|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
There are many caves and lava tubes that dot the volcanic hills, some contain petroglyphs and paintings, some were used as refuges in time of war, others as secret storage or burial places. The caves are also sunken gardens that supplied islanders with a sheltered place to grow food.
|
|
Caves can often be identified by watching for trees growing up out of the openings.
|
|
This is the Cave of the Cannibals, a cavern where the island people took refuge during times of war.
|
|
The cave was used as part of the Birdman festivals, it was here that the participants prepared themselves for the procession up to the village of Orongo. The walls and ceiling were painted with designs of sooty terns most of them have now been eroded though there are a few left.
|
|
It was explained to us that it was called Cave of the Cannibals, not because it was occupied by cannibals, but because when it was used as part of the birdman rituals the cave looked as if was swallowing people.
|
|
The legendary Cave of the Virgins, this is where the ancient peoples kept young women awaiting their weddings. It contains simple but beautiful petroglyphs of fish and flowers, probably carved by the waiting girls..
|
|
The cave is small in diameter though said to be 400m long, with an entrance down a cliff path on the edge of Poike making it difficult to find and reach. It can only be entered on hands and knees, so few visitors ever get to see it.
|
|
Ana Tepau: is a series of caves a lava tube caves that we were able to walk through. Because of the extra moisture that accumulates in the entrance banana trees were growing. The cave was used to hide in times of trouble and also for storage as it was cooler and out of the sun.
|
|
These houses, used by the chief and important, people were in the shape of an up turned boat were constructed with a foundation of basalt slabs sunk into the ground. Holes were cut into the top surface into which poles were inserted in one side and bent over to the other side to form an arch. Further supports were then lashed longitudinally to the arches and whole covered in leaves and thatch.
|
|
A narrow tunnel like entrance was placed in one of the long sides with a thatch over the top. In front of the entrance was a paved area of rounded stones.
|
|
Room inside was restricted an the house was only used for sleeping, all other activities taking place out doors.
|
|
Despite unusual design motifs and the large sizes of many of the designs, Easter Island's rock art was basically overlooked prior to 1981 when an intensive documentation project began. It soon became apparent that the rock carvings and paintings represent a highly sophisticated art, with unique motifs. The rock art of Easter Island is clearly the finest in the Pacific.
|
|
On Easter Island, petroglyphs are located in every sector of the island where there are suitable surfaces. Favoured locations are smooth areas of lava flow (called "papa" in Rapanui), or on smooth basalt boulders. Most of these surfaces occur along coastal areas and often are associated with major ceremonial centres. Some important ahu have, as part of their structure, elegantly carved basalt stones (pa'enga), with petroglyphs on them. Paintings survive in caves or in some of the stone houses at Orongo where they are protected against the weathering process.
|
|
Thousands of petroglyphs can be found on Easter Island. Many represent animals, notably birds or anthropomorphic birdmen.
|
|
At Orongo there is a concentration of petroglyphs including those of Tangata Manu, the birdman; of which there are over 480 on the island thought to represent birdman competition winners, Make-Make, the god that created him and Komari, the fertility symbol.
|
|
Incised petroglyphs are earliest, relief ones are later.
|
|
The beach at Anakena is only one of two sandy beaches on the island. It is believed to be the first place where the family of Hotu Matu'a landed after navigating the Pacific Ocean and the residential centre of ancient rulers. It is also the site of the restored Ahu Naunau.
|
|
Englert Archaeological Museum
|
|
Named after a German priest who lived on the island for nearly thirty-five years. The museum contains artefacts from the Rapa Nui culture, including the only coral moai eye that has been found.
|
|
Father Sebastian Englert, a Capuchin missionary, arrived in 1935 and remained the resident researcher and priest until his death, in Florida, in 1969, on his way back to Rapanui after an exhibition of Rapanui work.
|
|
The village where most of the 2500 inhabitants of Easter Island live. For nearly 100 years the Rapanui were held virtual prisoners in the village, prevented from to travelling to other parts of the island by the owners of the sheep grazing rights.
|
|
One of only two of the craters on the island that contain fresh water and native plants, about the only place there are any left.
