Rapa Nui Journal Volume 11 Issue 2

IN MEMORIAM

THOMAS S. BARTHEL

(January 4,1923 - April 3,1997)

Micronesia Handbook (4th edition), Neil M. Levy, 1996. ISBN 1-56691-077-3. 315 pages, $14.95. Moon Publications, PO Box 3040, Chico CA 95927-3040; Email: travel@moon.com

Review by Georgia Lee

There are no many opular movies which include a sequence featuring Rapa Nui, so RNJ reader should seize the chance to see Tim Burton's recent sci-fi black comedy Mars Attacks.

International News

What's New in Polynesia

What's New in Hanga Roa

A joint Belgian-Chilean biological mission, conceived and headed by Prof. H. Dumont of the Department of Morphology, Systematics and Ecology of the Gent University, spent about five weeks on Easter Island in August and September 1990. The project was undertaken specifically to obtain a reasonably complete picture of the palaeoenvironmental evolution of the region during the Holocene. For that purpose coring was successfully applied to sample sediments deposited on the bottom of the fresh water crater lake of Rano Raraku in view of detailed biological and ecological research.

In his description of Easter Island, Captain James Cook (1777) reports, "... the country appeared quite barren and without wood," and the naturalist G. Forster noted, "... there was not a tree upon the island which exceeded the height of ten feet". That was in 1774, and even today the only large trees to be found have been introduced-primarily eucalyptus and a few dozen coconut palms brought in from Tahiti.

A joint Belgian-Chilean biological mission, conducted by Prof. H. Dumont of the Department of Morphology, Systematics and Ecology of the Gent University (Belgium), visited Easter Island in the summer of 1990. During this expedition, which lasted a few weeks, coring operations took place in the crater lake of Rano Raraku in view of biological and palaeoecological research.

Human osteological research was a part of the 1987-88 KonTiki Expedition to Easter Island. As a part of this research, cranial casts were produced from six well-preserved skulls (three males, three females) collected by the Norwegian Expedition of 1955-56, by Rapu and Haoa in 1978 and by the 1981 Easter Island Anthropological Expedition (See Appendix 1). The original remains are housed within the collections of the Sebastian Englert Museum on Easter Island and the University of Minnesota (E47, Hekii, G2), and the casts and molds with the Department of Anthropology, University of Wyoming.

A primary objective of the 1981 Easter Island Anthropological Expedition was to acquire a well documented sample of prehistoric Easter Island skeletons, to collect craniofacial metrics and to record observations of nonmetric characteristics (as well as some data on postcranial traits) that would make possible a thorough study of population affinities. The 1981 expedition was highly successful with regard to both the archaeological recovery of well-documented human skeletons and a concurrent field analysis of osteological remains (Gill, Owsley, and Baker 1983; Gill 1986a). During the six-month field season in 1981, plus an earlier brief archaeological field season in 1979, and a few short field laboratory sessions between 1981 and 1991, recovery, curation, full osteometric data collection and a complete inventory of skeletal pathology were accomplished on a sample of 426 prehistoric and protohistoric skeletons. Analysis of another 110 Easter Island skeletons from other museums in North and South America was also accomplished during that same period (Gill and Owsley 1993; Owsley, Gill and Ousley 1994).

While the ethnographic, linguistic and archaeological findings of Easter Island research are well documented, there is noticeably less osteological information available in the literature (some studies include Gill 1988, 1990; Imbelloni 1951; Meyer and Jablonowski 1901; Petri 1936; von Bonin 1931; Gill and Owsley 1993; Gill et al. 1983; Murrill 1968; Owsley et al. 1983 1985,1993).

Since the Norwegian Expedition to Easter Island in 1955-56, led by Thor Heyerdahl, University of Wyoming anthropologists have been involved in archaeological and osteological research on the island. The late Dr. William Mulloy, University of Wyoming anthropologist, was a member of the original team of professional scientists elected by Heyerdahl. He maintained a strong and enduring commitment to continued research there until his death in 1978. Today, his students and colleagues continue much of his pioneering work.

This issue of RNJ contains a third portion of the papers presented at the third international conference on Easter Island research, the Rapa Nui Rendezvous, held in Laramie, Wyoming, August 3-6, 1993. The conference was sponsored by the University of Wyoming, and was the first of the Easter Island conferences to be hosted in the United States. Sixty papers were presented by researcher from 18 countries. Over 250 participants attended the conference which was held in recognition of the contributions to Easter Island research made by the late William T. Mulloy, Wyoming anthropologist, and his colleagues of the 1955-56 Norwegian Expedition.