Chullpa, Sillustani, Peru
Posted on 08/16/2018 1:44:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The first people arrived on Easter Island (or, in the local language, Rapa Nui) about 900 years ago. "The founding population, according to oral tradition, was two canoes led by the island's first chief, Hotu Matu'a," says Simpson, who is currently on the faculty of the College of DuPage... These statues, or moai, often referred to as "Easter Island heads," are actually full-body figures that became partially buried over time. The moai, which represent important Rapa Nui ancestors, number nearly a thousand, and the largest one is over seventy feet tall...
Recent excavations of four statues in the inner region of Rano Raraku, the statue quarry, were conducted by Jo Anne Van Tilburg of Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA and director of the Easter Island Statue Project, along with her Rapa Nui excavation team. To better understand the society that fabricated two of the statues, Simpson, Dussubieux, and Van Tilburg took a detailed look at twenty one of about 1,600 stone tools made of... About half of the tools, called toki, recovered were fragments that suggested how they were used...
There are at least three different sources on Easter Island that the Rapa Nui used for material to make their stone tools... quarries cover twelve thousand square meters, an area the size of two football fields. And those different quarries, the tools that came from them, and the movement between geological locations and archaeological sites shed light on prehistoric Rapa Nui society...
Van Tilburg urges caution in interpreting the study's results. "The near exclusive use of one quarry to produce these seventeen tools supports a view of craft specialization based on information exchange, but we can't know at this stage if the interaction was collaborative. It may also have been coercive in some way.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Space suits.
I like the "birdman" motif on that one, reminds me of the much, much earlier stuff at Gobekli Tepe.
Chullpa, Sillustani, Peru
Yup.
So the “tramp stamp” is of ancient origin?
THAT makes more sense than anything prior.
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