Easter Island discovery sends archaeologists back to drawing board

Archaeologists have disproved the fifty-year-old theory underpinning our understanding of how the famous stone statues were moved around Easter Island.

Fieldwork led by researchers at University College London and The University of Manchester, has shown the remote Pacific island’s ancient road system was primarily ceremonial and not solely built for transportation of the figures.

A complex network of roads up to 800-years-old crisscross the Island between the hat and statue quarries and the coastal areas.

Laying alongside the roads are dozens of the statues- or moai.

The find will create controversy among the many archaeologists who have dedicated years to finding out exactly how the moai were moved, ever since Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl first published his theory in 1958.

Heyerdahl and subsequent researchers believed that statues he found lying on their backs and faces near the roads were abandoned during transportation by the ancient Polynesians.

But his theory has been completely rejected by the team led by Manchester’s Dr Colin Richards and UCL’s Dr Sue Hamilton.

Instead, their discovery of stone platforms associated with each fallen moai - using specialist ‘geophysical survey’ equipment – finally confirms a little known 1914 theory of British archaeologist Katherine Routledge that the routes were primarily ceremonial avenues.

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http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=5722

This is how good archaeology is done.

Of course, now we have to figure out how they moved the damn things now...

Especially when that something is the only thing you need to transport?

When did the volcano god cease to need placating worship?

They are part of religious worship. People perform certain rituals that require them to move from place to place.

The Nazca lines in Peru are now considered to be ceremonial paths. There were ceremonial roads around Stonehenge in England.

To ancient peoples, roads were not just avenues of transportation, they were pathways to illumination.

And "pathways to illumination" is just too much New Age gunk to me. It cuts off critical examination in a broad generality which actually means nothing.

But the ceremonial paths between woodhenge, stonehenge, and avebury were used in various rituals for the dead. They were not used to transport crops or stuff.

No,illumination isn't new age gunk. If you want to understand why ancient peoples did things you have to try and look at it the same way they did. For instance, the Celts created mazes. Walking that maze was recreating a mythical journey. Literally, they believed that they became closer to their gods by performing such rites. They sought illumination, spiritual illumination.

Ceremonial roads are made to perform a spiritual function to a people that believed in such things.

That is not to say there weren't roads made for other purposes. The Incas and the other cultures that lived in the Andes made roads thousands of miles long for use in trade. Those roads were not create for the express purpose of religious worship.

A ceremonial path or road is made only for worship. It serves the purpose of bringing those who walk ceremonial paths closer to God as they saw it. Often such roads recreated some mythical journey by a culture hero. It gave them illumination or insight into what they believed was the divine.

Once his mind was made up, all the facts in the universe couldn't change it. Come to think of it that pretty much describes archeologists as a whole! lol

Of course.

So that would tend to support Heyerdahl's theory. Although I would have thought DNA studies would have settled the issue by now.

I don't understand why the roads being concaved proves the statues weren't moved along them, or why their being ceremonial would prevent such movement. It seems to me that a concave road would make a better slide for the statues--wet the road down and slide the stone a few feet. Maybe the dirt isn't conducive to that, I don't know. That's why I want to see the actual article. These popular-consumption summaries are so vague they don't mean anything.

Also, maybe the statues are more numerous by the volcano because it was easier to move them the shorter distance, and maybe there are land rights closer to the coast that we aren't aware of that made them less willing to place statues there. I'd love to see more of why they thing it had to be sacred ceremony instead of just land use custom. I've known other historians and archaeologists who go straight for the religious explanation on everything just because they want to find it there.

Note to self--dig up whole article. This really undermines all the 8th grade reports I did on Easter Island. :)

:rofl: