EASTER ISLAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 280, 26 November 1938, Page 8

EASTER ISLAND.

NO GREAT MYSTERY.

(By J.C.)

The ]ate Dr. Macmillan Brown was the most prolific in theories anions all the scientific and semi-scientific investigators of Easter Island and its so-called mvsterie6. The Chilian (iovernmcnt paid him the compliment of taking him from Wellington to the island in one of.it* Navy training ships. I encountered him oji the O.P-.0. steps in the capital on the day of his departure and he delivered in his best professoria'l loot tire-platform manner and far-currying voice a discourse on what he expected to find there and 'what he expected to solve. There were quite a lot of interested listeners. Macmillan Brown produced the customary volume, which thickened the fog of theories upon theories concerning the famous t-tonc statues, the statue-makers, the past of the island, and the whence of the imagecarvers. A few years ago. when l>r. Peter Buck. the greatest of Polynesian scholars and lield workers, took time from his Bishop Museum duties nt Honolulu to revisit his native country. 1 made the suggestion to him that if he ever visited Easter Island he would he more likely to solve the problems that had been piled up about it than a if\- of those who had made such a mystery of in the past. He won'ld be the first inquirer who could speak to the natives in their Polynesian tongue, which is almost pure Maori. Of all the archaeologists and ethnologists who had been there, not one possessed the first essentia], knowledge of the language; least of all Macm ilia n Brown, great and learned Pacific voyager though he was. They could not get direct touch with the remnant of the islanders. Te Rangihiroa agreed with me. and regretted it was not possible for him to make an expedition to the island, because the Bishop Museum [authorities, with himse'lf. had agreed to await the report of European scientists already 011 the spot. Thai report has been published, and it does not clarify the Rapanui situation; rather it thickens the pea soup. Weight of the Images. Now. in Te KangihirnaV latest book on Polynesian peoples and islands and traditions, "Vikings of the Sunrise.'' there is a chapter on Easter Tsland which seems to be the most sensible view yet taken of its statue-making era. Dr. Buck, though not able to visit the island, has brought all his wide experience of the Pacific groii|>s to bear on the problem. The depopulation of the island by the cruel Peruvian slavers three-quarters of a century ago is sufficient to account for the lack of knowledge about the great stone statues and their origin, but enough is evident, in Dr.' Buck's view, to show that the making and shifting of the images did not necessarily require such a large population as Macmillan Brown and others imagined. *'I doubt." the author says, "jf the images were heavier thttn tlie logs that the Maoris dragged from the forest for their x\ - canoes fir for the onepiece ridgepoles of t '.mmr large meeting houses. I nited man-power can accomplish much, especially when such public works were made the occasion for a festival. with feasting according to Polynesian custom." Brown's assumption that the images could be moved only by thousands of slaves coming from an imaginary archipelago is based chiefly on one image fifty feet high which was never removed from the quarry. The average height of the images is ten to fifteen feet, and their weight between four arid five tons. The nation of image-makers evidently origina'lly came from the Marquesas. Stone Age Efficiency. The Easter Islanders, in Te Rangihiroa's view, have been badly treated by ]>opular writers. Erroneous assertions have' been piled up one after another to make their arts and crafts appear poor and futile that the task of making the stone images and of transporting them would appear to be beyond the capacity of the ancestors of the present people. The mystery has been deepened by regarding the art tablets as a form of script, and so foreign to Polynesian culture. They are simply pictorial, and not a form of written language. "Because Western people are now incapable

of making stone images without steel tools and of transporting them without modern machinery, the very culture of the Easter Islander* has been attributed to a mythical people who never existed. Yet the fac' remains that the descendant* of Hotu-matut used the raw material of their little island tc an extent that the Western mind seems tc find difficulty in realising." There is a wit characteristic of Te Rangihiroa in his fina' word, that "the resurrection of an extinct civilisation from a sunken continent to dr what the Kaster Islanders accomplished unaided is surely the greatest compliment ever paid to an efficient Stone Age people."