easter island
One of the most famous yet least visited archaeological sites in the world, Easter Island is a small, hilly, now treeless island of volcanic origin. Located in the Pacific Ocean at 27 degrees south of the equator and about 2,200 miles (3600 kilometers) off the coast of Chile, is considered to be most remote inhabited island in the world.
easter island image
Sixty-three square miles in size and with three extinct volcanoes (the highest increase of 1,674 feet), the island is, technically speaking, a single massive volcano rising over ten thousand meters above the floor of the Pacific Ocean. The oldest known traditional name of the island is Te Pito Te or Henua, which means ‘the center (or navel) of the World’. In 1860 the Tahitian sailors gave the island the name Rapa Nui, meaning ‘Great Rapa,’ due to its resemblance to another island in Polynesia called Rapa Iti, meaning ‘Little Rapa’. The island received its name from the current best-known Dutch sea captain Jacob Roggeveen, who, on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722, became the first European to visit.
easter island picture
SacredSites.com © Photograph courtesy of Martin Gray
The Moai statues of Rapa Nui.
In the early 1950s, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl (famous for his Kon-Tiki and Ra raft voyages across the oceans) popularized the idea that the island was originally settled by advanced societies of Indians on the coast of South America . Extensive research into the archaeological, ethnographic, linguistic, and has definitely proved the hypothesis to be inaccurate.
easter island wallpaper
And ‘now recognized that the original inhabitants of Easter Island are of Polynesian stock (DNA extracts from skeletons have recently confirmed), which probably came from the Marquesas Islands or society, and who had arrived as early as 318 AD (carbon dating cane serious confirms this). Upon their arrival, the island was entirely covered with thick forests, was full of land birds, and was the richest breeding site for seabirds in the Polynesia region. Within a few centuries, this profusion of wildlife was destroyed because of the islanders’ life. The reasons are very clear today.
easter island images
It is estimated that the original settlers, who may have been lost at sea, arrived in only a few canoes and numbered less than 100. Because of the abundant birds, fish and plant sources of food, the population grew rapidly and gave rise to a rich religious culture and the arts. However, the resource needs of the growing population inevitably exceeded the capacity of the island to renew itself ecologically and the ensuing environmental degradation triggered a collapse of social and cultural. Pollen records show that destruction of forests was well under way by the year 800, only a few centuries after the start of the first settlement. These forest trees were extremely important for the islanders, being used as fuel for the construction of houses and canoes to ocean fishing, and as rollers to transport the large stone statues. By 1400 the forests were completely cut, the rich ground cover had eroded, the springs had dried, and the vast flocks of birds coming to stay on the island had long since disappeared. In the absence of logs to build canoes for offshore fishing, with depleted bird and wildlife food sources, and with declining crop yields due to soil erosion good, the nutritional intake of the population collapsed. famine, then cannibalism, set in. Because the island could no longer feed, heads of the bureaucrats and priests who kept the complex society running, chaos resulted, and by 1700 the population dropped to between one quarter and one-tenth of its former number. During the 1700s rival clans began to topple another half stone statues. By 1864 the last of the statues was thrown down and desecrated.
SacredSites.com © Photograph courtesy of Martin Gray
The Moai statues, Easter Island
Drylands and social struggles that Admiral Roggeveen reported during his visit in 1722 make it difficult to imagine the extraordinary culture that had flourished on the island over the past 1400 years. that features the most popular culture is its enormous stone statues called moai, at least 288 of which once stood on massive stone platforms called ahu. There are about 250 of these ahu platforms spaced approximately half a mile away and the creation of an almost continuous line along the perimeter of the island. Other 600 moai statues, in various stages of completion, are scattered throughout the island, both in quarries or along ancient roads between the quarries and the coastal areas where the statues have been erected more often. Nearly all the moai are carved in hard stone of the volcano Rano Raraku. The average statue is 14 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 14 tons. Some moai were as large as 33 feet and weighed over 80 tons (one statue only partially extracted from the rock was 65 feet long and would have weighed about 270 tons).
SacredSites.com © Photograph courtesy of Martin Gray
The Moai statues, Easter Island
The moai and UTA, already in use in 700 AD, but the great majority were carved and built between AD 1000 and 1650. Depending on the size of the statue, between 50 and 150 people were needed to drag it through the countryside on sleds and rollers made from trees on the island. While many of the statues were toppled during the clan wars of 1600 and 1700, other statues fell and broke during transport across the island. Recent research has shown that certain statue sites, particularly those leading to the great ahu platforms, were periodically ritually dismantled and reassembled with ever bigger statues. A small number of the moai were once covered with ‘crowns’ or ‘hat’ of red volcanic stone. The meaning and purpose of these capstones is not known, but archaeologists have suggested that the moai thus marked were of pan-island ritual significance or perhaps sacred to a particular clan.
