Easter Island/Rapa Nui

Hanga Te'e Bay off the South Coast road is the location of Vaihu, another unrestored Ahu with Moai as well as topknots (pukao) tumbled about. The reddish topknots, by the way, were a late development and represented a hair style where a man's hair was wound into a knot on the top of the head and dyed with red ochre. I have seen old paintings of New Zealand Maori with such topknots, though not dyed. I have also seen photos of South American indians with topknots dyed red, and photos of statues from the Mapuche Indians of Chile that have large stone statues with what looks like topknots on their heads.

At Vaihu some of the topknots are intricately carved. Another feature here and at some other sites is a stone circle called a paina which was used for the ceremonies performed at the Ahu.

Further south along the coast is the important site of Akahanga where the royal chiefs often resided, with four platforms, twelve Moai, eight topknots, and the remains of quite a few "boathouse" foundations and firepits (umu pae).

Food was mostly cooked (and sometimes still is) in a special kind of firepit that was like a half underground oven. An umu in Hawaii is a hole in the ground with a fire at the bottom and layers of banana and ti leaves, fire-heated stones, meat and vegetables, all covered with dirt (burlap protects the food today). The Rapanui is very similar except that the fire is in the pit and the rest is above ground, all surrounded by a rock wall. The top of a Rapanui is always made with five stones, whether it's used for cooking or just an ordinary fire. Victor showed us an umu that looked like it was made with only four nicely carved stones, and pointed out a small fifth stone wedged in one corner. No one knows why anymore, but it is still done. It is worth noting that the ancient Rapanui people had chickens, but no pigs (maybe they ate them all before they could reproduce, or maybe the pigs just ate too much themselves and were competitors for food).

The first high chief, or king, Hotu Matua, is supposed to be buried near Akahanga.

The easternmost Ahu on the south coast is the massive complex of Tongariki, with fifteen Moai now standing thanks to a restoration in 1997 with the help of a crane donated by a Japanese company. The restoration effort was massive, too, since the whole area had been swept by a tidal wave in 1960. The axis of the platform is aligned with the rising of the summer solstice sun, and there are many petroglyphs nearby.

On a hill in front of the Ahu is one of the smaller Moai that was moved by modern reserchers to demonstrate a theory of how the ancients might have done it. It is also the only complete Moai to have left the country and returned (to and from Japan) with the permission of the people.

The question of how the Moai were moved is especially intruiguing. A whole lot of theories have been proposed, from rolling the statues on logs, to sliding them over mashed sweet potatoes. Because of a legend that says the statues "walked" to the Ahu, one group of researchers moved one small statue a short distance by wrapping it with ropes and tugging it on alternate sides, like we sometimes do with tall and narrow pieces of furniture. What makes all these theories untenable is that a great many of the Moai were much larger than the ones used for experiments, and, most importantly, Rapanui is not flat. The majority of the terrain is hilly, bumpy and full of rocks and depressions, not suitable to the methods proposed.

Even my favorite theory, that the Moai were rafted to the sites, has holes in it. When I looked at the uneven terrain and the flat summer ocean and the canoe ramps next to the majority of sites that were right next to the water, and when I considered that re-usable rafts would use less wood than sleds and rollers, it seemed practical. But, the ocean isn't always flat, some Ahu are inland, and some Moai seem to have fallen on land while on their way to a coastal destination. Ah well, it's still as good as any of the other theories. Then I got to wondering about the legend of walking. I have enough experience with languages to know that many words have multiple meanings, and that translation are often faulty. The word for "to walk" in Rapanui is ha'ere. Okay. Then I checked on the Hawaiian equivalent, , which means "to sail." Does that signify anything? Who knows?

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