Rapa Nui/Easter Island and Civilisations

Up to their necks in it: Easter Island statues

Easter Island or Rapa Nui sprang to mind when Alia Ullah, marketing officer at Manchester Museum, asked the Collections team at Manchester Museums to write blogposts in response to the BBC’s new series Civilisations. This ‘reimagining’ of Kenneth Clark’s inspirational 1969 documentary is fronted by Mary Beard, David Olusoga and Simon Schama and it was the latter who presented the first programme last night. Civilisations ‘examines humans’ relationships with creativity, from the very first representation of beauty, to today’. Of course, that allows for a multitude of artistic work throughout history and prehistory.

Now, it wasn’t mentioned last night but for my money the stunning material culture of the people of Easter Island or Rapa Nui must get a mention somewhere in the series. When several years ago, Manchester Museum put on an exhibition to mark the loan of an Easter Island statue from the British Museum we focused on the island’s iconic statues, how and where they were made, how they were moved around the island and the meaning that they had for the Rapanui. The BBC’s Civilisations series offers an opportunity to revisit the fascinating culture of the island.

Comte de la Perouse measuring a moai from Voyage autour du Monde (University of Manchester)

When the first Europeans who arrived off the coast of Rapa Nui during the 18th century they were astonished to see the stone statues. A famous print by Gaspard Duche de Vancey (1756–1788) shows the Comte de la Perouse, the leader of the French expedition, and members of his crew investigating a statue whilst having their hats stolen and pockets picked by the people of the island, the Rapanui. In many ways, this image epitomises the European reaction to the inhabitants: astonishment that they could have created the statues given their impoverished way of life; and amusement that they brazenly pilfered visitors’ hats and handkerchiefs. The Rapanui, it was suggested, must have come along at a later date and were living amongst the ruins of an earlier and far more advanced civilisation. Not only did they not understand the works of their predecessors but in their ignorance, they pulled down their statues. This aspect of the interpretation of the works of art was not discussed in the first programme of Civilisations  but this tendency to make value judgements of indigenous peoples in order to justify the spoliation by Europeans of works of art and antiquities must surely feature at some point  in Civilisations.

Underlying this sniffy attitude to the locals was an inability to accept any monumental sculpture without the usual accompanying Greco-Roman panoply of towns and cities, roads, aqueducts, and civic architecture. The Swiss ethnographer Alfred Metraux (1902-1963), part of a Franco-Belgian expedition to Easter Island during the 1930s, observed that one of his companions expected to see the walls of ancient cities – similar to Mohnejo-daro – emerge beneath his pick. When they wern’t found, it was claimed that Easter Island or Rapa Nui must be the only piece of land surviving from what was once a much larger continent, which like Atlantis, had sunk catastrophically beneath the waves. On this hypothetical submerged continent, it was argued, were the remains of the expected features of civilisation deemed necessary to underpin the stone statues.

Of course, no evidence of the existence of a sunken continent in the mid-Pacific has ever surfaced. The suggestion is reminiscent of the rather desperate explaining away of the stunning bronzes from Ife in Nigeria by the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) as products of a supposed advanced civilisation that once existed off the coast of West Africa. There was nothing like the Ife bronzes amongst the African art with which Europeans were already familiar. Frobenius suggested they must have been given to Africans on the mainland before the island, like the legendary Atlantis, sank beneath the waves.

Map of Rapa Nui or Easter Island showing locations of single and groups of statues

It is now accepted that the skilled craftsmen and artists of Medieval kingdom of Ife made the bronzes just as the ancestors of the Rapanui made the statues or moai. And what prolific artisans the Rapanui were: about one thousand moai are known from the island and most of them were carved in a quarry in the volcanic crater of Rano Raraku. The rock is known as volcanic tuff and is relatively soft when freshly exposed. The significance of the volcanic sites to the Rapanui as entrances to the Underworld would have made rock obtained there symbolically important. This may explain why the Rapanui went to such lengths to make their statues out of this material.

Moai in Manchester Museum’s Making Monuments exhibition

About half the moai of Rapa Nui still remain in the quarry in various stages of completion and some are so jumbled together it would have been impossible to remove them without damaging others. Perhaps they were not meant to be removed and erected, and that they are really large rock art or petroglyphs, in which the island excels. The massive statue known as El Gigante, which is still in the quarry at Rano Raraku, is 65 feet (20 metres) tall and is estimated to have weighed up to 270 tons. Paro, the largest statue erected, is almost over 30 feet (10 metres) tall and weighed 82 tons.

