Explorer Thor Heyerdahl & the Easter Island Heads (Moai) (1 Viewer)

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Laron

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Wearing the blue shirt, Norwegian adventurer, and ethnographer, Thor Heyerdahl, excavated this Easter Island statue back in 1954-55. Heyerdahl became notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he sailed 8,000 km (5,000 mi) across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition was designed to demonstrate that ancient people could have made long sea voyages, creating contacts between separate cultures—linked to a diffusionist model of cultural development.

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Archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg, who’s director of the Easter Island Statue Project (http://www.eisp.org/), has been lecturing and writing about Easter Island’s iconic monolithic statues for years. Her project in association with UCLA, is the first legally permitted archaeological project in the quarry since Heyerdahl's dig. She and her team of resident Rapa Nui have spent nine years locating and meticulously documenting nearly 1,000 statues on the island, determining their symbolic meaning and function, as well as conserving them using state-of-the-art techniques.

But who built them? Is it a mystery? Are they older than we are told?

What do you think?

Wikipedia states: "The statues were carved by the Polynesian colonizers of the island, mostly between circa 1250 A.D. and 1500 A.D. In addition to representing deceased ancestors, the moai, once they were erected on ahu, may also have been regarded as the embodiment of powerful living or former chiefs and important lineage status symbols. Each moai presented a status: "The larger the statue placed upon an ahu, the more mana the chief who commissioned it had." The competition for grandest statue was ever prevalent in the culture of the Easter Islanders. The proof stems from the varying sizes of moai."
 

Snowmelt

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Maori tiki often have inlaid eyes of jade or paua shell. Imagine the large eye sockets of the Moai inlaid with a precious stone. That would be a ton of jade! I've heard the inlay was sometimes red. Do you know what that would be?

thVQHM4PMP.jpg
 
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Laron

Laron

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Imagine the large eye sockets of the Moai inlaid with a precious stone.
That would be a sight to see!

Do you know what that would be?
"A Chilean museum official, analyzing bits of old stone and coral found recently on Easter Island, which belongs to Chile, has concluded that the centuries‐old stone figures of beetlebrewed human beings that dot the island originally had huge inlaid eyes with red pupils, a New York museum official reported yesterday (...) “We thought that they were finished merely with the carving of the eye sockets, but now we realize that the inlaying of these highly naturalistic eyes, made of red volcanic lava and white coral, gave a much more powerful effect to the entire piece of sculpture.” (Source)
 

Snowmelt

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That would be a sight to see!



"A Chilean museum official, analyzing bits of old stone and coral found recently on Easter Island, which belongs to Chile, has concluded that the centuries‐old stone figures of beetlebrewed human beings that dot the island originally had huge inlaid eyes with red pupils, a New York museum official reported yesterday (...) “We thought that they were finished merely with the carving of the eye sockets, but now we realize that the inlaying of these highly naturalistic eyes, made of red volcanic lava and white coral, gave a much more powerful effect to the entire piece of sculpture.” (Source)
Well thanks, that really fills in the picture I had in my head. From the description of the finished sculptured head with inlaid eyes, the effect would have been potent.
 

Snowmelt

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While making an earlier thread of mine, about Denisovans, I learned that these early hominid people (more giant in stature than us) may have island hopped across to South America via Mongolia/China/South East Asia (Thailand/Malaysia/Indonesia and/or Australia). So the makers of the Easter Island sculptured heads may not have been Polynesians arriving in boats, but perhaps an interbred early human making images in their own likeness.
 
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therium

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