Easter Island/Rapa Nui

On the southwest coast of Easter island, very close to the eastern end of the runway, lies an extremely interesting archeological artifact in the ruins of Vinapu. Near the edge of the sea, on a rocky outcropping, are the remains of an Ahu, a long stone platform used for the religion of ancestor worship, and as a base for mounting the large Moai, or statues, for which Easter Island is so reknowned (the word "Moai" can refer to any statue of any size in any material, but in this report, as is usual in Rapa Nui, it only refers to the stone ones). As all the Ahu are similar, I'll give a brief description of their general features here.

Ahu in general consist of a raised platform of unmortared stones, two to four meters wide and of varying lengths, depending on how many statues it is intended to hold. In front of the platform, facing inland, is a sloping area made of rounded stones set partly into the ground. This is several meters wide and as long or longer than the platform. In the later days of ancestor worship the bones of departed chiefs were buried here. Larger ahu have raised areas extending beyond the ends of the platform where in the oldest times the cremated remains of ancestral chiefs were buried (this practice apparently ended when trees became scarce). The back of the platform almost always faces the sea and is usually vertical.

Vinapu is an unrestored Ahu, meaning that all the statues which formerly stood proudly on top of the platform still lie overturned, broken and scattered from the clan wars that nearly decimated the population before the New World Europeans arrived to finish the job. It was both sad and strange to encounter these toppled monoliths of greenish, fairly soft lava rock lying mostly face down where they were pulled over by enemy clansmen.

Our guide Victor was very clear that the history of Rapanui has been grossly misrepresented. Instead of a war between the "Long Ears" and the "Short Ears," which is the common story, he said that the wars were mainly between the different clans, of which there were twelve, divided into two confederations. One confederation was called Hanau E'epa ("Born Robust") and the other was called Hanau Momoko ("Born Lizardlike, i.e. slender"). Each confederation was composed of both chiefs and commoners. Apparently, sometimes the confederations fought each other, but more often different clans fought each other regardless of confederation affiliation. As is the case everywhere, including Hawaii, attempts to simplify the inner workings of a society are always way off base. Interestingly, Pedro, our driver, was a robust type, and Victor, who also had a lizard tatooed on his arm, was slender.

Each Ahu was set up by a particular clan to represent the power of its ancestors. As rivalries grew the statues got bigger and fighting increased. The very worst thing one clan could do to another was to destroy its mana by destroying its statues, especially the eyes. By the beginning of the nineteenth century all but one of the eyes of the Moai had been hacked to bits and nearly all the Moai on the various Ahu had been cast down.

At the back of Vinapu Ahu, on the seaward side, there was a very small, weatherworn Moai about two meters high sitting by itself, partly buried in the ground. Victor said that all of the oldest Moai were small like this. As their features were eroded and as the culture changed they were removed from the Ahu and replaced with newer and larger ones.

The most impressive aspect of Vinapu, however, is the back wall. It is made of closely fitted stone blocks in an earthquake-resistant style that looks exactly like the pre-Inca walls that I have seen in Cuzco, Peru, and very similar to remnants of the Menehune Ditch on Kauai and parts of the Great Wall at Pu'u Honua on the Big Island. Victor took out a compass and brought it near the wall to show how parts of it were magnetic. This is not as unusual as it sounds, because lots of lava contains iron particles and I have demonstrated the same phenomena with granite sarcophogi in Egypt.

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