Excavations undertaken by the British team in the volcanic crater at Puna Pau.

If we are to answer some of the many questions that still remain about the island we have to look to archaeology or to experimental archaeology to answer them. In the first programme of Civilisations Simon Schama showed how archaeological excavation had revealed the antiquities of Mesopotamia, bronzes at Sanxingdui in China and Mycenaean sealstones at Pylos in Greece. In 2015 Manchester Museum worked closely with Prof Colin Richards and a team of archaeologists from University College London, Bournemouth University and University of Highlands and Islands on an AHRC-funded programme of fieldwork on Rapa Nui. One of the sites they excavated was the quarry in the small, extinct volcano at Puna Pau where the distinctive hats or pukao for the moai were carved. In the course of their work it has been estimated that the Rapanui removed some 1000 cubic metres of rock from the quarry inside the volcano. Head wear was very important in this culture but the colour made the pukao or headdresses of the moai even more significant because red represents power, vitality and authority (or mana) in Polynesian culture.

The Rapanui belief system and way of life changed irrevocably when Europeans came to the island during the 18^th century. The Rapanui were eager to exchange goods and favours for European and New World commodities such as close-woven textiles, metal objects and trinkets and this seems to have undermined the traditional rites and invocations of the ancestors through the moai. Visiting ships in later years reported that fewer and fewer statues were standing. The last statue, Paro, fell in 1862-4. The toppling of the statues, the discovery of large numbers of obsidian weapons and stories about fighting in oral tradition all point to the violent collapse of traditional Rapanui culture. During the 1860s about one thousand Rapanui were  forcibly removed or “blackbirded” to serve as indentured labour in South America. Many died and the small number who eventually returned to Rapa Nui brought with them diseases, which killed many of those who had remained. Some Rapanui fled the island, which was increasingly given over to sheep grazing. After the island was acquired by Chile, in 1888, the population slowly began to recover. The construction of an airport, the start of regular flights from the mainland and tourism have brought  much needed income for the inhabitants and helped to restore their sense of identity and dignity.

Simon Schama said last night that human beings are art-making animals and that the urge to create has been intrinsic to us from the year dot. The hundreds of stone statues erected by the Rapanui must surely rank alongside the many stunning artistic works we saw last night, qualifying them too as monuments to human creativity. I don’t know at the time of writing whether the trio of presenters will talk about Rapa Nui but it seems to me that the island, its resourceful people and their fascinating material culture deserve to be taken seriously. Thankfully the BBC’s Civilisations series takes a much more international and multicultural approach than Kenneth Clark’s original.

Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: the Statues from Easter Island was shown at Manchester Museum in 2015. The content of this blog reflects the content of the exhibition, which was developed with Prof Colin Richards, formerly of the University of Manchester’s Department of Archaeology. It draws upon information from the AHRC-funded fieldwork undertaken by the British team and their Papanui and Chilean colleagues. However, readers should not infer that Prof Richards and others would necessarily agree with everything written here.

 

 

 

The Art of Easter Island

Decorated envelope

Manchester Museum’s exhibition about the statues of Easter Island Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: the Stone Statues from Easter Island has been receiving some good feedback from the public and is even inspiring some visitors creatively as the image of the hand-decorated envelope above from a Belgian enquirer shows. In this respect the exhibition is stimulating people in a similar way to the Lindow Man temporary exhibition a few years ago. The latter prompted an artistic outflowing of poetry, drawings and even 3D models that showed people’s deep-seated need to respond in very personal ways to topics that either inspire or move them.

Since opening in early April visitors have left a lot of complimentary and constructive comments about the exhibition and many of them, especially but by no means always children, have added  drawings and doodles showing the moai. The drawings perfectly capture the enigmatic quality of Easter Island statues and I am now kicking myself for having used lined paper in the visitors’ book. We only touched briefly upon the inspiration that Rapa Nui’s statues gave to a generation of modern sculptors, including Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), Henri Gaudier Brzeska (1891-1915) and Henry Moore (1898-1986). One visitor to the exhibition commented “The heads remind me of Anthony Gormley’s statues on Crosby Beach in Liverpool – very interesting. Fab exhibition. Keep up the good work.”

Perhaps the strong appeal they make to our artistic taste is because we have already been influenced by seeing European works-of-art inspired by them. They reflect back onto the statues the aspects of modern art that grew out of exposure to the so-called ‘primitive’. This would explain why  some visitors embellish their drawings of the statues by adding a surrealist moustache with curled over tip or show the statue smoking a joint.

