By Betsa Marsh

Stephen Colbert would love Easter Island. The Comedy Central host of  “The Colbert Report” has coined the term “truthiness,” a sliding scale of accuracy that suits the presenter of the facts. Sort of a Wikipedia world view.

 

Travelers to Easter Island are encouraged to come to the little Chilean outpost with their own pet theories about the stone colossi that tower over mortals. Try a hypothesis, see how it fits the prehistoric giants and the people who carved them. Since there is no airtight archaeological proof, chances are you’ll go home with your own brand of Easter Island truthiness.

 

“You’ll have more questions when you leave the island than before you came,” suggests Maria Lilian “China” Pakarati, an islander who teaches English and leads tours. After three days of climbing up volcanic cones, shimmying into caves and staring up at hundreds of gargantuan statues, I have to say the woman speaks the truth—no “truthiness” about it.

Did You Know?   Only one moai has been reset with eyes: this lone figure on Ahu Ko Te Riku at Tahai. Just one eye has been found during excavations, on display in the island’s anthropological museum. Some Rapanui speculate that enemies of the moai culture smashed the eyes to squash the statues’ power.

 

The confusion starts even with the name. Four thousand islanders call their home Rapa Nui, “Big Land.” When they’re feeling poetic, it’s Mata Kite Rangi, “Eyes Looking at Heaven.”

 

Then, 19th-century Christian missionaries landed and added “The Navel of the World,” according to Pakarati’s timetable. Then Chile annexed the world’s most remote inhabited island in 1888 and christened it Isla de Pascua.

 

‘Don’t Call Us Easter Islanders’

 

That, of course, is Spanish for Easter Island, the least popular name.

 

“We’re Rapanui,” Pakarati insisted. “Don’t call us Easter Islanders.” The island itself is Rapa Nui, the people, Rapanui.

 

Easter Island comes from the European discovery of the island about Easter Day 1722, when Dutch Admiral Jacob Roggeveen spotted land, anchored for one day, then sailed off. But not before leaving his mark.

 

“This European captain shot 15 natives at his first chance,” Pakarati said hotly. Many historians set the death count at 13 islanders, but regardless, it was a bloody harbinger of what the Rapanui could expect when outsiders came calling.

 

Instead of 1722, “I think we were discovered about 400 A.D., when Hotu Matua (“Prolific Father”) came ashore,” said Pakarati, referring to the legendary founding monarch. “Every Rapanui believes we came from the West, from Polynesia. You see our eyes?”

 

The origin of the Rapanui people is one of the biggest “truthiness” issues. The late Thor Heyerdahl, fabled Norwegian explorer who sailed his balsa-wood boat Kon-Tiki from Peru to the Tuamoto Islands in the South Pacific, was convinced that Rapa Nui had two waves of migration. The first came about 800-900 A.D. from South America on the prevailing currents; the second, against the waves, from Polynesia.

 

Most archaeologists now dismiss Heyerdahl, including archaeologist Peter Bellwood. “The peoples of Oceania deserve the credit for their achievements, not the peoples of some imaginary Mediterranean colonial enterprise.”         

 

Anthropologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii, who excavated on Rapa Nui from 2000-2004, puts the achievements in an even tighter timeframe, suggesting colonization as late as 1200.

 

For Pakarati, “our oral tradition is almost always opposite to what the archaeologists say.”

 

How to sort through the contradictions? The best way is to pull on some hiking boots and hit the UNESCO trails—the entire island is a World Heritage Site.

 

But isn’t it just one giant head after another? No, each altar is a different era, construction and condition, telling different parts of this complex tale.

           

In a frenzy of devotion from 900-1600 A.D.—on some researchers’ truthiness timeline--workers slung basalt picks and chiseled giants from the side of a volcano. Each behemoth took a year to 18 months to carve, cut away from the rock face and lower safely to the quarry floor. Transporting the giants—often 20 feet tall and 20 tons—over miles of volcanic rubble was another project altogether.

 

Shopping for Moai

 

For Pakarati, these “living faces”--moai in Rapanui (pronounced moe eye)—represented not gods but dead kings and honored ancestors, re-animated to protect the villages they loomed over. “As soon as someone important died, the people went to the factory and said ‘I want that moai on the altar.’”

 

With 387 of the island’s 888 moai suspended in the quarry—leaning, buried to their chests or still supine on the carving block—the overwhelming question is “What happened?” Workers dropped their picks and walked off the job site forever.

Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island, is isolated in the Pacific, about midway between mainland Chile and Tahiti.   LAN Chile Airlines is the only airline that flies to Easter Island from Santiago, Chile, and from Papeete, Tahiti. LAN Chile, 866-435-9526; www.lanchile.com.   There is a reciprocity fee for those entering Chile with U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Australian passports. The fee is U.S. $131 for those with U.S. passports, payable by cash or credit card. It’s important to complete the forms and pay the fee at the kiosk in the immigration area before getting in line at the immigration booths. The receipt is good for the duration of your passport. No visa is required for either Canadian or American citizens. www.chile-usa.org/fastfacts.htm   For more information about the cultural heritage of Easter Island, Easter Island Foundation: http://islandheritage.org/index.html   For more information on Chile: www.visitchile.org.

