Easier Island

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 72, 26 March 1936, Page 12

Easier Island

INSCRIPTIONS ON ROCKS MOST DIFFICULT PROBLEM HONOLULU, March 9. Easter Island’s colossal stone statues are far less baffling to science than are the inscriptions graven upon rocks throughout the island. This, at least, is the opinion of Dr. Alfred Mctraux, a Frenchman, who is in residence at the' Bishop Museum in Honolulu, after spending five months in research on Easter Island. The statues, Dr. Mctraux believes, could have been constructed with no particular difficulty and could have been moved, by 400 to 500 men hauling on ropes, to tho various places where they have been set up. Ho found that it was no task to transport, by means of rollers and a group of 60 Easter Islanders, tho two 30-ton images which he removed and sent home by steamer “But,” he said, “the present-day natives know little or nothing of their past. They have no idea what the tall hats on the images represent and are utterly unable to say what the images themselves were for. However, the origin of the statues is not an unsolvablo problem. The picture writing is far more difficult to deal with. I think it is not scripture, in spite of tho religious tendencies of the old Polynesian stock on the island, but, rather, is true pictography. No one has yet been a!;]'' to read the meaning expressed in tbs pictures.” Dr. Metraux found 450 people living on Easter Island. The natives, he said, were intelligent, with an extraordinary facility for adapting themselves to anything- new. In spite of their isolation they have a keen interest in the doings of the outside world.