Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (19 page)

tuff has a hard surface but an ashlike consistency inside and is thus easier to
carve than very hard basalt. As compared to red scoria, the tuff is less break
able and lends itself better to polishing and to carving of details. With time, insofar as we can infer relative dates, Rano Raraku statues became larger, more rectangular, more stylized, and almost mass-produced, although each statue is slightly different from others. Paro, the tallest statue ever erected,
was also one of the latest.

The increase in statue size with time suggests competition between rival
chiefs commissioning the statues to outdo each other. That conclusion also screams from an apparently late feature called a
pukao:
a cylinder of red
scoria, weighing up to 12 tons (the weight of Paro's pukao), mounted as a
separate piece to rest on top of a moai's flat head (Plate 8). (When you read
that, just ask yourself: how did islanders without cranes manipulate a 12-
ton block so that it balanced on the head of a statue up to 32 feet tall? That
is one of the mysteries that drove Erich von Daniken to invoke extraterres
trials. The mundane answer suggested by recent experiments is that the
pukao and statue were probably erected together.) We don't know for sure
what the pukao represented; our best guess is a headdress of red birds'
feathers prized throughout Polynesia and reserved for chiefs, or else a hat of
feathers and tapa cloth. For instance, when a Spanish exploring expedition reached the Pacific island of Santa Cruz, what really impressed the local
people was not Spanish ships, swords, guns, or mirrors, but their red cloth.
All pukao are of red scoria from a single quarry, Puna Pau, where (just as is
true of moai at the moai workshop on Rano Raraku) I observed unfinished
pukao, plus finished ones awaiting transport.

We know of not more than a hundred pukao, reserved for statues on the
biggest and richest ahu built late in Easter prehistory. I cannot resist the thought that they were produced as a show of one-upsmanship. They seem
to proclaim: "All right, so
you
can erect a statue 30 feet high, but look at me:
I can put this 12-ton pukao on top of
my
statue; you try to top that, you
wimp!" The pukao that I saw reminded me of the activities of Hollywood
moguls living near my home in Los Angeles, similarly displaying their
wealth and power by building ever larger, more elaborate, more ostenta
tious houses. Tycoon Marvin Davis topped previous moguls with his house
of 50,000 square feet, so Aaron Spelling had to top that with a house of
56,000 square feet. All that those moguls' houses lack to make explicit their
message of power is a 12-ton red pukao on the house's highest tower, raised
into position without resort to cranes.

Given the widespread distribution over Polynesia of platforms and stat-

ues, why were Easter Islanders the only ones to go overboard, to make by far the largest investment of societal resources in building them, and to erect the biggest ones? At least four different factors cooperated to produce that outcome. First, Rano Raraku tuff is the best stone in the Pacific for carving: to a sculptor used to struggling with basalt and red scoria, it almost cries out, "Carve me!" Second, other Pacific island societies on islands within a few days' sail of other islands devoted their energy, resources, and labor to interisland trading, raiding, exploration, colonization, and emigration, but those competing outlets were foreclosed for Easter Islanders by their isolation. While chiefs on other Pacific islands could compete for prestige and status by seeking to outdo each other in those interisland activities, "The boys on Easter Island didn't have those usual games to play," as one of my students put it. Third, Easter's gentle terrain and complementary resources in different territories led as we have seen to some integration of the island, thereby letting clans all over the island obtain Rano Raraku stone and go overboard in carving it. If Easter had remained politically fragmented, like the Marquesas, the Tongariki clan in whose territory Rano Raraku lay could have monopolized its stone, or neighboring clans could have barred transport of statues across their territories
—as in fact eventually happened. Finally, as we shall see, building platforms and statues required feeding lots of people, a feat made possible by the food surpluses produced by the elite-controlled upland plantations.

How did all those Easter Islanders, lacking cranes, succeed in carving, transporting, and erecting those statues? Of course we don't know for sure, because no European ever saw it being done to write about it. But we can make informed guesses from oral traditions of the islanders themselves (especially about erecting statues), from statues in the quarries at successive stages of completion, and from recent experimental tests of different transport methods.

In Rano Raraku quarry one can see incomplete statues still in the rock face and surrounded by narrow carving canals only about two feet wide. The hand-held basalt picks with which the carvers worked are still at the quarry. The most incomplete statues are nothing more than a block of stone roughly carved out of the rock with the eventual face upwards, and with the back still attached to the underlying cliff below by a long keel of rock. Next to be carved were the head, nose, and ears, followed by the arms, hands, and loincloth. At that stage the keel connecting the statue's back to the cliff was

chipped through, and transport of the statue out of its niche began. All stat
ues in the process of being transported still lack the eye sockets, which were
evidently not carved until the statue had been transported to the ahu and
erected there. One of the most remarkable recent discoveries about the statues was made in 1979 by Sonia Haoa and Sergio Rapu Haoa, who found
buried near an ahu a separate complete eye of white coral with a pupil of
red scoria. Subsequently, fragments of other similar eyes were unearthed. When such eyes are inserted into a statue, they create a penetrating, blind
ing gaze that is awesome to look at. The fact that so few eyes have been recovered suggests that few actually were made, to remain under guard by priests, and to be placed in the sockets only at times of ceremonies.

