Easter Island Heads Age

The Easter Island or Rape Nui - Tales from the museum floor

Isle of Easter or Rapa Nui, as the people of the island call it, is an island in the southern Pacific. Situated 3700 km off the coastline of the Latin America mainland, it is one of the most remote and populated places on the planet. This island was created 3 million years ago, when a gigantic volcano began to emerge from the seas.

The island as we know it today was the scene of countless explosions, the last 300,000 years ago. It is on a volcanic rock face, but without it there would be no island. It is said that the Rapanui set up there between 300 and 1200 AD and were of Polish descent.

Rapanui are Spanish speakers, but initially they were speaking the ancient Rapanui, which is an East Polish one. Rapanui built sculptures of stones or mai in various parts of the island, most of them upcountry. Sculptures were placed on stony ceremony stages, named Ahu, around the coast. They look into the interior to the towns as if they were guarding the population.

More than 800 sculptures were made on the island. Most of them are made of vulcanic tufa and have large heads and longish lines. Eye was only used for ceremonials when the sculptures were'activated'. Rapanui carried out a ritual from the point of childbirth, among other things when the umbilical cords were severed, the first haircuts, the first tattoos and growing up.

Calling on the ancestors' help through the sculptures, the Rapanui thought that their ancestor's ghosts would come to their rescue if needed. The number of inhabitants of the island may have increased to about 15,000 before the Europeans found the island in 1700. At the beginning of the nineteenth centuary Easter Island became the port of call for whalers and other boats.

Rapanui had little opposition to the illnesses that the ship's crew carried. By 1862, the Peruvians, who were engaged in so-called "blackbirding" attacks, had captive inhabitants of the island working in South America. Rapanui's few who came back carried contagious illnesses that caused the death of a large number of those who remained on the island.

Approximately one thousand of the island' s people were deported to be slaves, and the rest of the populace was ravaged by the pox, all of which helped to bring down the Rapanui. In the 1870' s there were only 111 Rapanui left on the island. Situated in 1888 part of Chile and in 2002 it was recorded that the island's total settlement was around 3,304 people, almost all of whom live in the west coastal town of Hanga Roa.