Rapa Nui Journal Volume 13 Issue 3

Manual de Capacitacion sabre el Patrimonio Cultural y Natural de Rapa Nui [Training Manual on the Cultural and Natural Heritage ofRapa Nui]

Marcos Rauch G. and Maria E. Noel 8., eds. Conaf/WMF, Rapa Nui, 1998

Review by A. Elena Charola, Ph.D. Consultant, World Monuments Fund, Easter Island Program Paper cover, 190 pages, US$30

Two new blockbusters from David Stanley/Moon Travel Books:

Tahiti Handbook, and Fiji Handbook

Reviewed by Georgia Lee

Tahiti Handbook Including Easter Island and the Cooks

Moon Travel Handbooks, PO Box 3040, Chico, CA 95927 4th edition, 1999; $15.95. ISBN 1-56691-140-0

From the Stone Age to the Space Age in 200 Years: Tongan Art and Society on the Eve of the Millennium

Edition for the 80th Birthday of His Majesty King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV in July 1998. The Tongan National Museum, Catalog, 1999. Adrienne L. Kaeppler ISBN 982-9005-0 I-I Distributed by the Vava'u Press, Ltd., PO Box 958, Nuku'alofa, Tonga, South Pacific. Email: vapress@kalianeuo

Spirit of Place. Petroglyphs of Hawai'i

Georgia Lee and Edward Stasack Easter Island Foundation, Los Osos. $35.00; 211 pp.

Review by Paul G. Bahn

Archaeology of Easter Island (Rapa Nui)

By Helene Martinsson-Wallin in Collaboration with Paul Wallin and Sonia Haoa. Rapanui translation by Nicholas Haoa and Sonia Haoa.

An Essay Toward a Dictionary and Grammar of the Lesser-Australian Languages, According to the Dialect used at the Marquesas (1799)

William P. Crook, Samuel Greatheed, and Tima'u Te'ite'i, 1998. H. G. A. Hughes and S. R. Fischer eds. Monograph I of the Institute of Polynesian Languages and Literatures. Auckland. ISBN 1174-4499. US $18, NZ $35.

Review by Roger C. Green, University of Auckland

Moai Sightings

The Eyes of the Moai or A Perfect Night Out in Manhattan by Peter Gravild Korning, Denmark

What's New in Polynesia

What's New in Hangaroa

What's New in Chile

With the arrival of the first westerners to Easter Island, an interesting situation arose: the inhabitants, accustomed to the barter system, wanted to acquire trade items because they were attractive, not because of actual need. It was a trade guided by avarice and not by necessity. That is to say, it was a type of barter that was outside the parameters of regular interchange that was known and carried out in the daily life of the island. Perhaps their new situation had disconcerted them to such an extent that, with the goal of acquiring such diverse objects as hats, cloth, metals and knives from the Europeans, they began to trade even ancestral wooden carved figures.

Stones up to 1.5 tons are usually slung on poles for transport. Thirty ton Assyrian winged bulls on sledges rest on short ambiguous objects, some parallel and some perpendicular to the line of motion, which may be wooden rollers or gliders. Sixty ton Egyptian pharaohs are dragged on sledges over wooden planks without rollers, upright and with lubrication. One-hundred ton Egyptian columns on barges are shown lashed to sledges. So suggests Heizer (1966) in his survey of ancient heavy transport. He also notes the propensity of heavy loads to crush wooden rollers and states categorically, " ...the use of wooden rollers cannot be demonstrated for any stone-moving culture in the New World, and at best the evidence is weak for pre-Roman Old World societies".

Hanga Nui Bay, on the eastern end of the southeast coast of Easter Island, is currently the focal point of research in an intensively studied archaeological area that extends from the plains at the foot of the southwest slopes of the Poike Peninsula. The study area is a transect which crosses the island from coast to coast in a north-south axis from Hanga Nui to Mahatua on the east and from Motu Nao to an area close to Te Peka Peka on the west.