 An enduring mystery of Easter
Island is just how the islanders managed to move great stone heads "
some weighing up to 90 tons " from a volcanic quarry to the ceremonial
centers on the coasts.
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- New excavations of ancient roadways are revealing tantalizing
hints about the process, although the puzzle apparently is not yet solved.
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- Geology Professor Charlie Love of Western Wyoming Community
College, with a crew of 17 students, archaeologists, and islanders, spent
much of the past summer working on Easter Island after receiving an EPSCoR
grant (from the U.S. Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research).
They cleared and excavated sections of roads along which the ancient islanders
moved the multi-ton figures.
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- More than 800 statues (moai) on this southeastern Pacific
island were carved out of volcanic ash deposits near one end of the island,
then moved along three major roads to be placed on stone ceremonial centers,
called ahus, which line the coasts. Most of the moai at the ahus weigh
10 to 20 tons, but as many as 40 others weigh 40 to 90 tons.
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- Parts of the roadway were carved into the surface of
bedrock lava flows, apparently to avoid a flat surface; the paths are cut
in a shallow V- or broad U-shape roughly 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) wide. Along
certain road segments, long rock alignments appear to be curbstones. Other
stretches revealed postholes dug into the bedrock outside the curbstones
" possibly to accommodate some mechanism for prying the statue and
its framework forward. These are most common where the roadway slopes upward.
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- These roadways have not been firmly dated, but Love estimates
the statue-moving activity ended about A.D. 1500.
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- "We do not yet know the whole picture regarding
the sequence of the road forms," Love said. "Most likely, they
changed methods of moving these statues as they carved larger and larger
ones through time, and the road form depends on the maximum weight of the
next statue to be moved on the road."
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- "As far as I'm concerned," he said, "the
Mystery of Easter Island has not been solved." Love hopes to return
to Easter Island for a more detailed examination of the moai roads.
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