Rapa Nui Journal Volume 18 Issue 1

EIF News

The Prez Sez

What's New at the EIF Office

Moai Sightings

What's New in the Pacific

Publications

Dear Editor,

The paper on the Jubaea palms by H-R Bork and A Mieth (RNJ 1712: 119) presents a plausible scenario, but prompt some observations. One might imagine that people dependent upon the palms would notice before 'the feller of the last tree' did his work, especially since Hunter-Anderson tells you that at least some island people are sensitive to the ecological fragility of their environment. On the other hand, recall the difficulty of establishing parks to prevent Pacific Northwest loggers from cutting the last of the old-growth redwood.

Micronesia is a highly diverse region with thousands of islands scattered across some 4.5 million square miles of open water in the western Pacific. From the air, the region looks as if handfuls of pearls had been loosed from a string and haphazardly strewn across a velvety fabric of the deepest blue. As you begin your approach, however, these pearls start to take shape, revealing coral, volcanic and continental islands of varying shapes and sizes, some highly dissected with steep jungle terrain, others a thin ribbon of green hugging close to the water's surface. As both a cultural and geological paradise, Micronesia presents the inveterate trekker or novice traveler with a farrago of peoples, cultures, language , landscapes, and environments. Just trying to get around can be confusing, with a new set of challenge arising at every tum. Enter Neil Levy's latest edition of Moon Handbooks Micronesia.

It has always been easier to destroy than to create - and in literary terms this means it's usually easier to criticize than praise. Most decent works deserve a healthy smattering of both. The book that is the subject of this review, however, draws so much attention to its shortcomings (albeit sometimes minor ones) that praise is hard to come by.

I bought this expensive 2003 book to augment both my growing collection of Easter Island publications and my knowledge of Easter Island itself. So I began reading with enthusiasm. And when I came upon the first of a series of many typos, boo-boos, and flat-out errors, I first dismissed them as a reflection on how people rely far too heavily on spell-checkers in their word processing software. However, as the number of mistakes grew, I became distracted. That's when I started compiling a list.

FIRST THE FACTS...THEN THE FANTASY

The world ha paid little attention to the fact that, during the last few centuries, a number of early maps have turned up. These give an accurate picture of the coasts of Africa and North and South America, and they date from years BEFORE European explorers had arrived in these areas. A most intriguing question poses itself: who could have created them?

Fifty Years in the Field. Essays in Honour and Celebration of Richard Shutler Jr's Archaeological Career

Edited by Stuart Bedford, Christophe Sand, and David Burley New Zealand Archaeological Association Monograph 25, 2002, Auckland. Paperbound, A4 (21 x 29.5 cm), 260 pages, numerous illustrations (maps, drawings, and photographs); NZ$45.00, available through the NZAA

Website: www. nzarchaeology.org/mono.

Review by Mike Carson and Dave Tuggle International Archaeological Research Institute, Inc., Honolulu

Alphonse L. Pinart (1852-1911), anthropologist and linguist,

had established himself as a tireless documenter

of native North America, before turning his sights on the Pacific.

Rapa Nui, in particular, held him in thrall, and his diary

of the 1877 expedition aboard the Seignelay documents the

island during its most depopulated and depressed period. As a

linguist, he was also interested in rongorongo, and attempted

a collection of reproductions of the available texts.

The archaeology of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has received a tremendous amount of attention in the last century. Researchers have traveled from all comers of the Earth to this miniscule island to solve the mysteries of the Center of the World. But this article is not about those people, nor is it about the mysteries. This report, rather, is about a special group of high school students in Rapa Nui eager to play an active role determining the future of their own cultural heritage. And we might argue that the work of these students may be more important than those popular and dramatic explanations of the island's prehistory.

It is most kind of the editorial board of the RNJ to allow this opportunity of a reply, as a few things in Guy' article do warrant comment, I believe.

This article started with the discovery that sign 11 was preceded by sign 76 on the Santiago Staff in 28 occurrences out of 35, and that this digraph, 76-11, occurred only on lines I, 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, and 14. The Staff bearing 14 lines, this suggested that these seven lines constituted a continuous text starting on line 12. Searching for corroborating evidence led to unexpected, and disturbing, observations.

The petroglyphs of Rapa Nui are intriguing for their variety of design motifs and their complexity. In The Rock Art of Easter Island (1992), I described and illustrated many varieties of "sea creature" images to be found in the island's rock art. Due to space constraints, not all recorded examples were included in that publication, and subsequent archaeological work has uncovered a few others. Recently, I encountered two books describing fishes of the Marquesas and Hawai'i (Chester et al. 1998; Titcomb and Pukui 1952), and some unresolved matters relating to Easter Island's sea menagerie were brought forth. In one instance, I erroneously cited two dolphin images, calling them swordfish (Lee 1992:Fig 5.34); Dr John Randall of the Bishop Museum kindly assisted with the identification of those, as well as some other fish motifs.

This paper addresses the relationship between the Chilean colonization of Easter Island and the Rapanui resistance against it. Two acts of resistance will be discussed in detail. The first one occurred in 1914, sixteen years after the Chilean takeover; the second in 1965, the year before the island was finally incorporated in the Chilean Civil Administration.

I have heard that novice anthropologists often enter the field thinking they know it all and then soon discover that they don't. I thought I knew nothing - and never discovered I had been wrong in that. In February 2002 I arrived to do my Ph.D. fieldwork on the Rapanui youth under the supervision of Grant McCall. As no one had studied the Rapanui youth so far, I had plenty of possible topics concerning the 761 islanders aged between 15 and 29 (national census, 2002), but I was personally most interested in the simple question: What is it like to be young in such a small, faraway and yet quite famous place?

When I arrived on Rapanui on I April 1972, I was fortunate to know and work (after some months) with Victoria Rapahango, Jose Fati, Leon Tub, Amelia Tepano and several others who gave generously of their time to talk to a tangata hiva (outsider). Like Routledge, I was a long-term resident researcher and, so, could come back for repeated visits to the same wise persons; I could question them and compare answers. My interest was not really in the ancient past, but in the more immediate experience the Rapanui had with outsiders. Nevertheless, people did want to tell me what they knew about their intriguing past, as much as they could remember. Sometimes, we would discuss various sources, written and oral, and try to draw our own conclusions. Leon Tub, in particular, favored this dialogue approach.

The fair for 2004 lasted for two days and I made my rounds until I was completely exhausted. On the stand of Galerie Meyer-Oceanic Art, 17 Rue des Beaux Arts, 75006 Paris a beautiful Rapa Nui ceremonial paddle was on sale. It is described as follow: "Rapa, Ceremonial Dance Paddle from Rapa Nui. 1640 to 1820 (Carbon 14) Toromiro wood, 88.4 x 20,9 x 1,5 cm. Provenance: Andre Breton, 42 Rue Fontaine, 75009 Paris, No 6144 of the Andre Brton auction. 2003."

Place are readily represented, understood, and marketed through the use of capsule images (Porteous 1977) or icons. The Eiffel Tower means Paris; the shell-like image of the Opera House means Sydney. Such large vertical objects, hyperbolic in their exaggerated obviousness, make useful icons. In this paper I explore the iconography of Rapa Nui, which is rather more complicated than the image which immediately springs to mind, the icon of the stern and severe moai which decorates so many book-covers, film titles, tee-shirts and placemats.