It is perhaps not so surprising that there are so many sketches of the heads: lots of simple line-drawing profiles express the visitor’s appreciation of the Museum’s work.

Moai by Josh

Some children who have been to the exhibition on a school trip have since come back with their families. Take the Davies family who left the comment: ” McKenzie visited with school on Friday. He loved it and so he’s brought us back to teach us what he has learnt” (25/05/15).

Birdman Race competitor?

It’s not just about the statues, however. The exhibition explores the deeper meanings the different kinds of stone had for the islanders and we show samples of volcanic rock. This clearly struck a chord with one visitor, as the photo below shows.

Volcano fan

 

Making Monuments at Manchester Museum

Moai Hava and entrance to exhibition about Rapa Nui/Easter Island at Manchester Museum.

The centrepiece of Manchester Museum’s temporary exhibition Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: The Statues of Easter Island, which opened on 1st April is the statue of Moai Hava. This 2m high 2.5 ton basalt  statue has been kindly lent by the British Museum as part of its National Programmes. Until recently Moai Hava was displayed at World Museum Liverpool. These impressive statues enjoy an iconic status across the world. Drawing upon the recent fieldwork undertaken by experts from University College London, the University of Manchester, Bournemouth University and Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology (ORCA), University of Highlands and Islands as well as Rapa Nui and Chilean archaeologists, Manchester Museum’s temporary exhibition explores how the statues  were made, the significance of the different kinds of stone, and the quarries where they were carved, and the meaning that they had for the people of the island who are known as Rapanui. In addition the main exhibition gallery features two large replica statues or moai, each 2.5m high and surmounted by a topknot or pukao. These impressive copies were made by Chris Dean (who did the sculpting) and Peter Spinks of Freeform Studios Ltd and Creative Models respectively.

Statues or moai at the volcanic crater of Rano Raraku. Photo: Adam Stanford (c.) Aerial-Cam Ltd

About one thousand statues or moai are known from the island and most of them were carved in a quarry at the volcanic crater of Rano Raraku. The rock is known as volcanic tuff and is relatively soft when newly exposed. When it is weathered, and, under certain lighting conditions, it has a luminosity, which lends the statues an otherworldly character. This may explain why the Rapanui went to such lengths to make their statues out of this material. The statues were carved in the bedrock still attached by a keel.

About half still remain in the quarry in various stages of completion and are sometimes so jumbled together it would have been hard to remove them without damaging others. Some writers have suggested that they were not intended to be removed and erected, and that they are really large rock art or petroglyphs, in which the island excels. The massive statue known as El Gigante, which is still in the quarry at Rano Raraku, is 65 feet (20 metres) tall and is estimated to have weighed up to 270 tons. Paro, the largest statue erected, is almost over 30 feet (10 metres) tall and weighed 82 tons. We cannot be sure how the statues were moved but experimental work has shown they can moved on rollers, on a wooden frame resting on wooden rails, and even ‘walked’ by two teams pulling alternately on ropes, similar in some respects to how one would move a heavy fridge or freezer unit. A fine artist’s impression of the latter process, which appeared in National Geographic magazine (July 2012), provides the image at the entrance to the Museum’s temporary exhibition gallery, although we are not saying this is the only way the statues were moved.

The exhibition also shows a representation of one of the three hundred or so ceremonial platforms or ahu on which many, but by no means all, the statues stood. Each community on the island had its own ahu and frequently these are found on the coast. They follow a common design with a ramp of cobbles facing an open square or plaza with carefully shaped vertical stones on the seaward side, sometimes with crematoria for disposal of the dead. They seem to have been added to over time and some ahu contain pieces of broken stone statue and have ramps for launching canoes. The stones used to construct the ahu were quarried and gathered all over the island and sometimes petroglyphs were carved on them. The ahu were the ceremonial centres for the communities where special rituals took place. Early accounts describe the natives kneeling in front of the statues and raising and lowering their hands as if in prayer. The intervention of important ancestors was invoked through the statues. The eyes of the statues were inserted at particular times which ‘activated’ them but otherwise they may have been dormant (pers.comm. Prof Colin Richards).

Map of Rapa Nui or Easter Island showing locations of single and groups of statues

Not all statues were erected on ahu and some have been found along the roads or trackways that lead away from Rano Raraku. Previously these statues were interpreted as having been abandoned in transit when the supply of wood failed but work by the British team shows they were erected in these locations intentionally as a way of marking the approaches to the quarries, which must have been regarded as a deeply meaningful, symbolically and spiritually important space. It is interesting that the statues or moai occur at fairly regular intervals along the trackways. A similar arrangement can be seen in a sketch of Ahu Hanga Paukura published in Katherine Routledge’s book The Mystery of Easter Island (1919: fig.77). A number of toppled moai can be seen leading up to the ahu, another special place in the eyes of the Rapanui.

