The many questions posed by the Maoist statues on Easter Island
The statues of Easter Island are still an enigma to our modern civilizations. Indeed, this island lost in the middle of the largest ocean in the world is home to stone statues that may have come from a strange civilization.
When one evokes the alignments of Carnac where the dolmens of the most septic surroundings evoke the possibility that these granite blocks are a vast deception, they imagine that imaginative farmers would have come out of their fields and piled stones with their tractors. But on Easter Island, this theory of the falsification of history does not hold for a moment.
Easter Island is, in fact, one of the most remote places in the world. The island and its giants are more than 3,700 kilometres from Chile and 4,300 kilometres away. More intriguing the island is windswept, the land is arid, and vegetation grows only with great difficulty on this dry ground.
The mysteries of the statues of Easter Island
On this island in the Pacific, the mystery remains. There are indeed some nine hundred large carved stone blocks. These statues are monumental, and they represent the bust of a giant.
The first good point in the elucidation of this mystery is the fact that we know where the stones come from.
These large blocks of stone were extracted from the Rano Rakaru Volcano. The stone is basalt. On average, the busts are four meters high. On the other hand, the weight of the statues on Easter Island is hallucinating. Because these giants weigh between 20 and 80 tons, they were transported all around the island and then installed facing the sea. To relocate these giants, some scientists have suggested that they could be rolled over themselves. Other researchers are pretty much convinced that the statues were moved standing upright. This was done by an ingenious system of pendulums operated by ropes. By pulling on these ropes, the men managed to provoke a pendulum movement which allowed them to move forward.
What is the origin of the Easter Island statues?
We know that the first traces of habitation on the island date back to the year 500.
However, to this day, it is still challenging to determine precisely which civilization was involved in the building of these stone giants.
It is known with certainty that the Incas from South America would have succeeded in reaching Easter Island by boat. But there are also traces of the Polynesian civilization and people.
There are also theories about the possibility that these statues could represent the Incas. They would have arrived on the island, without women and may have integrated into the population. When we study the statues more closely, they look strangely similar to the features of the faces of the Incas (large ears, thin nose. The sculptures seems like to the Incas in every way).
However, we know from studying the bones found at the island’s burial sites that the population was made up of Polynesians. In other words, the DNA of the skeletons found at the site is similar in every way to that of today’s Polynesians. The entire scientific community agrees that the first wave of skeletons came from inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands.
It is also known that the construction of the giants began in 850 AD.
What were the functions of these giants?
When we examine these statues, we are immediately surprised by the fact that the busts turn their backs to the sea and face the land.
What we know: all the giants that are installed on the coast of the island look insistently at the center of the island. They seem to be watching the land or the crops. Perhaps the giants have another function, that of protecting humanity? Or to watch over the volcano and “mother nature”. The Pacha Mama, the mother earth, is a significant entity in this part of the world and especially in Latin America. There is one exception, a small group of statues that are installed in the center of the island and look towards Polynesia.
But researchers believe that these busts celebrate above all the cult of the ancestors and the spiritual power Mana. Then little by little, the edification of these statues would have drifted as a demonstration of strength between the different tribes present.
The most likely function is communication with the afterlife. For throughout Oceania, people are used to erecting such monuments or totem poles. It is therefore highly probable that the statues on Easter Island had the function of serving as a relay between the world of men and the world of the dead.
The statues seem to represent only men. The sculptors likely took as models former chiefs of dead tribes.
Did you know really know the Easter Island?
Where does the name Easter Island come from?
The current name of the island comes from the date of its discovery. A Dutch sailor, Jacob Roggoveen, first discovered the island on April 5, 1722. In this year the Christian feast “Easter” falls on the 5th. This is how this fantastic island was named Easter Island.
In 1888 Easter Island was annexed by Chile.
It should be noted that during this reconstruction, American researchers used concrete blocks that represent the statues of Easter Island. However, the statues of Easter Island are made of tuff. This is a type of volcanic stone that is a kind of aggregation of volcanic debris. So if the people of Easter Island had used this technique, the head would have broken after a few movements. So the “moving the fridge” technique doesn’t seem to work. It is not enough to make the buzz on the internet to validate a scientific hypothesis.
If this moving solution has lead in the wing, the blocks were likely moved on sleds before being trimmed or finished on site.
Tourism on Easter Island
All the statues are located in the Easter Island National Park. Approximately 116,000 tourists visit the island each year to view the sculptures.