Rapa Nui Journal Volume 16 Issue 1

Splendid Isolation: Art of Easter Island

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 11, 2001 - August 4, 2002,

Eric Kjellgren, Evelyn A J. Hall and John A Friede Assistant Curator of Oceanic Art.

Catalogue published by Yale University Press, New Haven and New London

Exhibition Review by Norman Hurst

El mundo submarino de Isla de Pascua / The Underwater World of Easter Island

by Michel Garda, 2000 S.E.E.M. Orca Ltda, Chile

Review by Georgia Lee

Volcanoes, El Ninos, and the Bellybutton of the Universe

by D.A Walker, 2000 Xlibris Corporation,

Soft cover, 99 pages, $20.00, ISBN 07388-37229

Review by Tom Christopher

Easter Island

by Michael Kenna, 2001 Nazraeli Press, 53 pages, $75.00

ISBN: 1-59005-012-6 First Edition limited to a 1000 slip-cased numbered copies

Review by Tom Christopher

On the Margins of Sustainability. Prehistoric Settlement of Utrok Atoll, Northern Marshall Islands

Marshall I. Weisler BAR International Series 967, Archaeopress, Oxford. 2001.

144 pp. (122 B&W figures, photographs, maps and drawings, 24 tables, 3 appendices) £28.00 (US$40.00), paper. ISBN 1-84171-254-X

Review by Felicia R. Beardsley, Ph.D.

Moai Sightings

What's New in the Pacific

What's New in Hanga Roa

To anyone who has given attention to the subject, there is no spot on the earth more remarkable, mysterious, and inexplicable, than is Easter Island. Of the size, and something near the shape of Manhattan or New York Island, it lies at the southeastern extremity of the Polynesian group in the South Pacific ocean. It is twelve miles long, and four miles wide at its widest point, a rude triangle, and curiousIy enough, with its trend to the northeast and southwest, as is New York. Here the similarity end , for at each of its three angles is a volcanic peak, whose fires are long since dead, the island being purely volcanic in character, and composed of basalt, tufa, lava, pumice, and obsidian, which formations, in fact, describe its limits. Geology, in the case of Easter Island, gives no hint as to its age, the entire island having been so twisted and disturbed by vast convulsions as to destroy all traces of classification. The island is surrounded by precipitous cliffs, rising in some cases to a height of one thousand feet. It is 2,500 miles from the nearest mainland, the coast of South America; is in latitude 27° 10' South, and longitude 109° 24' west. It ha the climate of Madeira, with a wet and a dry season, but electric storms are unknown there.

Perhaps it's because I'm looking for him, but Paul Gauguin seems to follow me everywhere. I am standing in line at a bank on Rarotonga when a European woman behind me comments that the bank tellers "look just like a Gauguin painting"; her companion murmurs in agreement. In North America and Europe, Gauguin's paintings have become the defining, and inescapable, vision of the Pacific. Replicas of his images appear in the Disney Polynesian Resort in Kissimmee, Florida; in a bath products shop in California's Silicon Valley; in ads for Tahitian tourism: brown, lounging women, wrapped (or unwrapped) in brightly-colored pareu and adorned with flowers. The employees of a Bank in Avarua, professionally dressed in crisp white blouses and dark skirts like businesswomen in many parts of the world, transform in European eyes trained in looking through Gauguin's lens, and begin to "look like" not themselves, but like women in paintings created by a Frenchman living in another archipelago, one hundred years ago.

Small stones from Easter Island with incised or pecked designs have been mentioned in many books and reports over the years. Ethnographic sources speculate on how they might have been used in ancient times, and most of these discuss them in the context of amulets or as fertility stones for chickens. The earliest descriptions are from Alexander (Tati) Salmon, the Tahitian who served as an informant for Lieutenant-Captain Wilhelm Geiseler and William J. Thompson, both of whom came to the island in the late 1800s.

The fauna and flora of Easter Island is not only impoverished; the share of invasive species is impressive (Campos and Pena 1973; Desender and Baert 1996). The freshwater microfauna of the island had been neglected until recently. The presence of mosquitoes was, of course, known, and had given rise to the introduction of an insectivorous fish that may have had effects on other faunal elements as well. Yet, among insects, it is reasonably certain that only a single dragonfly species (Pantala flavescens) ever existed on the island. The fact that, at times, it shows an atypical behavior here (Dumont and Verschuren 1991) does not exclude the possibility that this long-ranging migrant, which may move with ocean-going ships, was a recent arrival on the island. The single aquatic beetle species known from Easter Island, Bidessus skottsbergi was decribed from Rano Kao in 1924 (Zimmerman 1924) prior to the introduction of the fish. It has not been collected since. Its status a an endemic is under question: Desender and Baert (1997) argue that Kuschel (1963) was probably right in considering it synonymous to an Australian species.

In Easter Island history, agriculture played a vital economic role, be it out of the basic need to feed the population or, in a more advanced stage, to produce surplus food (Stevenson and Haoa 1999, Stevenson et al. 1999). Stevenson et al. (1999) state that agricultural production on Easter Island was generated by dryland agricultural systems, albeit designed to reduce agricultural risk.

The unpredictable nature of a key environmental resource (e.g., moisture) is often viewed as a major variable that guides economic decision-making and the form of the social organization required to implement adaptive strategies that will ensure the survival of the population. Several authors have recently argued that environment characterized by higher uncertainty (e.g., risk of crop failure) will exhibit a greater tempo of changing organizational forms and an overall higher levels of organizational complexity. (Ladefoged 1995; Graves and Ladefoged 1995; Dunnell 1999; Ladefoged and Graves 2000; Kirch 2000; Hammon 2001; Hunt and Lipo 2001). In these high-risk environments the construction of chiefly sponsored monumental architecture can suppress population numbers to below critical levels. Energy that could be expended on increasing agricultural production, thereby leading to increases in population levels, is diverted into "wasteful" activities, such as monumental construction.

Scientific Links between Rapa Nui and the Royal Museurn of Art and History in Brussels (RMAH) were estabIished in 1934-1935 on the occasion of the Franco-Belgian Expedition. This expedition, one of the first large-scale scientific enterprises on Easter Island, lasted for five months and was directed by the Swiss ethnographer Alfred Metraux and the Belgian archaeologist Henri Lavachery, associate curator at the RMAH (Lavachery 1935; Forment 1985, 1990). As a result of this expedition an important collection of Easter Island ethnographic and archaeological artifacts was shipped to Europe and divided principally among the Musee de l'Homme in Paris and the RMAH in Brussels. The latter museum obtained, among a wealth of other objects, an archaic-looking colossal anthropomorphic sculpture, almost 3 m high and weighing about 6 tons. It is one of the very few moai that have ever been taken from the island.

The Mayor of Rapa Nuj, Petero Edmund, sticks his fingers in his ears. "They're like this!" he how me, describing the Chilean government's refusal to listen. If Chilean officials Iistened, they would hear the Mayor telling them to stop parceling out Rapa Nui land. "The land is part of our culture," he says. It is to preserve and build upon the culture that he wants Rapanui control of the land to be kept as a park, not broken up into individual homesteads. This is only one point of view on the island, but everyone is talking about the land. As the Mayor put it, "Yes, even the Council of Elders is fighting among themselves , which is proper to our spirit around the island there is always some kind of fight. But if you ask any native on the island, what is your objective, what is your point of view about strengthening your position as a native, everyone will agree on the land. No land, no culture. No land, no identity."