Rapa Nui Journal Volume 33 Issue 1 and 2

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    Terevaka Archaeological Outreach (TAO) 2020 Project Report: Digital Repatriation
    ( 2020) Shepardson,Britton L.
    The Ngaro Project presents the products of research and educational outreach conducted by Terevaka Archaeological Outreach (TAO) between 2009 and 2020. The focus of the project is to organize information originally collected by Easter Island resident and activist, Ida Luz “Piru” Hucke Atan, regarding cultural resources from the island that now reside in collections across the world. Visits to twelve museums across the U.S. helped to amass an interactive database of high-resolution images of 447 objects (www.terevaka.net/ngaro). The project not only provides an example of digital repatriation, but also provides a structure for a multimedia, online platform that could lead to additional crowd-sourcing of information to develop a more inclusive approach for museums and Indigenous communities to collaborate in the future.
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    Con-ticci and the Bennett Monolith of Mocachi
    ( 2020) Danel,Andrea Ballesteros
    In the late nineteenth century, the Spanish scholar Marcos Jiménez de la Espada presented his ideas about the Inca god Ticiviracocha or Viracocha at the third International Congress of Americanists. He argued that a group of white men had reached South America via a maritime route on the coast of Arica (Chile) or Arequipa (Peru). In 1932, more than half a century later, American anthropologist Wendell Clark (W.C.) Bennett participated in archaeological excavations in the southern highlands of the Andes where a series of stone monoliths were discovered. One of these monolithic statues, known as the Bennett Monolith of Mocachi, was included on the sail of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki raft. This paper explores two important elements of Heyerdahl’s trans-Pacific contact theory: Kon-Tiki and ‘white bearded men’. First, it argues that a similar idea to Heyerdahl’s conjecture about ‘white bearded men’ in the Americas was explored by the nineteenth-century Americanist scholar Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, albeit with a different interpretation surrounding Con-ticci and arguably unbeknownst to him. Secondly, it explores and contrasts Heyerdahl’s differing view about the presence of a beard on a monolithic statue from Bolivia with the perspectives of its discoverer W.C. Bennett in 1932, and the Argentine scholar José Imbelloni. While it appears that Heyerdahl was not aware of Jiménez de la Espada’s work, his apparent resolute interpretation of Bennett’s ‘Monolith of Mocachi’ as bearded caused much controversy among South American academics. It even led to Bennett’s explication of how a simplified labelling to distinguish the monolith in question in relation to others led to Heyerdahl’s regard as advancing an erroneous conception surrounding the presence of ‘bearded white men’ on this continent prior to Columbus. The name Kon- Tiki was a stylization of part of the name of the Inca deity ‘Con Ticci’ and that of the Polynesian deity ‘Tiki’.
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    Rapa Nui in the Hans Helfritz Collection at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum
    ( 2020) Brockman,Tania Basterrica ; Rapahango,Betty Haoa
    The ethnographic museum Rautenstrauch-Joest (RJM), Cultures of the World, in Cologne, Germany, has a large number of objects and collections from various parts of the planet. The work of Hans Helfritz, a great traveler and renowned photographer and documentarian of his time, is included in the RJM collection. Thepresentwork focusesontheanalysis, inventory anddescription of thephotographs that he took on his trip to Easter Island in December 1946, from which he obtained hundreds of black & white photographs and color slides as well as 16 mm film footage in both formats. The objective of the research carried out in conjunction with the RJM is to bring to light the legacy of Helfritz, which until now has remained largely unpublished, and to describe the work undertaken to access the collection and make it available to the public.
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    Identifying Places and People in Walter Lehmann’s Photograph Collection of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, 1911)
    ( 2020) Pakarati,Cristián Moreno ; Wieczorek,Rafał
    This paper examines recently digitized photographs from the collection of Walter Lehmann held by the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin. Most of the photographs originate from the expedition to Easter Island organized by Walter Knoche in April 1911. The photographs depict scenes from daily life on Rapa Nui. There are several named individuals who can be identified in portraits and group photographs. Among those, there are previously unknown images of important native leader María Angata Veritahi a Pengo (c. 1853–1915). The existence of this photograph collection shows continuous interest in Easter Island in the work of Walter Lehmann, an important German ethnologist known primarily from his Mesoamerican studies
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    Mana Tupuna: Honoring the Ancestors Abroad
    ( 2020) Kelly,Phineas
    The Mana Tupuna Project reimagines the connection between contemporary Rapanui people and the carvings of their ancestors. The inaugural iteration of this multifaceted project focuses on the Mulloy collection in the University Wyoming Museum of Art. By digitally bridging between museum art abroad and people on Rapa Nui, this project reinforces Polynesian language, culture, and values in both local and global settings. Beginning in March 2020, international travel and tourism to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the island was in a state of relative isolation for nearly two and a half years. Resilient and indomitable as ever, the people of Rapa Nui took this time to refocus on traditional farming, fishing, Rapanui language, and cultural revitalization projects. The Mana Tupuna project, which is a collaboration between the Rapa Nui Tour Guides Association, Rapa Nui wood carvers, and the author, explores and assesses colonial discourses, their effects on the art and culture of Rapa Nui, and the possibilities for more sustainable forms of tourism that do not rely solely on people physically visiting the island. The applications that support Mana Tupuna function as language and culture revitalization tools. Educational institutions on Rapa Nui have already begun to use them. These applications re-anchor Rapa Nui wood carvings from the 1950s and 1960s, now residing in the University ofWyoming Art Museum, to the people and places of Rapa Nui via 3D modeling, 360° photography, virtual reality, and the internet. Crucially, the global tourist audience can also access versions of these applications. Wood carvings (moai toromiro), among the first trade goods exchanged between Europeans and the Rapanui, have been a key element of social interactions between the islanders and their visitors since the first Europeans visited the island 300 years ago. This article, which privileges traditional Polynesian cultural values, explores the history of Rapa Nui wood carving and Western views of this tradition.
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    Cover
    ( 2020)
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    Table of Contents
    ( 2020)
    table of contents