Rapa Nui Journal Volume 22 Issue 2

During the last two weeks of July over two thousand delegates from across the Pacific gathered in Pago Pago, American Samoa, for the region's largest cultural gathering - the 10th Festival of Pacific Arts. The Festival was conceived by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) in 1972 as a means of promoting heritage arts and is held every four years, rotating among the three Pacific regions. Twenty-two islands sent emissaries including dancers, musicians, visual and theatrical artists, poets, traditional healers, and filmmakers for exhibition, exchange, and dialogue. Rapa Nui was represented by the musical group "Matato'a" as part of a delegation of twenty musicians, dancers, and support staff. After an arduous journey through Tahiti, Auckland, and Apia, the twenty performers and staff set up their headquarters at Kanana Fo'u Seminary, sharing the premises with delegations from Fiji, Tonga, and Australia. Meals were communal and free-time events such as soccer (football) and canoeing fostered interaction among islanders.

Moai Sightings

What's New on Easter Island

What's New in the Pacific

What's New Elsewhere

THE GREAT MOTORCYCLE RALLY OF 1988

According to reports received from a number of islanders and printed in at least two opposition newspapers and one opposition magazine, on September 9 a motorcycle rally took place on Easter Island. Reports agree that from 50 to 60 of these machines participated as part of the centennial celebration of Chile's taking possession of the island.

AN EXHIBITION OF EASTER ISLAND ART IN PARIS and A REVIEW OF THE ACCOMPANYING TREASURES OF EASTER ISLAND

by Catherine & Michel Orliac

Review by Paul Horley

WEBSTER'S RAPA NUl - ENGLISH THESAURUS DICTIONARY

by Philip M. Parker

Icon Publishing, 2008 ISBN 978-0-497836-76-4. $28.95 from Amazon.com

Review by Shawn McLaughlin

WHERE FATE BECKONS. THE LIFE OF JEAN-FRANCOIS DE LA PEROUSE

by John Dunmore

University of Alaska Press, 2007 Soft cover, ISBN 978-1-602230-03-3.

$19.71 from Amazon.com

Review by Georgia Lee

EASTER ISLAND 1793 TO 1861: OBSERVATIONS BY EARLY VISITORS BEFORE THE SLAVE RAIDS

by Rhys Richards

Easter Island Foundation, 2008 Soft cover, ISBN 978-1-880636-28-2. $15.00 U.S.

Review by Paul Horley

Interview with Georgia Lee and Frank Moran.

Georgia Lee:

AA degree, Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri, 1945; BA and Teaching Credential, California College of Arts and Crafts, 1948; MA degree, Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1978; PhD, Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1986.

Frank Moran:

BS and MS, University of New Hampshire, 1935 to 1940; PhD abd, University of Wisconsin; Member of the Technical Staff, Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1941-1962; Associate Director, Director and Distinguished Fellow, Science Center, North American Aviation 1962-1979.

"REPORTING CALLING AT SALA-YGOMEZ AND EASTER ISLANDS"

With annotations by Shawn McLaughlin

The following is a report made by Commander Bouverie Clark to Rear-Admiral Algernon Lyons, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy, based on the late 19th century visit of the H.M.S. Sappho to Easter Island and first published in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch in 1899.

H.M.S. Sappho, at Sea, lat. 28 ⁰ 01'S., long. 114⁰ 02' W., 20th June, 1882

It is with a great sense of loss and sadness that we now remember Gonzalo "Chalo" Figueroa, who was more than a mentor and model to me because of his commitment to Rapa Nui, but also a dear friend. Those were his only words, during a few seconds of consciousness, when I visited him some weeks before his departure.

Obituary by Jose Miguel Ramirez-Aliaga

How did the thirty-five year-old German scholar, who in 1958 had not yet secured a university position, come to acquire priceless field-notes from one of the twentieth century's epochal voyages to Easter Island - the Franco-Belgian Expedition of 1934-35, led by Swiss ethnologist Alfred Metraux? The answer is both fascinating and informative, involving five years of increasing amity and mutual respect, as well as of an ever greater appreciation of the challenge and frustration that is Easter Island.

This article represents my own experience with the petroglyphs, becoming aware of them, observing them, and thinking about them. I had worked as a translator of written Japanese before coming to Hawai'i for the first time in 1989, and had seen the early pictographic forms of the Sino-Japanese characters (Vaccari & Vaccari 1950). From my observations of the petroglyphs, primarily as photographic reproductions in texts, and from Gelb's definition of writing, human communication by conventional marks (1963:12), I assumed that the petroglyphs represented the first stage of a pictographic system that would have developed as it had on Easter Island. I had seen an ethnographic film of the 'Kung San in which an elder had read rock art for John Marshall- it was a story of a hunt with pictographs of the animal and handprints to show how to advance on it. As a result I expected the Hawaiian petroglyphs to exist as art and writing at the same time.

The ceremonial village of 'Orongo is one of the most fascinating and important sites on Easter Island. Located at the top of Rano Kau's precipitous cliffs, 'Orongo offers awe-inspiring views toward the three off-shore islets of Motu Kao Kao, Motu Iti, and Motu Nui. The village consists of about fifty dry-laid stone buildings (referred to by numbers according to Ferdon 1961: Fig.13 7), and occupied seasonally during the famous Birdman competition (Routledge 1920:426, Metraux 1940:331-332). The houses are usually overlapping, which probably simplified their construction.

Recent archaeological work on Rapa Nui has challenged the widely held assumption that the bulk of prehistoric subsistence was derived from coastal locations. Early coastal plain surveys (Englert 1974; McCoy 1976) had cataloged thousands of archaeological features and sites, including the structural remains of ahu (religious platforms) and moai (statues), along with elite and non-elite residences, and walled planting enclosures called manavai. The later survey of Cristino, et al. (1981) showed, however, that structures and agricultural features were by no means exclusive to the coastal regions of the island, but were in-fact also spread throughout the interior of the island. Similar features as those found around the exterior were recorded and analyzed, but unrecognized throughout the island was a type of agricultural garden based around the deliberate surface coverage of stone fragments.

One of the recent discussions to emerge among archaeologists regarding Rapa Nui (Easter Island) prehistory contrasts "early" and "late" estimates for initial human colonization of the island. These differing estimates, in tum, offer significantly different messages for the timing and rate of cultural evolution on the island. A recent study of eleven charcoal samples concluded that Rapa Nui was first colonized around 1200 CE. A new analysis of the same eleven charcoal samples suggests that the data are consistent with an earlier colonization date, around 900 CE. The three hundred year difference between the two estimates could mean the difference between a "short chronology" and "long chronology" to archaeologists and environmentalists alike.

In a recent lead article in American Antiquity, Jeanne Arnold (2007) challenged our assertion (Jones & Klar 2005; Klar & Jones 2005) that prehistoric Polynesians made contact with Native societies in southern California. While we responded to some of Arnold's charges and an earlier critique by Anderson (2006) in American Antiquity (Jones & Klar 2006,2008), we feel that it is also important to carry on this dialog with the Pacific specialists reached by the Rapa Nui Journal. Here we review some of the points made previously and develop several others in response to Arnold's rejection of a Polynesian contact event.

Polynesian archaeology is undergoing a renaissance with spirited debates on a number of fundamental issues such as dating human colonization of islands and archipelagos, determining the causes of landscape change (whether human-induced, climate affected, or some manner of both), defining the temporal and geographical limits of long-distance interaction spheres, the causes and consequences of sociopolitical change, and the nature of Ancestral Polynesian Culture. None of these topics engender a discipline-wide consensus, least of which is the date for the colonization of any Polynesian archipelago.