easter island

I wonder what the point is with all them stone heads.


any ideas????? looks like theyed be hard to make.

I've always been facinated by them, even more so from "Mars Attacks" when the space ship throws a huge bowling ball n knocks 'em all down

LOL, I love mars attacks...

The islanders had the only written language in Oceania...

www.pbs.org...

go there, then click on 'Move a Megalith' then there should be another link to 'Move the Moai Game'

Moai being the name of the statues. . . It's a weird game. I might just be tired.

The ppl on the island were a classic example of what happens to a people when they run out of a natural rescource

Originally posted by Azza
The ppl on the island were a classic example of what happens to a people when they run out of a natural rescource

They build mysterious giant stone heads all over there island?

I know they had their own language but the purpose of all those stone carvings is just weird!

Here you go,
en.wikipedia.org...

Sanc'.

The monolithic statues of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) are called moai in the Rapanui language. Carved on the island by the ancestors of the current population, approximately 50% of the total of 887 statues documented to date still remain in the immediate vicinity of Rano Raraku, the quarry in which they were produced. The majority of the remaining statues were transported to and erected upon a variety of ceremonial structures called ahu. This feat is one of the great megalithic achievements of Pacific prehistory.

ACTUALY, there is a LOT of information about this issue on the internet, you can check this link, for example: www.sscnet.ucla.edu...

The statues were build for their Gods and many years ago this island was covered by trees. Now there are plains, because of the non-stop cutting. But I won't tell more - it's quite easy to find info on that or other scientific links, there's no big mistery though.

sorry for that mistake with a link:
www.sscnet.ucla.edu...

my bad

Help to scare off people who were to visit the island...

I recently got a book "Wonders of the World - 100 great man-made treasures of civilization" a Barnes and Noble Book by Rosemary Burton and Richard Cavendish. It had a couple pages on Easter Island that I found interesting:

When the first Europeans approached it on Easter Sunday in 1722, they saw that the island was ringed with massive statues gazing bizarrely out to sea. The inhabitants, however, appeared welcoming, and they lit fires encouraging the visitors to come ashore. When they did so, Captain Roggeveen and his Dutch crew observed three different races amoung the islanders, some dark, some with a reddish skin, and some strikingly pale-skinned with red hair. Some of these people had curiously extended earlobes, into which large discs were fitted, and these were the ones who seeemed to show particular reverence for the giant statues.

Skipping ahead it says that in 1770 Spanish expeditions from Peru made the same observations, but "Captain Cook, reaching the island only four years later, encountered a very different scene. The land had become neglected and barren, the people were listless and demoralized, and, where there had been no sign of weapons or any warlike tendencies, they now carried wooden clubs and spears. The huge statues had been overturned, and no one seemed to workship them any more."

Tablets known as "Rongo-Rongo tablets" have been found with their language, but haven't been deciphered.

there were actually stone tablets found on the island that when white man came white men destroyed. They say on the island that they descended from birdmen or flying men. you can see carvings in the rocks of birds with huge eyes alll over. the tablets that were destroyed had strange heiroglyphs that couldn't be decoded. i think now we only have about 14 small fragments of them left. who knows what evidence it could have had.

the statues originally also had hats. the rocks themselves are from 40 to 66 feet high and their source (where the rock came from) is not from the isnland, but the HATs that they wore are from a totally other place than that type of rock.

i got that from the books 'chariots of the gods'

daniel

That's what happens when the gods misbehave. I'm not kidding.