Moai seemingly abandoned in transit. Photo: Adam Stanford (c.) Aerial-Cam Ltd

Seeing, which we refer to in the exhibition in a section called ‘Polynesian Gaze’, was an important aspect of the Rapanui’s belief system, and recent fieldwork conducted by the British team has revealed two eyes carved into the surface of the quarry at Puna Pau where the cylindrical pukao or topknots were obtained. This small volcanic crater has effectively been hollowed out from within by the removal of over 1000 cubic metres of red scoria. Red was an important colour to Polynesians because it represented power, vitality and authority, making the Puna Pau scoria ideal for use as a headdress to decorate the head of a moai. Being cylindrical the pukao could be rolled to their destination but at least fourteen can still be seen close to the quarry.

Ahu Naua Nau showing moai wearing topknots or pukao. Photo: Adam Stanford (c.) Aerial-Cam Ltd

Whilst the project has been in development a number of colleagues have asked me whether Moai Hava is the only statue to leave Rapa Nui or Easter Island. Moai Hava is one of two moai that were taken from the island at the time of the HMS Topaze expedition of 1868. The other, perhaps the better known of the two moai, is Hoa Hakananai’a, and this is on display at the British Museum. It was recovered from the settlement of Orongo on the extreme south-western tip of the island. It was inside a house which no doubt explains the good state of preservation of its petroglyphs, which include dance paddles, birdmen and other motifs. A detailed discussion of this moai can be found in an article by Mike Pitts et al. in last year’s Antiquaries’ Journal (2014). The inscription on the base of Moai Hava states it came from this naval expedition and was presented by Queen Victoria to the British Museum in 1869.

Inscription on plinth of Moai Hava (photo: Stephen Welsh)

A number of colleagues have asked about the circumstances in which the statues were acquired. Jo Anne Van Tillburg’s book Remote Possibilities Hoa Hakananai’a and HMS Topaze on Rapa Nui (Trustees of the British Museum, 2006) gives an account of the removal of Moai Hava from the island and shows a drawing of the tattooed image of the event on the arm of one of the Rapanui (image 59). The book also lists others that are in other countries of the world: three in the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Santiago, Chile; three moai heads in the Musee de L’homme in Paris; a moai, a head and a pukao or topknot in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, USA; a pukao, statue head and torso in the Musees Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels, bought back by the Franco-Belgian expedition of 1934-5; a moai in the Corporacion Museo Fonck, Vian del Mar, Chile; a moai in the Museo Arquueologico de la Serena, La Serena; a head in the Auckland Museum, Auckland, New Zealand; and a moai in the Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand. Details, photos and drawings of many of them can be found in Remote Possibilities. It is sobering to think that if you consider complete moai, there are only about half a dozen examples in different countries of the world, and our exhibition has one of them.

Moai in the Smithsonian (photo: Bryan Sitch)

Of course this is not the first time that statues and even whole monuments have been removed from lands around the world. The extraordinary scale and artistic quality of the Easter Island statues made them attractive to institutions which had the means to acquire them; their size and weight obviously made it difficult for private individuals to take away. The question inevitably will be asked whether such pieces ought not to be returned to the place from which they came. The same question has been asked of Egyptian artefacts and even more high profile artefacts. One could argue that there are sufficient moai and Egyptian antiquities for some of them to be spared for the enjoyment and education of people in different countries of the world, where these artefacts serve as ambassadors for their respective countries of origin. Boris Johnson in the Telegraph recently commenting on the destruction of antiquities in Nineveh by IS was grateful that many antiquities from Mesopotamia had been removed to Europe and America. Thank heavens that some of these wonderful pieces survive somewhere in the world and hopefully serve as a source of inspiration and help restore the pride and dignity of populations brutally robbed of their heritage in this way. You could say that institutions that hold such material would say that wouldn’t they, and that such objects ought to be returned to the country of origin. However, there is no reason to suppose the moai taken by HMS Topaze were removed from the island against the wishes of the islanders. The Swiss ethnographer Alfred Metraux (1902-1963) wrote that ‘Easter Island civilisation died between 1862 and 1870’, though I’m sure the present day Rapanui would dispute that.

