Rapa Nui Journal Volume 10 Issue 2

Kaho'olwe: Na Leo o Kanaloa (Chants and stories of Kaho'olawe). 1995. 'Ai Pohaku Press PO Box 37095, Honolulu, HI 96837. Oversize, 116 pages, the book comes in both hardcover and softcover versions. Softcover price: $32.95. Foreword by Noa Emmett Aluli of the Protect Kaho'olawe 'Ohana; Introduction by Rowland B. Reeve.

Review by Georgia Lee

Fa 'a-Samoa: The Samoan Way. .. between conch shell and disco. A portrait of Western Samoa at the end of the twentieth century by Ad Linkels, 1995. Photos by Ad and Lucia Linkels. Published by Mundo Etnico Foundation, Tilburg, The Netherlands. ISBN 90-72840-09-7. This booklet accompanies the CD Fa 'a-Samoa: The Samoan Way. .. [pAN 2066 CD: Anthology of Pacific Music #6]

Review by Daniel Pouesi

Easter Island: The Endless Enigma by Jose Luis Velasco; photographs by Juan Pablo Lira and underwater photography by Paul Humann. Editorial Kactus, Santiago de Chile. 96 pages, color photographs. ISBN 956.7013-28-3. English translation by Peter Kendall.

Review by Dan Gartner. CanbeITa, Australia

Rapanui. Descriptive Grammars, 1996. by Veronica Du Feu, London and New York: Routledge. XV + 217 pp., map, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-415-00011-4. Price: £75, Order from Routledge, II New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4E£, Great Britain, or Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001, USA.

Review by Steven Roger Fischer

This paper is a brief comment on the different types of inlaid eyes found by The Kon-Tiki Museum expedition to Easter Island 1986-88 and eyes that have been re-discovered in The Kon-Tiki Museum collection during an inventory made in 1989-90.

In two different expeditions Heyerdahl and Ferdon (1961) and John Flenley (1984) found outstanding amounts of palm tree pollen in the crater sediment of Rano Raraku and Rano Kau, Easter Island. The microscopic analysis of this fossil pollen shows a great similarity to fresh pollen of Jubaea chilensis, (Molina) Baillon.

Robert Langdon (1995:77) disputes the long-standing proposition that Rattus exulans was dispersed by Polynesian voyaging and suggests that over hundreds of thousands or millions of years it "succeeded in getting from one island to another without any human aid at all." Between this and the conventional view lies the possibility, not yet explored in detail, that some rats were transported on canoes that had lost their human crew. I discuss this is relation to New Zealand, but the principles are the same for Easter Island.