|
|
The sacred site located on a narrow ridge between a 1,000 foot drop into the ocean on one side and a deep crater on the other with the remains of forty-seven oval buildings constructed out of overlapping stone slabs, together with numerous platforms and a series of high-relief rock carvings.
|
|
Along the narrowest point on the cliff is the most sacred area at Orongo called Mata Ngarau, where priests chanted and prayed for success in the annual egg hunt-as well as carve petroglyphs.
|
|
Until at least 1864, the Festival of the Bird Man was held here each spring. It is clear from drawings that show figures disappearing beneath the walls of a house that the event predates the stone houses erected in prehistoric times.
|
|
The houses that have been restored have been made a little higher than original.
|
|
Easter Islands other beach, a secluded cove nestled beneath a cliff of volcanic rock with pure and golden sands and magnificent clear water, with no archaeological sites.
|
|
Located at the eastern end of the island Poike is one of the three main volcanoes that form Easter Island and whose slopes are now almost entirely clear of volcanic debris giving a smooth rounded outline. At the top of Poike is a dry tree filled creator
|
|
Dividing Poike from the rest of the island is the Poike Trench over which there are conflicting points of view. Legend tells that it was a ditch built by the clan occupying Poike to protect their territory from other tribes, but that they were taken by surprise from behind and driven into their own ditch in which a fire was set and all but four of them perished.
|
|
Archaeology shows that there are carbon deposits in the trench but no human remains have been found.
|
|
A similar legend is told on the Macarias Islands about another Poike.
|
|
The quarry that is the source for the red scoria topknots for the moai, known as Pukao.
|
|
On the southern slope of Maunga Terevaka it is a source of stone carving tools It was also one of the sources for blocks used to construct ahu walls. and contains a lake completely covered in reeds.
|
|
Quarries are often associated with water, as stones could be wetted to make them easier to work.
|
|
Rano Kau is an impressive volcanic structure with a great caldera more than a mile across containing a fresh water lake with floating green fields of totora reeds used to built the traditional Easter Island reed boats, and very similar to the reed boats used in Lake Titicaca and on the North Peruvian Coast.
|
|
The rim of the crater is mostly level, except to the south where it plunges down to a knife-edged ridge called Kari Kari: on one side is the lake, on the other a 200m drop to the ocean.
|
|
The site offers an exceptional view from the rebuilt ceremonial village of Orongo over the three tiny craggy islands Motu Kao-Kao, Motu Iti and Motu Nui where the "bird man" ritual took place. This sacred site is famed for its hundreds of intricate petroglyphs carved on massive boulders perching on the edge of the cliff.
|
|
Within the flanks of the volcanic mountain Rano Raraku lies the quarry where the massive moai were carved from volcanic tuff. Many unfinished giants still lie imprisoned in stone, abandoned when the work suddenly and mysteriously stopped. Others stand buried to their shoulders in quarry debris and eroding soil and rock. Moai are also found on the outside of the crater.
|
|
Some 394 statues are at the quarry and many of them are still attached to the matrix of the rock where they lie unfinished. A trail leads around the outside slopes, and then heads upward and over into the interior. At the top of the highest point are holes in the rock that were early devices for braking the statues during the process of lowering them from the bedrock.
|
|
The largest moai, uncompleted and still resting in the quarry, is known as 'El Gigante' and would have stood at 65 feet and weighed 270 tons!
|
|
Rano Raraku is also notable for the stunning petroglyphs of enormous tuna, turtles, and human and bird-man figures as well as a fresh water lake with a 3m tall reed that is natural to the island.
|
|
The moai inside the creator rim were probably never intended to be used and were used to teach the carvers.
|
|
Use of Rano Raraku began around 900 to 1000AD.
|
|
Within the creator is a large fresh water reed covered lake.
|
|
A prehistoric workshop, with an obsidian outcrop where thousands of cores and flakes of this black volcanic glass are scattered on the ground.
|
|
From the road just to the east of the runway there is no indication of the presents of this site that is level with obsidian is found just laying about on the ground.
|
|
The god of the wind was Hiro
|
|
By the side of the road on the north east side of the island is a rock that has a number of holes that formed in it when it solidified. With the right technique requiring large lips and a squat nose to cover the hole, a trumpet sound could be made by blowing into a hole. The old name for the stone was Pu O Hiro - God of the Wind, the modern name is Mae'a Puhi - trumpet stone.
