This week’s dream: the stark beauty of Easter Island
Historians and anthropologists have spent decades studying Easter Island, and the stone figures, or moai, that lie scattered across its landscape. But much of what has happened here seems “beyond comprehension”, says Stanley Stewart in the FT. Its native inhabitants arrived around 1200AD, and it is likely the statues they made represent “protective, deified ancestors”, much like the smaller idols found elsewhere in Polynesia. But how the people got here (the nearest island, Pitcairn, is more than 1,200 miles away), how they erected the monuments (many weigh in excess of 70 tonnes), and why they created so many of them – all this remains “a teetering pyramid of riddles and puzzles”.
Mainland Chile – from which the island is governed – lies more than 2,000 miles away, and once you’ve crossed its coast, you don’t pass over a single speck of land on the five-hour flight from Santiago. With its rocky shoreline, miles of open moorland, lonely roads, stone walls and wild horses, the island itself is curiously like the west of Ireland, despite its tropical climate. Your first stop might be Rano Raraku, the quarry where the statues were carved. Dozens remain here “in various stages of production”, some still “encased” in the surrounding rock. Almost 1,000 of them were erected elsewhere. Moving them into place would have been a huge and costly feat of engineering. But by the time Europeans arrived in the 18th century, production had already ceased, and the island had fallen into poverty. It is thought that overuse of natural resources contributed to social collapse; and European diseases wrought further devastation. Perhaps feeling the gods had abandoned them, the locals started toppling the statues. Tourism, however, has revived the island’s fortunes, and at Ahu Tongariki, a Japanese firm raised 15 of the statues again in the 1990s. They stand shoulder to shoulder, facing inland as all their stony brethren once did – perhaps “keeping an eye on their descendants” once more.