Rapa Nui Journal Volume 14 Issue 3

PACIFIC 2000, The latest in a superb line of conferences with Rapanui at their core, took place on the slopes of a sleeping volcano, at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy, Kamuela.

THE KON-TIKI MUSEUM OCCASIONAL PAPERS, VOL 5

ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF ARNE SKJ0LSVOLD, 7S YEARS

Edited by Paul Wallin and Helene Martinsson-Wallin.

The Kon-Tiki Museum, 2000

Review by Georgia Lee

EASTER ISLAND. RAPA NUl, A LAND OF ROCKY DREAMS

By Jose Miguel Ramirez and Carlos Huber Alvimpress Impresores, Chile, 2000

Review by Georgia Lee

On BBC television in the UK recently, we were presented with a documentary program with the above title, written and presented by Sir David Attenborough, which was a salutary lesson in how to make excellent and gripping television. It was well structured, well paced, and told a coherent story without recourse to endless talking heads and gimmicky reconstructions with actors.

The Polynesian Languages Forum is led by president Rodrigo Paoa Atamu of Rapa Nui-who is also the president of Mata Nui 'a Hotu 'a Matu'a o Kahu-Kahu o Hera-and secretary general Larry Lindsey Kimura of Hawai'i. The Forum was founded as a non-governmental assembly of representatives of all Polynesian peoples.

For most of the world the knowledge of Easter Island is still associated with the famous Norwegian traveler Thor Heyerdahl, whose expeditions and books aroused much interest in the Island in the second part of the 20th century. However, in the very same year as Heyerdahl's birth, 1914, a small book, The Art of Easter Island, was printed in St. Petersburg, Russia. This book was undoubtedly the first on the subject, with the author's scientific interests closely linked to the particular qualities of Easter Island art, and seen through the eyes of the new art of the time.

Krupp (1997) broadly defines the interdisciplinary field of archaeoastronomy as embracing "calendrics; practical observation; sky lore and celestial myth; symbolic representation of celestial objects, concepts, and events; astronomical orientation of tombs, temples, shrines, and urban centers;" and other, similar trappings of culture. While some of these aspects might better be classified as "ethnoastronomy," it remains a useful definition.

Many observations about Rapanui women were recorded from the first arrival of Europeans to Easter Island. In general, the descriptions left by seafarers during the eighteenth century were only of certain groups, that is, those islanders with whom they had contact. This meant that only partial information of the actual reality was noted. One must also consider the short time spent on the island by these early visitors. In addition, outsiders oriented their descriptions toward physical characteristics, and behavior was interpreted from a European perspective.

There seems to be something special about Easter Island that makes people think. big. Perhaps its those tall monolithic statues that once dotted the island's coast. Whatever the cause, the "think. big" trend also came to include one of the island's architectural features which has been given the name, hare moa, which translated into English means "chicken house" or coop.

This essay is not just about Easter Island's archaeology. Rather the perspective is a multi-field one of a practitioner in historical anthropology of the period before written records (Green in press; Kirch and Green in press). That approach yields an integrated and fairly convincing solution to the language, culture, and biological affinities of the Rapanui who inhabited Easter Island at the time of European contact. As such, the argument advanced has to do with ethnicity - "the product of an empirically available activity, classifying people according to their origins" (Levine 1999:166), and 'origins', as Kawharu (1994: xv) astutely observes for the Maori, "can be said to be about identity. It is also of course about other things like space and time, myth and history, subject and context". Paralleling articles in the volume for the origins of the first New Zealanders (Sutton. 1994), this range of evidence also firmly ties the initial Easter Islanders to Polynesia, and in their particular case to the South Marutea-Mangarevan-Temoe-Pitcairn-Henderson Island region of southeastern Polynesia. Maori origins are more likely to be central East Polynesia.

Rapa Nui Journal began life in 1"986 as a newsletter called Rapa Nui Notes. This was a four-page, typewritten response to those who had visited the island, became enamored of it, and who begged for information about "What's New" on the island. The newsletter thrived, and in 1988 became Rapa Nui Journal. That issue was 14 pages long and was devoted to the memory of William Mulloy