Is Easter Island part of Chile

Catastrophe of Easter Island - Part 1

In February 2013, on a breezy early vernal day, I left the Lan Peru Jets for the Easter Island/Rapa Nui Launcher. One group of WEX members and I had got on the airplane the evening before in Lima, Peru, and would now be spending the next four nights on the small but enigmatic island.

So we rented a van that took us around the island and marvelled at the huge sculptures and huge stone wall made of megalit. They claimed, as I assumed, that the production of the sculptures was quite new and that most of the secrets associated with the island had been resolved.

If smaller ones would probably have fulfilled the same function, why did the inhabitants of the island dig up and move such giant sculptures? And why are the sculptures bury with up to 30 ft of earth? Has this been done intentionally or has a millennia-old bottom formation developed around the sculptures?

What made the people of the island think that placing sculptures pointing inwards around the island would prevent them from drowning in the sea like their vanished country of Hiva? How could a small isolated island dwellers create their own literary world? Would a secluded island like Rafa Nui be linked to millennia of trans-Pacific contacts spanning Asia, Oceania and America?

Let us first look at a short, formal story of our very secretive island. Such is the offical story of the island, according to the UNESCO website: One of the most noteworthy Korean culture phenomenon in the whole wide globe. It was inhabited around 300 AD by Polynesians, probably by the Marquesas, who had a purely Stone Age population.

In Rapa Nui, all the pre-European culture suggests that there were no other arriving groups. The island population grew constantly between the tenth and sixteenth century and colonies were established along the whole coast. In the warriors' classes that developed from this position, the so-called bird-human worship was born, founded on the small island off Orongo, which replaced the statue-forming religions and jettisoned most of the Moy and the Ara.

Jacob Roggeveen of the Dutch East India Company came to the island on Easter Sunday 1722 and gave it its name. In 1888 it was incorporated into Chile. One of the most popular archeological sites of the area is the mai, thought to be holy forebears watching over the towns and ceremonies.

Most of them are cut from the slag using single pimples ("toli") of solid base, which are then drilled into previously excavated wells. At present, 887 sculptures of different size (partly gigantic ) have been recorded on the island, most of them are still near the stone quar.

" However, where all this displaced ground comes from is a big issue, as these sculptures stand on the steep rock faces of the stone pit, which are practically free of ground. In 2011, when one of the large archaeologists' large mai sculptures was fully exposed, many were amazed that the mai were not only minds, but had even bigger underground shells.

Of course, this led Blogger and others to speculate about how old the sculptures were. Was they only 400 years old or were they thousand of years old - buryed by the powder of age? Looking at my memos and thinking about this first Easter Island issue, it seemed possible to me that these sculptures were made by Sumerians who took the Fuente Magna bowl to Tiwanaku around 3000 B.C., making them amazing 5000 years old.

Whilst 500 years ago humans were near these sculptures and left all kinds of dateable materials for later analyses, they did not necessarily produce these same. In the meantime, with huge stonewalls and sculptures standing in the powder of the times, many civilizations and in Rapa Nui beaches celebrations come and go: "We will be sending a lot of dateable stuff to the labs, but it is the oldest dateable stuff that counts.

Were this materials from the times when the sculptures were actually broken from the live rocks of the volcano rocks of Rano Raraku? First, however, let us look at the Easter Island exploration. In those days, early discoverers were looking for a country in the South Pacific named Davis Country.

After a raid in Panama, a Flemish pirate called John Davis, who led the English vessel The Bachelor's Délight, returned to Cape Horn when the ship's crews saw the country in 1687. Leutnant of the vessel, Mr Wafer, described the sifting in a 1688 London publication titled Descriptions of the Isthmus of Darien:...we arrived at 27 20' southern breadth when we crashed in about two hour before the start of the night with a low sand island and listened to a great murmur like that of the ocean hitting the coast in front of the vessel.... so we were standing with the country again until the next morning, which turned out to be a small shallow island without the protection of crags?

West, about twelve miles, we saw a series of high stretches of countryside that we considered an island, for there were several divisions in the view. That country seemed to be about fourteen or fifteen miles in a row, and then came large herds of birds.

The enigmatic country, "expanding northwest", was to be called "Davis Land", and it added to folklore that there is a large South Pacific continental area. Thirty five years later, Easter Island was found on Easter Day in 1722 by the Flemish sailor Jacob Roggeveen.

but all he could find was this little spot on an island. If Davis Land had ever been there, it would have vanished! There' s no large land mass near Easter Island, and it couldn't be the small sand island described above - there's hardly a little of it.

In Riddle of the Pacific, Brown says, "And yet no one who has been to Easter Island need ever disown their identification with any of the countries Davis has seen, either the low, shallow, sand island or the long, divided country that stretches northwest over the skyline.

This is a significant, probably archipelago country that crashed in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean just south of Easter Island. we cannot completely dismiss his proof that vast areas of the South-East Pacific have disappeared. Obviously the inhabitants of the island had the feeling that they had been alone in the whole island for some amount of while when the first Europeans arrived on the island.

Yes, the people of the island were very, very happy to see them! In the past, large vessels from Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands or even South America had come to the island, but these vessels had long since ceased to come and the island' s inhabitants felt forsaken. The island seems to have been given up by large vessels from Polynesia or South America many thousand years ago - perhaps as early as 900 BC, at the times of King Solomon's vessels to Ophir, the country of the golden age.

The Polynesian may have visited Rapa Nui on smaller voyages until about 1500 AD. During Captain Cook's reign (around 1770) only Tonga had large seagoing vessels large enough to make the long voyages to Hawaii or Easter Island. Others in Polynesia, such as those in Tahiti or the Marquesas, had only smaller vessels for inland waterway transport.

Rogerveen ended up on an island populated by Polynesians, some of which had pale fur and scarlet hides and resembled Europeans. Some of the Easter Islanders were naturally redheaded? Most of the sculptures had a small knots that symbolized the binding of very long bristles and the tip of the skull.

Roggeveen, at the helm of 150 of his men, was concerned about the exaggerated inquisitiveness and the theft of the islander. Then they scattered, mainly scared by the noises, and later returned with presents from the island's reward. The Easter Island people certainly knew the value of virgin lifeblood, and it became customary in early contact for a woman to go out to incoming vessels, go on a boat and then dancing and having sexual intercourse with the Sailor.

They waited ashore to take what they could when the foreigners came to the island to visit them. The Dutch were free to move around the island after this first encounter and saw for the first case the giant sculptures, which had apparently already fallen and were laying on the floor.

However, some of the sculptures in the Rano Raraku stone pit were still there. Archipelago inhabitants he found were inhabiting straw-covered cottages and surviving off the isle. The Easter Island had no further contacts until almost fifty years later; in 1770 it was frequented by two Spaniards and three years later by Captain Cook, who sympathetically described the island - which he considered dry and wind-whipped - and the human race - as impoverished as the land on which they sojourned.

But he was astonished by the huge sculptures and impressed by the consequences for civilisation it had created. 1786 a small stop was made on the island by a small group of people on a small tour under the Comte de La Perouse, quickly noticing the island's inhabitants' tendency to steal.

Further events followed, among them the kidnapping of almost a fourth of the people, in order to work as a slave on the Guanouan Chincho in 1862. In 1870, the Chilean navy carried out a geographic investigation and in 1888 formally occupied the island for Chile.