The still-visible transport roads on which statues were moved from
quarries follow contour lines to avoid the extra work of carrying statues up
and down hills, and are up to nine miles long for the west-coast ahu farthest
from Rano Raraku. While the task may strike us as daunting, we know that
many other prehistoric peoples transported very heavy stones at Stone-
henge, Egypt's pyramids, Teotihuacan, and centers of the Incas and Olmecs,
and something can be deduced of the methods in each case. Modern schol
ars have experimentally tested their various theories of statue transport on Easter by actually moving statues, beginning with Thor Heyerdahl, whose theory was probably wrong because he damaged the tested statue in the
process. Subsequent experimenters have variously tried hauling statues ei
ther standing or prone, with or without a wooden sled, and on or not on a
prepared track of lubricated or unlubricated rollers or else with fixed crossbars. The method most convincing to me is Jo Anne Van Tilburg's sugges
tion that Easter Islanders modified the so-called canoe ladders that were
widespread on Pacific islands for transporting heavy wooden logs, which
had to be cut in the forest and shaped there into dugout canoes and then
transported to the coast. The "ladders" consist of a pair of parallel wooden
rails joined by fixed wooden crosspieces (not movable rollers) over which
the log is dragged. In the New Guinea region I have seen such ladders more
than a mile long, extending from the coast hundreds of feet uphill to a for
est clearing at which a huge tree was being felled and then hollowed out
to make a canoe hull. We know that some of the biggest canoes that the Hawaiians moved over canoe ladders weighed more than an average-size Easter Island moai, so the proposed method is plausible.

Jo Anne enlisted modern Easter Islanders to put her theory to a test by
building such a canoe ladder, mounting a statue prone on a wooden sled,
attaching ropes to the sled, and hauling it over the ladder. She found that 50

to 70 people, working five hours per day and dragging the sled five yards at
each pull, could transport an average-sized 12-ton statue nine miles in a
week. The key, Jo Anne and the islanders discovered, was for all of those people to synchronize their pulling effort, just as canoe paddlers synchronize their paddling strokes. By extrapolation, transport of even big statues
like Paro could have been accomplished by a team of 500 adults, which
would have been just within the manpower capabilities of an Easter Island
clan of one or two thousand people.

Easter Islanders told Thor Heyerdahl how their ancestors had erected statues on ahu. They were indignant that archaeologists had never deigned
to ask them, and they erected a statue for him without a crane to prove their point. Much more information has emerged in the course of subsequent ex
periments on transporting and erecting statues by William Mulloy, Jo Anne
Van Tilburg, Claudio Cristino, and others. The islanders began by building
a gently sloping ramp of stones from the plaza up to the top of the front of
the platform, and pulling the prone statue with its base end forwards up the
ramp. Once the base had reached the platform, they levered the statue's
head an inch or two upwards with logs, slipped stones under the head to
support it in the new position, and continued to lever up the head and
thereby to tilt the statue increasingly towards the vertical. That left the ahu's
owners with a long ramp of stones, which may then have been dismantled
and recycled to create the ahu's lateral wings. The pukao was probably
erected at the same time as the statue itself, both being mounted together in
the same supporting frame.

The most dangerous part of the operation was the final tilting of the
statue from a very steep angle to the vertical position, because of the risk
that the statue's momentum in that final tilt might carry it beyond the verti
cal and tip it off the rear of the platform. Evidently to reduce that risk, the
carvers designed the statue so that it was not strictly perpendicular to its flat
base but just short of perpendicular (e.g., at an angle of about 87 degrees to
the base, rather than 90 degrees). In that way, when they had raised the
statue to a stable position with the base flat on the platform, the body was
still leaning slightly forwards and at no risk of tipping over backwards. They
could then slowly and carefully lever up the front edge of the base that final
few degrees, slipping stones under the front of the base to stabilize it, until
the body was vertical. But tragic accidents could still occur at that last stage,
as evidently happened in the attempt to erect at Ahu Hanga Te Tenga a
statue even taller than Paro, which ended with its tipping over and breaking.
The whole operation of constructing statues and platforms must have

been enormously expensive of food resources for whose accumulation,
transport, and delivery the chiefs commissioning the statues must have arranged. Twenty carvers had to be fed for a month, they may also have
been paid in food, then a transport crew of 50 to 500 people and a similar
erecting crew had to be fed while doing hard physical work and thus requir
ing more food than usual. There must also have been much feasting for the
whole clan owning the ahu, and for the clans across whose territories the
statue was transported. Archaeologists who first tried to calculate the work
performed, the calories burned, and hence the food consumed overlooked
the fact that the statue itself was the smaller part of the operation: an ahu outweighed its statues by a factor of about 20 times, and all that stone for the ahu also had to be transported. Jo Anne Van Tilburg and her architect
husband Jan, whose business it is to erect large modern buildings in Los An
geles and to calculate the work involved for cranes and elevators, did a
rough calculation of the corresponding work on Easter. They concluded
that, given the number and size of Easter's ahu and moai, the work of con
structing them added about 25% to the food requirements of Easter's popu
lation over the 300 peak years of construction. Those calculations explain
Chris Stevenson's recognition that those 300 peak years coincided with the
centuries of plantation agriculture in Easter's interior uplands, producing a
large food surplus over that available previously.

However, we have glossed over another problem. The statue operation
required not only lots of food, but also lots of thick long ropes (made in
Polynesia from fibrous tree bark) by which 50 to 500 people could drag stat
ues weighing 10 to 90 tons, and also lots of big strong trees to obtain all the timber needed for the sleds, canoe ladders, and levers. But the Easter Island
seen by Roggeveen and subsequent European visitors had very few trees, all
of them small and less than 10 feet tall: the most nearly treeless island in
all of Polynesia. Where were the trees that provided the required rope and
timber?

Botanical surveys of plants living on Easter within the 20th century have
identified only 48 native species, even the biggest of them (the toromiro, up
to seven feet tall) hardly worthy of being called a tree, and the rest of them
low ferns, grasses, sedges, and shrubs. However, several methods for recov
ering remains of vanished plants have shown within the last few decades that, for hundreds of thousands of years before human arrival and still dur-