Easter Island?

I've been looking in your site and I didnt see anything about Easter Island I wanted to know what was your guy's opion of that island and its mysterious statues? They seem pretty advanced to be built by humans and at that time as well.

The Easter Island statues:







When were they built?

-Becs

Originally posted by navajoprophet
I've been looking in your site and I didnt see anything about Easter Island I wanted to know what was your guy's opion of that island and its mysterious statues? They seem pretty advanced to be built by humans and at that time as well.

Hi navajoprophet
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Sanc'.

I think it's just some kind of "art" the islanders like.

Yeah, I don't see why they shouldn't have been built by the islanders? Seems perfectly plausible to me.

-Becs

Originally posted by Minime
I think it's just some kind of "art" the islanders like.

You are joking? On the thread supplied by sanctum there is this post:

Originally posted by NashMan
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.

What i find interesting is that after they were visited by the outside world there society went to s**t.

This is of the top of my head so please feel free to correct me but im sure i remember that the people of Easter island had tales of strange flying creature's that had visited them.

[edit on 23-8-2004 by kode]

What i find interesting is that after they were visited by the outside world there society went to s**t.

Why am I not surprised ? It's a known fact, that as soon as the West attempts to impose "civilisation" on other cultures, it causes them suffering.

-Becs

the same could probably be said about the huge stones in deep mexico. i remember watching something on the discovery channel once. and there are some places that are covered with huge sphere like rocks.
there are only a few still in the orginal places in which they were found.

some claim they were some type of navigation plan.

Well, isn't this fortuitus! I am currently reading a book on Easter Island, lent to me by a friend. You really should do yourself a favour and see if you can find this book in your local library. It's called:

"Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island" by Thor Heyerdahl. Published in 1958 by Allen & Unwin. It was originally published in 1957 with the title "Aku-Aku: Paskeoyas Hemmelighet" by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, Oslo.

In the 1950s Thor Heyerdahl led an expedition to Easter Island. There were archeologists, geologists etc involved and they stayed for the better part of a year. In short they found there were a number of epochs in Easter Island's history. The earliest epoch was before the statues were built and the people of this epoch built walls and left statues which were remarkably similar to others in the Andes which pre-dated the Incas. According to the author the Incas didn't know who built these particular dwellings, either.

After this epoch there was the period of the great statue building where there were to groups of people on the Island- long-ears and short-ears. The long ears were typified by fairer skin and red hair It was the long-ears who always wanted to build statues. A war broke out between the long-ears and the short-ears with the long-ears being mostly wiped out. The short-ears had no interest in statue building and the skill and knowledge were generally lost. This occured roughly 450 years ago (before Western contact). There were period of wars and even cannibalism in much of Easter Island's history, with the current population being dominated by people of Polynesian descent.

The remaining descendents of the long-ears kept the secrets of making the statues, transporting them across the Island and erecting them. The mayor of Easter Island at the time of writing the book was apparently a pure long-ear and his son and daughter had red hair and fair skin. The mayor got six of his family members together and started making a 15 foot statue for the expedition. They stopped after a few days but they got well under way with nothing more than stone tools. In the end it was calculated that it would take them 1 year to make the statue if they worked every day. They also stood another statue up using nothing but a few logs and lots of smaller stones. On another day they put on a feast which most of the population turned up to (about 800 people) and a fraction of these were able to drag another statue some distance across the islalnd quite easily.

I'm only about half-way through the book but it is a brilliant read!

There's no real mystery to the construction, transportation and erection of the statues any more. The only real mysteries are why they were built and where did the population of long-ears come from? A third mystery is regarding the original builders of the walls and other statues which the current population of Easter Island know nothing about. This is the work that is very similar to that found in the Andes. A ditch extends across one peninsular of Easter Island that's almost 2 miles (3 km) long. Its construction was dated to 400AD by the expedition.

Anyway, sorry for the long post! If you're truly interested in Easter Island then find this book in your library and read it! I've only mentioned a fraction of the information so far. There's also etchings of the peculiar writing found on the rongo-rongos (a wooden board).