 

 

Was it war? Regime change? Religious upheaval? Or did they simply run out of trees to move the moai to their altars?

 

Not only is the work stoppage enigma unsolved, but the logistics still torment researchers. How did they move the blocky statues? Current thought is that the moai shuffled along on a path of flat stones, propelled up and forward. Men on either side pulled on ropes attached to a massive log at the statue’s back. Imagine moving a refrigerator on steroids.

 

This image suits the ancestors’ contention that the moai “walked” to their appointed spots, but no supposition answers every point. Pakarati’s truthiness?

 

“Mana is the force that comes through the gods. Rapanui still believe that through the power of mana the statues moved.”

 

Resurrecting Toppled Gods

 

However they first arrived, each statue now standing owes a lot to human help. From about 1600 until the last moai was flattened in 1838, Rapanui culture convulsed in a civil cataclysm, the old worship reviled and the moai toppled. Today’s standing moai were restored by modern archaeologists.

 

Surely there were records of such revolution? In one of the most profound ironies of this search for truth, the Rapanui were the only Polynesians to develop a writing system, the rongo rongo script. Missionaries ordered the pagan documents, inscribed on wooden tables, burned, and today you see only copies at the island’s Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum.

 

Undaunted, three generations of archaeologists have toiled to reset more than 30 moai onto altars. Heyerdahl raised the first during his 1955-56 expedition, camping on Anakena Beach where King Hotu Matua was said to come ashore. In a 1992-96 collaboration between archaeologist Claudius Cristino and the Moai Restoration Committee of Japan, a giant crane lifted 15 statues—the largest historic relics on Rapa Nui--onto an altar near the waves at Tongariki.

 

Visit each site and soon a tour becomes a quest: Why the pointy nose? What’s with the long ears? Hey, there’s a female moai over here. A good guide is essential.

 

As long as travelers keep off the sacred altars and don’t touch the petroglyphs, they’re free to gawk and daydream till the sun goes down. And beyond—each sunset, photographers gather at the moai in a quiet, reflective mood.

 

Centuries after these leviathans were carved, they still retain some of their mute power—can it be mana? Our group of travelers starts to anthropomorphize these stony giants, saddened when we see them face down. We even debate: Is it better to have “lived” on the altar and been deposed, or to have been left behind in eternal anticipation at the quarry?

 

Each day, the statues become more real as the expert theories become shaker. I’ve read and read about this mysterious island, and now I think I’ll let my own experience with these blind, brooding monoliths become my personal “truthiness” of Rapa Nui.

          

Yet more moai? There’s more than stony giants on Rapa Nui. Climb up to the Birdman rocks. After the era of the moai and civil war, Rapanui leaders may have instituted the Birdman ceremony about 1600 to restore social and political stability. Orongo, at the top of the Rano Kau crater, was the ceremonial center, with 53 houses now restored. From these cliffs, inscribed with Birdman petroglyphs, the community watched as the Iron Men of their day paddled out to small islands where the sooty tern nested each spring. The first man back with an intact egg—usually strapped to his forehead—was Birdman for the year, a position of near-limitless power. Christian missionaries stopped all this frivolity in 1866. Grab a suit and head for Rapa Nui’s little dabs of sand. Most of the coastline is an inhospitable jumble of black volcanic boulders, but dainty little Ovahe Beach opens its arms with soft white sand. Just around the cove, Akahena Beach attracts more visitors, framed as it is with palms brought from Tahiti. This is the beach where King Hotu Matua first came ashore, according to the oral tradition, and where explorer Thor Heyerdahl camped with the first scientific expedition in 1955-56. He re-erected the first fallen moai, still on its platform, Ahu Ature Huki. On the same beach in the 1970s, Rapanui archaeologist Sergio Rapu added a large altar, Ahu Nau Nau, for seven statues, some so well-preserved that you can see their tattoos and clothes. Here, Rapu’s team found the only eye of a moai yet to surface; it’s now in the Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum on Rapa Nui. Nearly every visitor to Rapa Nui is called to see the moai at sunrise or sunset—or both. From the hotels in the island’s only town, Hanga Roa, it’s an easy walk along the coast road to the statues at Tahai-Ko Te Riku. Horses and rental cars can take you to all the other altars. Don’t skip church. Nothing says Rapanui like swaying to their music, hearing their language and holding their hands; you can do all three at Sunday Mass. In high season, it’s often SRO at the Santa Cruz Church, with travelers crowding in to hear the trilingual service—Rapanui, Spanish and dashes of English. A band of guitars, drum and accordion leads the choir and congregation in waltz rhythms, and towards the end of the service, everyone moves close to clasp hands and hold them high. We wish each other “Peace” and realize that magic still happens on this mystical isle.