In the case of Rapa Nui the statues had ceased to hold the importance for the islanders that they had had earlier. The reason for this is that the Rapanui belief system and way of life changed irrevocably after Europeans came to the island during the 18^th century. The visits were greeted by islanders increasingly eager to exchange goods and favours for European and New World commodities such as close-woven textiles, metal objects and trinkets. A famous illustration by de Vancy from the time of the French visit in 1778 shows the Comte de La Pérouse measuring a standing moai whilst the Rapanui are stealing his hat. Another member of the ship’s crew is being distracted by an attractive Rapanui woman unaware that other Rapanui are picking his pockets. It must have seemed to the Rapanui that power and influence would come in future not from invoking the ancestors through the moai but by obtaining goods from passing ships.

Comte de la Perouse measuring a moai from Voyage autour du Monde (Copyright: University of Manchester)

Later visits by European ships’ crews revealed that fewer and fewer statues were standing. The last statue, Paro, was toppled in 1862-4. Although it has been argued that some statues were lowered carefully as grave covers, others were toppled deliberately in order to break off their heads. This seems to have happened at a time when the clans of the island were fighting amongst themselves. Warfare was common amongst Polynesians (pers.comm Prof.Colin Richards) but the toppling of the statues, the discovery of large numbers of sharp obsidian implements called mata’a and stories about fighting in Rapanui oral tradition all seem to point to the violent collapse of traditional Rapanui culture but not everyone would agree with this interpretation. The Birdman cult, the annual race to bring back the first Sooty Tern egg of the season from the tiny island of Motu Nui off the western tip of Rapa Nui, if its inception is indeed late, as may be hinted by some writers, may have been created as a way of avoiding the increasingly bitter outbreaks of fighting that followed first contact with Europeans. The Birdman had absolute power over the island for a year but did not have to compete personally in the race if he was represented by a champion.

During the 1860s about one thousand Rapanui, including the king, his son and priests, were removed forcibly to serve as indentured labour in South America. Many died on plantations, in the mines or in domestic service until an international outcry led to the repatriation of the survivors. Sadly the small number who finally returned to Rapa Nui brought with them diseases to which those who’d remained had little or no resistance. Large numbers of Rapanui died and others fled the island, which was increasingly given over to sheep grazing. After the island was acquired by Chile, in 1888, conditions very slowly began to improve for the Rapanui and the population recovered from an all-time low of just 111 people. Since that time the construction of an airport, the start of regular flights to and from the mainland and especially tourism have brought in much needed income for the inhabitants and helped to restore their sense of identity and dignity, though some would say it has been a mixed blessing. The island received World Heritage status in 1996.

Making Monuments exhibition at Manchester Museum. Photo: Joe Gardner.

The purpose of the Making Monuments exhibition, however, is not to tell the detailed history of the island but to explore the meaning these spectacular statues and their topkknots had for the Rapanui. We have not dealt with the unique RongoRongo script or the Birdman cult in Making Monuments exhibition except to refer to them in passing; they will be discussed in more detail in the exhibition booklet. Nor do we dwell on that other hotly debated topic of Easter Island studies the ecological disaster theory. Instead the exhibition focuses on the statues, how and where they were made, how they were moved around the island and the meaning that they had for the Rapanui.

Admiring the Moai in Making Monuments at Manchester Museum.Photo: Joe Gardner.

Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: the Statues from Easter Island opened on 1st April and runs until 6th September 2015.

This blog post could not have been written without the help and support of a wide range of contributors to the exhibition project. The content of this article reflects the content of the Making Monuments exhibition at Manchester Museum, which was developed with Prof.Colin Richards of the University of Manchester’s Department of Archaeology. Some information comes from the AHRC funded fieldwork undertaken by the institutions referred to earlier. However, readers should not infer that Colin and his colleagues would necessarily agree with everything written here. The subject of Easter Island/Rapa Nui is contentious. The Headley Trust and The Dorset Foundation generously funded the temporary exhibition. Objects were lent by the British Museum, Horniman Museum and Gardens, Pitt Rivers Museum, Liverpool Museums, Natural History Museum (London), Natural History Museum (Oxford), Gallery Oldham and a number of private individuals, to all of whom we are very grateful.

 

 

Caught Knapping

Preparation for a knap-in

Manchester Museum is holding a knap-in on 19th November and on Friday Dr Elizabeth Healy and a PhD student Ray Nilson came to talk to Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes, and me about the arrangements and to see some examples of worked flint artefacts. At the event, which is limited to 65 participants and ticketed (£10, or £8 concessions)  visitors will be able to watch enthusiasts striking or knapping raw materials and making a range of implements. There will be opportunities for people to try this for themselves under supervision of course. There is a real interest amongst visitors to the Museum in discovering how people in the past made things, some of them of considerable quality and demonstrating breath-taking crafts working skills.

