Hoa Hakananai‘a in detail: Comment on A. Davletshin’s unconvincing assertion of an ‘overlooked image’ on the ventral side of the ‘Orongo statue now in the British Museum
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2012-05-01
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26
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1
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Albert Davletshin contends that he has detected several rock art elements on the ventral side of the basalt statue
Hoa Hakananai‘a (EISP inventory BM-LON-001).1 The statue was collected from ‘Orongo by HMS Topaze in 1868 (Van Tilburg 1992, 2006) and is now in the British Museum (1869.10-5.1). We take his claim very seriously and agree that a single curved line on the torso is tantalizing. However, the designs he depicts do not exist on Hoa Hakananai‘a. Since we are constrained for space we cannot deal with all of our disagreements with this article, most of which we raised during the peer review process. Our main points here are that Hoa Hakananai‘a is unique within our inventory of 1,042 monolithic sculptural objects but must be considered within an island-wide archaeological context of which the author has no apparent grasp. Secondly, our documentation employs a variety of objective, replicable methods including state of-the-art digital scanning procedures (www.eisp.org). Davletshin’s methods, in contrast, are subjective and not replicable, not encouraged in the field of modern rock art studies, produce unreliable results (especially in artificial light and with a raised target), and are inferior to ours. His resultant data are erroneous and his interpretations are incorrect.
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Easter Island, Rapa Nui
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