|
|
This is a large rock carving of a face at the side of Maunga Vai Heva to the north of Poike depicting a grieving husband whose wife and family has been killed. When rain falls on the carving it runs down it as tears and fills the gapping mouth with water.
|
|
An area south of Maunga Terevaka which was the old sheep ranch headquarters.
|
|
In the 1850s the Merlet Society gained control of the island and rented it out to Brander for rearing sheep for wool and latter to Williamson Balfour, a Chilean company with British origins. Their base was Vaitea where sheep farming was continued until 1977 when the flock was run down to protect the archaeology.
|
|
Until quite recent times whales and sea lions visited the island, their oil was used for lighting lamps.
|
|
Cara-cara have been introduced to control mice through they are now becoming a bit of a pest themselves.
|
|
These wood carvings which probably hung in homes as personal effigies did not arise until the degradation period.
|
|
Rongo Rongo is the hieroglyphic script of Easter Island though probably less a true script and more a series of mnemonic devices, whose antiquity is in some doubt: Some scholars think that it represents the only known aboriginal form of writing in Polynesia, while others think that it is a post-contact development, an attempt to emulate western-style writing.
|
|
It has remained a mystery since its discovery. For over a hundred years, controversy has raged over the meaning and source of these enigmatic characters. Whatever the truth, the Rongo Rongo script has never been deciphered, although it is thought that it is partially phonetic and partially pictographic in nature.
|
|
There are only 21 known tablets in existence - scattered in museums and private collections. Even the island's museum only has Rongo Rongo replicas.
|
|
Tiny, remarkably regular glyphs, about one centimetre high, highly stylised and formalised, they 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. Of the twenty-one 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 1868 newly converted Easter Islanders sent to Tepano Jaussen, Bishop of Tahiti, as a token of respect, a long twine of human hair, wound around an ancient piece of wood. Tepano Jaussen examines the gift, and, lifting the twine, discovers that the small board is covered in hieroglyphs.
|
|
The bishop, elated at the discovery, wrote to Father Hippolyte Roussel on Easter Island, exhorting him to gather all the tablets he can and to seek out natives able to translate them. But only a handful remain of the hundreds of tablets mentioned by Brother Eyraud only a few years earlier in a report to the Father Superior of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart.
|
|
Some say they were burnt to please the missionaries who saw in them evil relics of pagan times. Some say they were hidden to save them from destruction. Brother Eyraud had died in 1868 without having ever mentioned the tablets to anyone else, not even to his friend Father Zumbohm, who is astounded at the bishop's discovery. Monsignor Jaussen soon located in Tahiti a labourer from Easter Island, Metoro, who claimed to be able to read the tablets. He described in his notes how Metoro turned each tablet around and around to find its beginning, then starts chanting its contents.
|
|
The direction of writing is unique. Starting from the left-hand bottom corner, and proceeding from left to right and, at the end of the line, the tablet is turned before starting at the next line. The orientation of the hieroglyphs is reversed every other line. But Jaussen was not able to decipher the tablets.
|
|
It is thought that Rongo Rongo boards may have been used by two people taking it in turns to chant a line, thus accounting for the unusual layout.
|
|
There are also many zoomorphic figures, birds, fish and less often lizards. The most frequent figure looks very much like the frigate bird, which happens to have been the object of the Birdman cult, as it was associated with Make-Make, the supreme god.
|
|
Comparison of the tablets which bear the same text, with analysis of repeated groups of signs, indicate that the writing must have followed rules. The scribe could choose to link a sign to the next, but not in any old way. They could either carve a manikin standing, arms dangling, followed by some other sign, or the same manikin holding that sign with one hand. They could either carve a simple sign (a leg, a crescent) separate from the next, or rotate it 90 degrees counter-clockwise and carve the next sign on top of it.
|
|
All that can reasonably be hope to decipher some day is some two to three lines of the tablet commonly called Mamari that clearly has to do with the moon. There are several versions of the ancient lunar calendar of Easter Island.
|
|
Though not very likely, it is possible that one day an Easter Island Rosetta Stone will be found and the meanings of the 700 or so characters which make up the Rongo Rongo script will finally be revealed.
|
|
|