Debate about one of the stone implements

I got out a selection of some of the wonderful flint and other stone objects in the lithics store at the Museum. A fine ground and polished early Bronze Age stone axe-hammer (below) is a wonderful exhibit although sadly we know little about where it was found. It was transferred to Manchester by  Salford Museum some years ago and I live in hope that some day information about the circumstances of discovery will turn up in an antiquarian publication…This kind of material was the focus of research and collecting at Manchester Museum during the later 19th and early 20th centuries when William Boyd Dawkins was Curator. From the 1970s the focus shifted to Classical antiquities but now prehistory in back in fashion, not least because of changes to the National Curriculum.

Anna with early Bronze Age axe-hammer

One of the added benefits is asking the flint-knappers who are coming to the event on 19th November to make copies of stone tools that were used on Easter Island or Rapa Nui. Manchester Museum will show material from the island in a temporary  exhibition opening in early April next year. Exhibits will include a stone statue called moai Hava that was brought back to Britain by HMS Topaze in 1868 and presented to the British Museum, and a range of artefacts borrowed from a number of other museums in the UK. We’re working closely with Prof Colin Richards of the Department of Archaeology at the University who has been conducting fieldwork on Easter Island. We will recreate for the exhibition part of the quarry at Puna Pau where Prof Richards has been excavating with his team. This was where islanders carved pukao or topknots that sat on top of some of the statues or moai.

We will dress the reconstruction of the quarry in the Museum with replica tools made by the flint-knappers for greater authenticity. Large numbers of stone implements or toki have been found in the quarry where the statues were obtained as if the work was suddenly interrupted and the islanders downed tools. It is not clear whether the islanders ceased to honour the statues after ‘first contact’ with Europeans or whether the notorious ‘blackbirding’ raids to secure labourers for Chile compelled the workers to drop their tools and flee or whether discarding the stone implements tools was part of the islanders’ belief system in relation to work on the statues.  It’s a very exciting project and it’s nice to know that the knap-in is contributing to the exhibition.

Easter Island Exhibition at Manchester Museum

Moai Hava and Sam in the World Museum in Liverpool

Since returning from the Ke EMu conference in Washington on Saturday I’ve been thinking about Manchester Museum’s next temporary exhibition which will be about the stone statues or moai of Rapa Nui or Easter Island. We are in the fortunate position of being able to borrow a statue called moai Hava from the British Museum, and a selection of supporting objects from the BM and other museums. The exhibition will draw upon the results of fieldwork on Easter Island undertaken by Professor Colin Richards of the University of Manchester’s Department of Archaeology. Our ‘Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: the Stone Statues of Easter Island’  exhibition will open in early April 2015 and run for six months in the Museum’s temporary exhibition gallery.

It is incredibly exciting to work with material from Easter Island, which must rank as some of the highest profile archaeology in the world. When Europeans encountered the island for the first time early in the 18th century they were astonished to see the statues. They found it difficult to reconcile the scale of the statues with the apparent poverty of the islanders, or RapaNui as they call themselves, and the absence of sources of materials such as timber with which to move and erect the stones. The theory that at some point prior to the European visits the great civilisation responsible for the stone statues had collapsed is present in the earliest historical accounts and much ink has flowed since then to try and explain the disaster which befell the inhabitants. During the 1970s palaeobotanist  John Flenley sampled the peat in the volcanic craters to study the history of the island’s vegetation and by studying the pollen in the cores showed that palm trees had originally covered the island. The felling of the palm trees for farmland and for timber with which to move the statues is thought to have brought about an environmental disaster leading to the  collapse of the islanders’ way of life. The large numbers of obsidian tools such as those featured in an earlier post on the Ancient Worlds blog  were thought to be evidence of the islanders’ nightmarish descent into violence, anarchy and  civil war.

Obsidian mataa from Easter Island in Manchester Museum

The various theories to account for Easter Island’s decline have been hotly debated. More recently some archaeologists and anthropologists have blamed contact with Europeans for the collapse of Easter Island’s traditional culture rather than an environmental catastrophe. The spread of diseases against which the islanders had no immunity and the notorious ‘black-birding’ raids to pressgang labourers to work in Peru’s guano mines in the 1860s reduced the native Rapanui population to little more than a hundred people. What the population had been before then is anybody’s guess but at the time of the first European visits it thought to have been about 3000, and a figure as high as 20,000 has been suggested for the earlier period.

Puna Pau where a quarry face has been excavated. Photo: Adam Stanford © Aerial-Cam Ltd for RNLOC.

The Manchester Museum exhibition will focus on the statues. Professor Colin Richards and his colleagues have recently excavated a stone quarry at Puna Pau where headdress stones or topknots for the stone statues were carved. We propose as part of the exhibition to supplement the original material with reconstructions of an ahu or ceremonial platform on which some of the moai or stone statues once stood, a pukau or topknot that would have sat on top of the head of one of the moai, and the quarry face at Puna Pau to show visitors the nature of the stone working on the island.

Stone statue with repositioned pukao headress and inlaid eyes. Photo: Adam Stanford © Aerial-Cam Ltd for RNLOC.

As part of the exhibition we will also explore the  part  the statues have played in stimulating sculptors such as Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915). This influence can also be seen in popular culture. Easter Island statues frequently feature in comics and graphic novels for example. When I was in Washington last week I somewhat furtively visited a comics store to try and obtain copies of the Adventures of Batman, The Mighty Thor and Uncle Scrooge. Had museum colleagues seen me in there I’d have protested it was only to gather materials for the Easter Island exhibition. In The Mighty Thor (1982), for instance, the superhero battles giant stone statues from Saturn which are clearly inspired by the moai. If any readers have copies and might be willing to lend them for our exhibition please let me know.

Moai from Easter Island in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington

Another treat during the Ke EMu conference in Washington was visiting the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian) and seeing another Easter Island statue or moai from Ahu O’Pepe. An image on the label shows an Easter Island head with its eye re-inserted. We intend to recreate one of the eyes as part of the exhibition using coral and obsidian. So there’s lots to look forward to in this exhibition and there’s great excitement at the Museum as the project gets under way.

Easter Island head with inlaid eye (Smithsonian label)

Easter Island/Rapa Nui at Manchester Museum

Kiera holds the fort at the recent Big Saturday at Manchester Museum

The subject of last Saturday’s Big Saturday was travel, and with Kiera from the British Museum, who is with us on a placement at the moment, I showed some objects from Easter Island to the public. It was particularly appropriate to show material from Easter Island or Rapa Nui which must be the most isolated place on earth as part of the travel Big Saturday. As a useful map in John Flenley and Paul Bahn’s book The Enigmas of Easter Island Island on the Edge (Oxford University Press, 2002) shows, it is  almost 3,600 km from the coast of Chile on the South American mainland and 2,092 km from Pitcairn, the nearest ‘neighbouring’ island: imagine popping round to the neighbours to borrow a cup of sugar! One of the Collections Team curatorial assistants went out to Easter Island as part of her holiday and kindly sent me some copies of photographs she took. Kate told me it took just over 5 hrs to get from Chile to Easter Island by plane. The unique, monumental stone statues or moai from the island are the subject of an exciting new temporary exhibition called Making Monuments on Rapa Nui; the Stone Statues of Easter Island which opens on April 2nd 2015 and runs until 6th September 2015.

Easter Island postcards (courtesy of Kate Sherburn)

 

Up to their necks in it: Easter Island statues (courtesy of Kate Sherburn)

Many of the visitors to the Big Saturday whom we talked to were familiar with the statues and they were thrilled to see some objects from Easter Island from the Museum’s Living Cultures collection. These were kindly made available by Stephen Welsh, Curator of Living Cultures. There are four obsidian mata’a or spearheads from the Charles Heape collection. Charles Heape (1848-1926) was a businessman by background but because of his interests he became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Anthropological Institute. He collected implements and weapons and in May 1923 he donated his collection – said to be the most complete of its kind in existence – to Manchester Museum. It was said to be of supreme value not only to the University but to Ethnology students throughout the world. He collaborated with James Edge Partington, who had collected in the Pacific, to publish An Ethnographical Album of the Pacific Islands. Given their respective collecting interests and backgrounds it is hardly surprising that some Easter Island material came to Manchester Museum.

