Birdman 4

When Roggeveen arrived in 1722, he found 887 upright stony-faced moai statues. They had been carved from 1100 to 1680 AD, almost all with basalt hand chisels out of the solidified volcanic tuff ash at the Rano Raraku quarry. Each clan had its own territory. It took six men a year to complete a single moai. The largest ever made was over 69 feet high, and weighed 270 tons, although most averaged a paltry 13 feet high, and 14 tons.
Nearly half of all the moai ever created were still staring at Robyn and I, at Rano Raruku, waiting to descend to their descendents. They were gigantic chess pieces in the game of Southern Sea survival, carved in minimalist flat planes, with proud unfathomable faces on overly large heads. The ones that had made it off the slopes were meant to have rust red scoria pukao topknots added at the bottom. Their brows were heavy, over orbits, slit deep to receive the rocks and coral that would color their eye parts. Ears were elongated oblong rectangles, and their sharp chins set their strong jaws out over truncated necks on heavy torsos with subtly outlined clavicles. White lichens had appeared, a few millimeters every decade, as age spots, for that many years. Their noses were long and broad with sneering fishhook-curled nostrils, over protruding lips pursed into a thin pout. The message was anything but blithe, except for the Percy Shelley Ozymandian kind. Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair.
A theory, and when it comes to Easter Island, there are always theories that come to Easter Island, exists that the physical features of the moai represent essential signs of leprosy in a reversed overcorrected form, in an attempt to ritually ‘undo’ the ravages and ‘existential shock’ that the disease had visited on the general population. It was propounded by Dr. Anneliese Pontius, a psychiatrist from Harvard, to explain the aesthetic preference of a people whose main diet, before they began to eat each other, was probably the Polynesian rat. I’m thinking no.
The big mystery about the moai, however, was not how they were created, but how they got to where they were going. What we do know is that, by the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, the island was treeless. These stone figures caused us to be filled with wonder, for we could not understand how it was possible that people who are destitute of heavy or thick timber, and also of stout cordage, out of which to construct gear, had been able to erect them.
We know from the pollen record that it was totally forested up to 1200 AD, and that tree pollen was gone by 1650. Because that’s when the statues stopped being made, we infer a relationship with the trees. The latest theory about transportation was that the moai were literally ‘walked’ to their ahu terraces by rocking and tilting them down the hill, from side to side. Whether the 250 men needed to move each stone statue employed ropes, sledges, lubricated rollers, tracks, A-frames, or cantilevered posts, is of specialized interest, but doesn’t change the fact that Rapanui obsession with their Ancestor Cult was the principal instrument of their own destruction.
Robyn and I posed for the usual foolish optically delusional photos of us pushing up falling moai, lying down beside the ones with broken backs and whispering in their oblong ears, and generally celebrating our own private festival of indecorous desecration.
We hiked around the crested corner, past lone striated moai on the internal caldera slopes, to the freshwater volcanic lake, its rushes and wild horses, and a massive murmuring nest of bees, in a rock hollow, on the way back out. Where had they come from?
And where had the maroon and white painted upright Ancestral statues gone? By the time that Cook arrived in 1754, he had a similar impression as that of his predecessor. We could hardly conceive how these islanders, wholly unacquainted with any mechanical power, could raise such stupendous figures, and afterwards place the large cylindric stones upon their heads.