Scholars are able to definitively explain the function and operation of the Moai statues. It is assumed that their sculpture and installation derived from an idea rooted in similar practices found elsewhere in Polynesia but which evolved in a unique way on Easter Island. Archaeological and iconographic analysis indicates that the statue cult was based on an ideology of male, lineage-based authority incorporating anthropomorphic symbols. The statues were thus symbols of authority and power, both religious and political. But they were not just symbols. For the people who built and used them, were the royal archives of the sacred spirit. carved stone and wooden objects in ancient Polynesian religions, when properly fashion and ritually prepared, were believed to be charged by a magical spiritual essence called mana. The ahu platforms of Easter Island were the sanctuaries of the people of Rapa Nui and the Moai statues were ritually charged sacred objects of those sanctuaries. While the statues were toppled and re-built over the centuries, the mana or spiritual presence of Rapa Nui is still strongly present in the ahu sites and atop the sacred volcanoes.
Mystery surrounds the purpose of the ahu platforms and moai statues but even more perplexing mysteries have begun to emerge from the research of scholars outside the boundaries of conventional archeology. As previously mentioned, orthodox archaeologists believe that Easter Island was first settled around 318 AD by a small group of Polynesians lost at sea. Other scholars, however, have suggested that the small island could be part of the island was once much larger and that the original discovery and use of the site can be many thousands of years earlier in time (you know, for example, Melanesians who were traveling by boat around the Pacific as early as 5500 BC). Three researchers in particular, Graham Hancock, Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-Ath, believe that Easter Island was an important node in a global grid of sacred geography before the great floods of archaic times. Easter Island, writes Graham Hancock, is “part of a massive subterranean escarpment called the East Pacific Rise, which almost reaches the surface in several places. Twelve years ago, when the great ice sheets of the last glaciation were still largely unmelted , and the sea level was 100 meters lower than it is today, the rise would form a chain of steep and narrow antediluvian islands, provided that the Andes. “At that time, the land we now call Easter Island would simply be the highest peak of a much larger island. The fascinating question posed by Hancock, Wilson and Flem-Ath is whether this much larger island had been discovered and settled before the melting of ice caps.
In addition to its better known name of Rapa Nui, Easter Island is also known as Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua, which means ‘navel of the world’, and as Mata-Ki-Te-Rani, who means ‘eyes watching the sky’. These ancient names and a host of mythological details ignored by mainstream archaeologists point to the possibility that the remote island may once have been both a geodetic marker and the site of an astronomical observatory of a civilization long forgotten. Speculation on this antediluvian culture include the notion that shadow his sailors had drawn the world’s oceans, that its astronomers had sophisticated knowledge of the long term astronomical cycles such as precession and cometary orbits, and that its historians had records of previous disasters global and destruction caused even more ancient civilizations. In his book, Heaven’s Mirror, Hancock suggests that Easter Island may once have been a significant scientific outpost of this antediluvian civilization and that its position was of the utmost importance in a planet-spanning, mathematically precise grid of sacred sites. He writes: “The very existence of such an ancient world grid has been staunchly resisted by mainstream archaeologists and historians – as, of course, have all attempts to link the sites known to it. However, the traces of lost astronomical knowledge that defined you see on Easter Island, and the echoes of ancient Egyptian applicants and spiritual cosmological themes, cast doubt on the scientific explanation ‘Navel of the World’ the strange name has been adopted for reasons purely ‘poetic and descriptive’. We suspect that the Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua originally were selected for settlement, and gave his name, all because of its geodetic position. “” What we are suggesting is that Easter Island might be origin have been solved in order to serve as a sort of geodetic beacon, or marker – fulfilling some unguessed still in operation in the old system of global air-ground co-ordinates that linked ‘many’ navel of the world ‘so-called.
Two other alternative scholars, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, have extensively studied the location and possible function of these geodetic markers. In their fascinating book, Uriel’s machine, they suggest that one purpose of the geodetic markers was as part of the global network of sophisticated astronomical observatories dedicated to predicting and preparing for future meteoric impacts and crustal displacement cataclysms. The great floods of archaic myths did not result only from the melting of the ice between 13,000 and 8000 BC, but also from two great cataclysms that occurred during and after the melting of ice caps. These cataclysmic events, a large displacement of the planet Earth’s crust in 9600 BC, and the seven cometary impacts of 7640 BC, led to massive waves (3-5 Miles High, traveling at over 400 mph for distances up to 2000 miles) , volcanic activity and other earth changes recorded in myths all over the planet. Before the melting of ice caps and these catastrophic events, however, a great maritime civilization may have existed, with its cities along the coastlines now submerged beneath the seas.
