Easter Island How and Why?

Originally posted by ShadowXIXThe things that weird is most of the Moai abandoned during movement are face down

Are you sure you're not looking at ones that have fallen after being erected?

Originally posted by Byrd


Are you sure you're not looking at ones that have fallen after being erected?

Nope these are the ones found along the well known roads to move the Moai to were they were typical erected.

heres a picture of one found along the roads leading from the moai quarry


Most of the ones abandoned during transport are like this for some reason.

Perhaps it was some custom and they purposely rolled them on to their backs or something if they abandoned it

www.hawaii.edu...

just so you know tribal history indiates the statues walked by themselves because the islanders used "mana" or spiritual power and willed them to go where they wanted after they were carved.

stranger things have happened i quess...

in the 1950's or whatever the few mixed blood longears left (13 generations later after the war) showed how they were taught it was done but i dont think anyone can say they know for sure...

[edit on 12-3-2006 by mosca]

The book Collapse by Jared Diamond explains how the statues were constructed, transported, and provides a plausible theory why they were knocked down. He also states how the population of the island was organized and how the civilization spiraled into collapse after destroying the island's natural resources.

The book is a great read BTW.

What did he say was the reason so many abandoned in Transit were found face down?

The edges of these monumental statues show signs of wear, on top of that, there are unfinished statues still lying around, in the island's stone pit. These people apparently 'walked' them using long ropes and dozens of men along with good coordination an overdose of plain luck (i wonder if any ever tipped over :lol the hats are a problem, though, but these are not that heavy. The sad aspect is that they could have lived in a tropical paradise, but religion made them do dumb things and waste their lives. i could understand 1 statue, or 2 maybe TEN, for prestige but that's it ffs.


Stonehenge is actually much more mysterious, because the source rock cannot be found within hundreds of miles.

There is no mystery behind the Easter Island statues. Here's a wee story. Completely speculation but it makes sense(ish).
Once upon a time, there was a thriving island community. Everyone was happy and gay, so they built a statue to commermerate their God, Whatishisface. The statue was a mighty statue to behold and showed off the prosperity of that village, but there were other villages who thought they could do better, so they built bigger statues, even better then the first. The other village seeing this statue, decided to build a bigger statue, to show that they were the better of that other villages. This then caused warfare, killing everybody, and leaving the rest to starve, because they used all of the natural resources to build the whathisface's statues. This left the island barren, and everybody died.

The End.

That story makes sense, all be it cynical. I personally have always thought they were done out of a tradition whose origin was lost even to the natives. Case of religious fears meant they had to do it out of a fear of what might have happned if they didn't.

Would I be right in assuming if the civil war theory has been backed up by other evidence?

Big battles tend to leave thier marks and bodies lying about.

also has any evidence been found of any other native artwork that is loosely related to the statues, like a kind of small portable version ?

yes the civil war was backed up by archealogy.

archeology verified two distinct tribes living on the island. a civil war erupted in the islands third epoch, where for the first time obsidian spear points were constructed, the long ears were killed and burnt at poikes ditch, and afterwards war and cannibilism (both prev unknown among the long ears) spread throughout the island due to the newly arriving short ear aggressors.

the civil war boils down to clash of cultures between the long ears and the short ears.

The "Santiago Staff" is the only rongorongo artefact that marks textual divisions, revealing 103 vertical lines at odd intervals

Easter Island's Rongorongo Script

Thought by the author to be the "rosetta stone" to decipher the script.

Easter Islanders are of Polynesian descent, and archaeologists concur to date their arrival around 400 AD. The island was stripped bare of timber by the eighteenth century. Yet in a letter dated December 1864, Brother Eugene Eyraud mentions the existence of hundreds of wooden tablets covered in hieroglyphics. Four years later, Monsignor Jaussen, Bishop of Tahiti, could only recover five tablets. Only twenty­one have survived, scattered in museums and private collections. The writing on them is extraordinary. Tiny, remarkably regular glyphs, about one centimeter high, highly stylized and formalized, are carved in shallow grooves running the length of the tablets. Oral tradition has it that scribes used obsidian flakes or shark teeth to cut the glyphs and that writing was brought by the first colonists led by Hotu Matua. Last but not least, of the twenty­one surviving tablets three bear the same text in slightly different "spellings", a fact discovered by three schoolboys of St Petersburg (then Leningrad), just before World War II. In 1958 Thomas Barthel made the whole of the Easter Island corpus available in his "Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift" ("Bases for the Decipherment of the Easter Island Script"), alas never translated into English. Almost forty years later now the tablets remain as much of an enigma. Their meaning remains unknown, except for two and a half lines of one tablet, which, beyond reasonable doubt, contain a lunar calendar, already identified as such by Barthel in 1958.

Easter Island Tablets

There are also petrogylphs on the island--not portable
Rock art of Easter Island

And the Metropolitan Museum of Art had an exibit in 2001 of art collected from Easter Island--images on this page www.metmuseum.org...

My opinion of why the statues were found face downwards--

If the statues were thought to have any type of power, the people who intercepted the statues on the way to being erected would flipped it face downward to keep its power minimal. A lot of cultures seem to have the idea that if a statue/cult image/whatever can't see its power is limited or stopped.
The interceptors would have taken an figure being transported on its back and turned it over on the front to stop it from working.

the painted dance paddle is an oar, and very common in Peru as well among the caucasian and native american mummies.

the rongorongo writing is similiar to glyphs found at mohenjo doro.

however long ear lanquage was different from short ear (polynesian). I never have been able to find out which ones kept the rongorongo tablets but they were tied into the birdman way of life which was short ear

I just saw a clip on the science channel that said new evidence suggest the ecology of Easter Island as a whole started going down hill very soon after people first arrived there, and was also in large part due to rats that came to the Island as well (eating the tree seeds faster then they could regrow).

That would be a interesting change because I think most scholars think they lived in relative balance for the first few hundred years they lived on the Island and only went down hill later.