost lifeless 1600 years later. . Fertile soils, an abundance of food, plenty of building materials, sufficient living space, and all opportunities for a comfortable existence were destroyed. At the time of Heyerdahl's visit to the island, there was only a toromiro tree on the island; now he is no longer there.
It all started with the fact that several centuries after arriving on the island, people began, like their Polynesian ancestors, to install stone idols on platforms. Over time, the statues became larger; their heads began to be decorated with red 10-ton crowns.
The spiral of competition was unwinding; Rival clans tried to outdo each other with displays of health and strength like the Egyptians building their giant pyramids. On the island, as in modern America, there was a complex politic system distribution of available resources and integration of the economy in various areas.
The ever-growing population depleted the forests faster than they could regenerate; vegetable gardens took up more and more space; the soil, devoid of forests, springs and streams dried up; the trees that were spent on transporting and lifting the statues, as well as on building canoes and dwellings, were not enough even for cooking.
As birds and animals were destroyed, famine set in. The fertility of arable lands decreased due to wind and rain erosion. Droughts have begun. Intensive chicken breeding and cannibalism did not solve the food problem. The statues, prepared for moving, with sunken cheeks and visible ribs, are evidence of the onset of hunger.
With food scarce, the islanders could no longer support the chiefs, bureaucracy, and shamans who administered the society. The surviving islanders told the first Europeans to visit them how the centralized system had been replaced by chaos and the warlike class had defeated the hereditary leaders.
The stones appeared to depict spears and daggers made by the warring parties in the 1600s and 1700s; They are still scattered throughout Easter Island. By 1700 the population was between a quarter and a tenth of its former size. People moved into caves to hide from their enemies.
Around 1770, rival clans began knocking over each other's statues and cutting off their heads. The last statue was toppled and desecrated in 1864.
As the picture of the decline of the civilization of Easter Island appeared before the researchers, they asked themselves: - Why didn’t they look back, didn’t realize what was happening, didn’t stop until it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?
Most likely, the disaster did not occur suddenly, but stretched out over several decades. The changes occurring in nature were not noticeable for one generation.
Only old people, looking back on their childhood years, could realize what was happening and understand the threat posed by the destruction of forests, but the ruling class and stonemasons, afraid of losing their privileges and jobs, treated the warnings in the same way as today's loggers in the northwestern United States: "Work is more important than forest!"
The trees gradually became smaller, thinner and less significant. Once upon a time, the last fruit-bearing palm was cut off, and the young shoots were destroyed along with the remains of bushes and undergrowth. No one noticed the death of the last young palm tree.
Easter Island's mild climate and volcanic origins should have made it a paradise away from the problems that beset the rest of the world, but Roggeveen's first impression of the island was that of a devastated area, covered with dried grass and scorched vegetation. Neither trees nor bushes were visible.
Modern botanists have discovered on the island only 47 species of higher plants characteristic of this area; mostly grass, sedge and ferns. The list also includes two species of dwarf trees and two species of shrubs.
With such vegetation, the inhabitants of the island had no fuel to keep warm during the cold, wet and windy winter. The only domestic animals were chickens; there were no bats, birds, snakes or lizards. Only insects were found. In total, about 2,000 people lived on the island.
Now about three thousand people live on the island. Of these, only 150 people are purebred Rapa Nui, the rest are Chileans and mestizos. Although, again, it is not entirely clear who exactly can be considered purebred.
After all, even the first Europeans who landed on the island were surprised to discover that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui - the Polynesian name for the island - were ethnically heterogeneous. Admiral Roggeveen, whom we knew, wrote that on the land he discovered there lived white, dark, brown and even reddish people. Their language was Polynesian, belonging to a dialect isolated from about 400 AD. e., and characteristic of the Marquesas and Hawaiian Islands.