I've never heard about there being 3 differnt types of people on the island before (the red people could have just had body paint or something). Not that i've read that much about the place, but still. If what Kode quoted is true, then it sounds like the Spanish may have done something to them. If I remember my history correctly, the Spanish didn't exactly always make peacful relations with the natives. Perhaps they tried to force there religion on them and knocked down some of there statues and all that. Which is truly unfortunate.

Becs: Just a nit pick. It wasn't really the west that was impossing civilization at that time. Mostly Europe... especially in the earlier explorations of the new world which would have been all Europe. Basicly it's just any advanced civilization forcing it's values and beliefs on a more primitive one.

I don't think its too big of a mystery about "Who" built them rather than "How" did they build them? I'm still not sure if scholars have identified the cultural and biological lineage of the Easter Islanders themselves, being that they were on a quite secluded island.

I find the history of Nan Madol much more interesting than Easter Island...here are a couple of links:

www.janeresture.com...

darkwing.uoregon.edu...

Answerman's correct (and I loved AKU-AKU.) Over the years there's been a number of expeditions there and all the material (including the petroglyphs) support the findings of Heyderdahl.

Several times since the Heyderdahl expedition, the people of the island have gotten out their ancestors' tools and chipped out yet another statue, moved it into place, and set it up... all with stone-aged tools.



Here's a web page with an entertaining overview of the "theories." As the page points out, we know who the people are that carved them and we know an extensive amount about their history:
www.islandheritage.org...

Watch the movie "Rapanui," it is quite good and shows a way the islanders made these monuments and why.

www.imdb.com...

I'd love to say that the rocks on Easter Island were put there by Extra Terrestrials or something not of this earth (as we know it) but to be honest I don't think they were, we've got to bear in mind that some civilizations (and indeed some individuals) were advanced for their time, take Leonardo da Vinci for example, he thought of many things that the technology was not available to build in that era, so I think that the inhabitants of Easter Island were just very intelligent people that used their minds to create the statues we see today (maybe to please their gods or deities or something along those lines?)

In Rapanui, the stone carvers moved the stone to the spot where it would be erected, carved the stone, and then levered the stone upright with queues of men pulling on ropes attached to the stone. They would all heave on the ropes at once, moving the giant statue up a tiny bit, while children and women threw small rocks up under the statue. Eventually the rockpile beneath the statue would grow to the point where the statue's weight was directed more to the base than the back, and they could finally place it upright.

I thought I once heard that the stones used to make these statues were not from the area. Can someone shed a little light on this?

Originally posted by DrpKeeGTZ
I thought I once heard that the stones used to make these statues were not from the area. Can someone shed a little light on this?

They were not from the area on which they stand. The islanders had to move them across the island on rolling logs.

well there was an experiment to see if islanders could build these and one was reconstructed with about 100 men.Now it wouldnt surprise me if aliens were somehow involved but they could have and probably were built by humans. BTW the guy that started all the stuff about aliens and ancient civilizations was Daniken.

EDIT: this is also related to Daniken.
www.anomalies-unlimited.com...

[edit on 24-8-2004 by phantompatriot]

Okay, here is my opinion in a nut shell...

...the people had stuff to live off of, but they spent all of their time and resources worshippinh dieties. They made all of these statues, then they didn't have any resources left after they had sacrificed it all to the dieties...

...so they died, THE END...

seriously though, this is a VERY interesting subject...the pattern is repeated over and over again through the history of civilization

Originally posted by petey_pongo23
Okay, here is my opinion in a nut shell...

...the people had stuff to live off of, but they spent all of their time and resources worshippinh dieties. They made all of these statues, then they didn't have any resources left after they had sacrificed it all to the dieties...

...so they died, THE END...

seriously though, this is a VERY interesting subject...the pattern is repeated over and over again through the history of civilization

Like I said, watch "Rapanui." It details the beliefs of these people and what you describe refers to the reason there are no trees on Easter Island. All the trees were destroyed in the statue construction projects.