Obsidian mata’a from Easter Island (accession number 2425)

The mata’a look like very large barbed and tanged arrowheads (see image above). However, they are so big they cannot have been used as arrowheads or projectiles. They are much more likely to have been mounted as spearheads by means of the stem or tang. I initially thought the tips of these implements had been damaged and that was why they didn’t come to a point. It looks as though there is a great deal of variability in the shapes of the mata’a. Many writers have quoted George Forster who accompanied Captain Cook on his visit to Easter Island in 1774: ‘some…had lances or spears made of thin ill-shaped sticks and pointed with a sharp triangular piece of black glassy lava’. To some, the historical context for these weapons is the period of internecine warfare that followed the destruction of the island’s palm forest and ever-increasing competition between the different clans on the island for food and other resources. To others the collapse of traditional Easter Island or Rapa Nui culture did not come because of whole-scale degradation of the environment by chopping down the trees (what Jared Diamond refers to as ‘ecocide’) but because of the effects of contact with Europeans in the 18th century.

Obsidian mata’a from Easter Island

Some archaeologists, however, have questioned whether the mata’a are indeed weapons. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo in The Statues that Walked Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island (Free Press, 2011) questioned the evidence for a descent into violence and wrote that only a small proportion of prehistoric human skeletal remains  from the island show evidence of trauma. Of the mata’a they write:

Obsidian mata’a from Easer Island

‘On Rapa Nui, it is often assumed that obsidian tools known as mata’a are evidence of lethal weapons. These are roughly triangular implements that have a stem chipped on one end for hafting to some kind of shaft. How lethal mata’a would have been, however, is open to debate. While the edges are sharp, their shape is not appropriate for piercing, and we should be cautious before concluding that they were used in warfare…they would have been remarkably poor tools for stabbing.’ They cite studies of microwear on the edges of the mata’a arguing they were used for the cutting and scraping of fibrous plant materials and quote an observation made by Cornelis Bouman, captain of one of the Dutch ships with Jacob Roggeveen in 1722, to the effect that the islanders cut ‘bananas with a sharp black stone’.

Obsidian mata’a from Easter Island

In their rebuttal of Hunt and Lipo’s assertion that the mata’a were agricultural implements Flenley, Butler and Bahn wrote that the obsidian objects were unlikely just to be tools because of their intricate hafting.  They write that insufficient work has been done on micro-wear analysis and they ask why the mata’a turn up suddenly and in large numbers (sometimes in hoards) and quite late in the history of the occupation of the island. Although one skull had been pierced through by a single thrust of a spear, the relative paucity of evidence for injuries on human skeletons could be explained by the fact that fatal wounds inflicted on soft tissues would simply not survive archaeologically. The wounds mentioned in the Spanish accounts of the visit to Easter Island in 1770 are also relevant: ‘…in some we observed sundry wounds on the body, which we thought to have been inflicted by cutting instruments of iron or steel, we found that they proceeded from stones… and as most of these are sharp edged they produce the injury referred to’. This blog paragraph briefly summarises one of the sections in Flenley, Butler and Bahn’s ‘Respect versus contempt for evidence: Reply to Hunt and Lipo’ in Rapa Nui Journal (vol.21(2) October 2007, pp.98-104. Lethal weapon or banana chopper, it is up to you gentle readers…

Since writing this a few days ago I have read Grant McAll’s ‘European Impact on Easter Island: Response Recruitment and the Polynesian Experience in Peru’ in Journal of Pacific History 11.2 (1976), 90-105. In this article there is an account of the pursuit of a Peruvian slaver by an islander called Tori. Years later the Peruvian returned to Easter Island and offered gifts to his pursuer who had shouted to him to stand and fight. In the account it states ‘Tori could easily have thrown his mataa (spear) and have killed that young man, but he did not want to throw at the young man’s back.’ And Tori himself makes the following explanation: “I could easily have thrown my mataa at your back and have killed you but I didn’t want to’ and an intermediary repeats “He didin’t want to cut you with his mataa from behind. You would now be dead with his mataa. He didn’t wish to cut you from behind.”

In addition to the mata’a Kiera and I also showed a wooden figurine but as it is not clear whether or not this was made for the tourist market I do not discuss it here. We also showed some archive photographs of a journey in the Pacific  undertaken by members of the Hudson family during the 1930s, of which this is one taken during their time on Easter Island:-

Photograph from a 1930s visit to Easter Island (Manchester Museum)

I understand that visitors especially enjoyed seeing the ‘unusual objects from many years ago’ and were impressed by the ‘amount of activities on offer today’, to which the Easter Island table made its contribution. My thanks to Kiera for manning the fort whilst I went to see a Roman one at Castleshaw and to Vicki for planning and organising such a wonderful day.

This must be the only job in the world where you could attend a Druid ceremony at dawn to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the discovery of a bog body, show the public objects from Easter Island in the morning, and visit the excavation of a Roman fort in the afternoon…