Easter Island covers roughly 64 square miles in the South Pacific Ocean and is located some 2,300 miles from Chile’s west coast and 2,500 miles east of Tahiti. Known as Rapa Nui to its earliest inhabitants, the island was christened Paaseiland, or Easter Island, by Dutch explorers in honour of the day of their arrival in 1722. It was annexed by Chile in the late 19th century and now maintains an economy based largely on tourism. Easter Island’s most dramatic claim to fame is an array of almost 900 giant stone figures that date back many centuries. The statues reveal their creators to be master craftsmen and engineers and are distinctive among other stone sculptures found in Polynesian cultures. There has been much speculation about the exact purpose of the statues, the role they played in the ancient civilization of Easter Island and the way they may have been constructed and transported. Read more...
Recent analysis of radiocarbon dating from the island indicates that Rapa Nui was first settled around A.D.1200, a period in which Polynesians voyaged to the East Pacific and perhaps also to South America and California. According to legend, a chief named Hotu Matu’a, having learned of Rapa Nui from an advance party of explorers, led a small group of colonists, perhaps no more than 100 people, to the island. Read more...
Discovery of the Island by Jacob Roggeveen
In 1722 Jacob Roggeveen, a Dutch explorer, stumbled upon the world’s most isolated inhabited island of the Pacific Ocean. He decided to call it Easter Island, after the day he discovered it. Roggeveen described the islanders as having a variety of skin colours, but not black. Some, but not all of them had earlobes that they stretched down to their shoulders. They typically wore plates in the large ear holes or flipped up the loops back up over the ears. Captain James Cook also visited the island in 1774, and his expedition artist drew depictions of the Islanders with long ears. They also decorated themselves with feathered headpieces and shells. Read more...
Ever since the Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen, the first European known to have reached Easter Island, arrived in 1722, scholars have debated the origins of the isolated population he found there. Did they sail from the east, from South American soil, or from Central Polynesia to the north and west? It is daunting to imagine a voyage to Easter Island from any direction, which would have taken a minimum of two weeks, covering several thousand miles of seemingly endless ocean. It is clear, however, that the original inhabitants must have come from a seafaring culture, adept at building long-voyaging vessels and navigating the open seas. Read more...
New findings rekindle old debates about when the first people arrived and why their civilization collapsed. Read more...
During the 19th Century, ancient artifacts containing a set of etched symbols were discovered on the world-renowned Easter Island, a small remote island located a few thousand miles west of South America, and famous for the hundreds of giant monolithic anthropomorphic statues called moai. The intricate designs appear to be glyphs, or a form of writing, but the meaning of the glyphs has never been deciphered. Some believe that decoding the mysterious writing could offer answers into what caused the collapse of the ancient Easter Island civilization. Read more...
Rapa Nui’s mysterious moai statues stand in silence but speak volumes about the achievements of their creators. The stone blocks, carved into head-and-torso figures, average 13 feet (4 metres) tall and 14 tons. The effort to construct these monuments and move them around the island must have been considerable—but no one knows exactly why the Rapa Nui people undertook such a task. Most scholars suspect that the moai were created to honour ancestors, chiefs, or other important personages, However, no written and little oral history exists on the island, so it’s impossible to be certain. Read more...
Practically everyone has seen the iconic images of the Easter Island heads. What you may not have known is that those Easter Island heads actually have hidden buried bodies. Archaeologists have uncovered the bodies associated with the heads and found interesting discoveries that further our knowledge of the Easter Island civilization and how they created the monoliths. Read more...