"Easter Island is famous for its statues, called Moai (over 800 of them) . They were originally placed on huge stone platforms that were built along the coast. Here they stood looking inland over the country watching over the people. The statues represented dead chieftains and are an example of ancestor worship. All of the statues were carved out of a quarry in an extinct volcano, Rano Raraku. Easter Island is the most isolated place in the world. It is around 1,800 km to its nearest inhabited neighbour, the island of Pitcairn in the west, and no less than 3,600 km to Chile in the east. The island is only 24 km long and 11 km wide. The island was populated around 1,000 AD and European seafarers first visited it on Easter Day 1722. In 1955-1956 Thor Heyerdahl led the first professional archaeological excavations of Easter Island. Over six months five archaeologists excavated stone platforms, dwellings, caves and new types of stone statues. Other cultural artifacts were also extensively documented... In 1986-1988, Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki Museum led a new archaeological expedition to Easter Island, which discovered the earliest settlement and the earliest temple. They also conducted experiments to find out how the huge stone statues could have been moved from the island’s interior to the coast. The birdman, a mythological being, half human and half bird, can be found on both Easter Island and in several ancient South American cultures. To Thor Heyerdahl this and the similarities between stone sculptures on Easter Island and in South America were indications that there had been cultural contact between the islands and the mainland."
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 03:02:44 +0000
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