Fetch The Statues That Walked: Unraveling The Mystery Of Easter Island Published By Terry L. Hunt Distributed As Publication

scholars who have done years of fieldwork on Easter Island have cowritten this engaging and mostly satisfying study of the history of Easter Island and its magnificent statues.
Plenty of maps and pictures keep the text lively and keep you focused on the island's central mystery: how the hell did people on that tiny, godforsaken island create and move all those hundreds of giant statues centuries ago

Hunt and Lipo have done a lot of research and a lot of digging, and they have created a compelling narrative explanation for most of the mystery.
The least plausible part of their argument was a laughable digression into game theory that should have been omitted from this otherwise evidencebased argument, Still, though, this was a great read for anyone interested in one of the world's enduring mysteries, I went through a swing of reading the Graham Hancocks and Sitchins of the world years ago, so it was nice to return to a crumb of that subject matter, albeit from a more sober and credible angle.


The authors dig around and make the case for tweaking the narrative of the preEuropean history of the island, The presentation is methodical and understated, but never grinds to a halt,

Based on the premise of the book I was fearing that a bunch of Noble Savageish sentiment would be shoved down the reader's throat, but there wasn't much of that.


I'm so used

to buying crusty old used books that it was almost a shock to see email and Google Maps mentioned in something I was reading.


Disclosure: I was formerly a work colleague with one of the authors it had nothing to do with archaeology,

Codicil: While reading this I rewatched Chariots of the Gods on YouTube, When my father bought a VCR circathat was one of the few cassettes we had so I watched it many times, Seeing it again was awesome the funky music, the narration that swings from farcical to ominous to disjointed, the globetrotting, The perfect way to get revved up to read this book, even though Easter Island only takes up less thanminutes of the movie,
Solid book illustrating what we know about this mysterious island, Unfortunately, we dont know much but there are many parallels we can draw from the Rapa Nui people that can help us moving forward, The tiny South Pacific Easter Island of“Rapa Nui”and the mysterious statues on it has intrigued historians from all over the world, In, the first Europeans sighted these huge stone heads on this small and isolated island off of Chile,

Archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lido have retold the story in their terrific book that challenges the past theories after spending years of intensive field work there.
Researchers in the past believed that in order to build these massive statues called Moai there must have been a huge population increase and destruction of forest to build and transport the statues.
The ancient island people destroyed their trees, their environment and themselves, But this book disputes that idea and offers new fascinating scientific evidence,

The Polynesian prehistoric, Rapa Nui people had to find local solutions in their engineering, working of rock, and transporting of these seventyfive ton statues, They were hand carved out of the island's volcanic rock, built by the tribal culture and set on rock platforms, The “Moai” were religious ancestor statues of massive stone heads and there was almost,of them, They were transported over rough terrain, sometimes for a few miles,

In the old theories, how they moved the statues was thought to be that hundreds of people had to help with transportation, Instead looking at this issue with fresh research, this book reveals, it might have been just ten to forty islanders, These archaeologists and their team built aD model and then after considerable experimentation could get the statue to rock back and forth and “walk” using ropes around the head.
The original statues were engineered to do this “walk” and did not need any wood to transport them,

Also in this book, the authors surmise that instead of environmental destruction killing the islanders, it was the Spanish explorers bringing diseases to the island that wiped out some of the population.
Then in the earlyth century, slave trading began and the island was raided on a regular basis, Unfortunately it was genocide not ecocide that killed off the local people,

The authors remind us that these ancient people survived for five hundred years on a remote island with very little contact, The island had mostly coconut trees that made building canoes for fishing not feasible nor did they have fresh water running streams for their crops, Yet they still survived by planting their crops in the volcanic soil,

These researchers feel we owe the current descendents of the islanders, who still live on the island, an explanation of what happened in the past, They believe the ancient islanders were not reckless or crazy or warlike nor did they cause their own demise, Instead they offer a different perspective and scientific evidence of Easter Island's history, I was very happy to read it and thought they did an amazing job, Four. I didnt actually know much about Rapa Nui before I read this book, apart from knowing of the existence of the moai and a vague idea that their civilisation committed “ecocide”, stripping their island of too many resources for it to recover and impoverishing their local environment for good.
Hunt and Lipo strongly suggest otherwise, talking about the evidence of clever farming techniques designed to get the best out of the soil, and discussing the actual culprit for the devastation invasive species brought by boat.
I didnt know about lithic mulching before, for instance, a method of covering soil with brokenup rock in order to allow the elements to leach minerals out of it and into the soil.


Hunt and Lipo discuss the moai as well, of course, discussing their purpose and how they were moved into place, but as part of the bigger context of the society on Rapa Nui and the challenges they had to deal with.
I found it an enjoyable and evidencebased approach to a topic I didnt know much about before bravo,

sitelinked for The Bibliophibian, This was a fascinating look at some of the most recent research into the past of Rapa Nui Easter Island, Some of the conclusions the authors and their research team came to overturn a lot of what was thought to be common knowledge about the islanders, especially what led to the collapse of their civilization.
I read and enjoyed Jared Diamond's Collapse years ago, which has a chapter devoted to Rapa Nui, but the authors are pretty hard on his conclusions, namely the idea that the people recklessly caused the deforestation of their tiny isolated island, and that they became so overpopulated that warring for resources and cannibalism became commonplace.
Without saying too much that might spoil the book, I'll just say that Hunt et al, come to a very different conclusion, one that implicates not the Rapa Nui people but years of European exploitation, A great read if you're into cultural anthropology, or just ever wondered how the heck they moved those giant statues, Having travelled to Rapa Nui myself, I can honestly say this book is a fabulous read, It debunks a lot of myths and offers evidence based explanations regarding prehistoric life on the island, It gets a bit waffly and off track at the end, and I wish thered be more of a mention about the “bird man” cult, but aside from that Id recommend it to anyone interested in the island and its mysteries.
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