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EASTER ISLAND AND EAST POLYNESIAN PREHISTORY.
Patricia Vargas Casanova (ed.) 1999.
Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Arquitectura
y Urbanismo, Instituto de Estudios Isla
de Pascua, Santiago, Chile. ISBN: 956-19-0287-7
Pb. Pp. 228 + xvii. $US25.00
James Coil (University of California, Berkeley,
USA)
coil@SSCL.Berkeley.edu
Easter Island is known throughout the world
for its striking ‘giant stone head’ statues.
These monolithic sculptures have at times
held a Stonehenge-like attraction for those
who have sought to attribute the origins
of such remarkable prehistoric cultural
achievements to visitors from other continents
or even from outer space.
However, although the idea of some sort
of prehistoric contact between Polynesia
and South America is still valid (see, e.g.,
Green’s chapter in this edited volume),
scholars of Pacific Island prehistory have
also long established that one need not
look to other regions or planets to understand
the cultural origins of Easter Island’s
extraordinary archaeological remains, but
instead would point out the well-demonstrated
connections between Easter Islanders and
related groups throughout the islands of
Polynesia, as revealed by archaeological,
ethnographic, biological, and linguistic
studies. From this perspective, the famous
statues represent in fact a spectacular
local elaboration of a deeply embedded regional
tradition of ancestral image-making.
While the statues of Easter Island have
been the focus of several serious research
projects (see Van Tilburg and Vargas Casanova’s
chapter in this volume for a review), Easter
Island’s remote location at the southeastern
apex of the ‘Polynesian triangle’, its restricted
marine and terrestrial resource bases, and
its clearly demonstrated history of environmental
change, have allowed its study also to contribute
significantly to some of the most pressing
current research issues in Pacific Island
archaeology. These include, for example,
questions involving chronologies of initial
discovery and colonization, cultural adaptation
in ‘marginal’ insular settings, the ecological
effects of land use and demographic growth,
and the nature of continued contact and
interaction between remote islands and archipelagoes
following their settlement. For similar
reasons, other nearby island groups also
continue to play an important role in the
study of the region’s prehistory.
However, as Roger Green points out in his
foreword to this volume, the ability of
researchers whose work is focused on these
isolated Polynesian islands to collaborate
and communicate effectively is often hindered
by an analogous sense of insularity, based
upon their own linguistic and geographical
separations: “a number of distinct political
entities and a variety of linguistic genres
are involved: Polynesian and various of
its languages, Chilean and Spanish, France
(French Polynesia) and French, and New Zealand
and Hawaii (USA) and several kinds of English”
(p. iii). As such, the 1996 conference upon
which this volume is largely based, which
was organized by Chilean archaeologists
and held on Easter Island, represented a
notable second success in bridging these
gaps by bringing together the ideas, advances,
and works-in-progress of scholars from a
variety of countries and sub-disciplines
who are involved in the study of East Polynesian
prehistory.
The range of countries whose institutions
are represented by the authors of the seventeen
chapters in this volume (Chile, USA, French
Polynesia, New Zealand, Italy, Norway, and
France) is matched by the wide variety of
approaches which these researchers are bringing
to the study of East Polynesia’s past. This
collection of papers thus aptly demonstrates
the continuing vitality of a holistic anthropological
approach in the study of Pacific Island
prehistory, and includes studies involving
archaeology, historical linguistics, physical
anthropology, ethnography, and, importantly,
various combinations of these.
Papers contributed by Patrick Kirch and
Marshall Weisler both point out, however,
that despite the significant achievements
of decades of holistic anthropological research
in Polynesia, several key issues and areas
have yet to fully benefit from these advances.
As an example of this, Edmundo Edwards’
report on his archaeological survey work
in the Austral Islands represents the first
comprehensive description of this island
group’s archaeological remains, which with
further investigation may yet play a key
role in addressing issues of settlement
chronology highly at issue among the region’s
scholars.
As with Edwards’ work in the Australs,
other Chilean archaeologists have previously
laid the foundations for ongoing international
archaeological research on Easter Island,
as revealed in Patricia Vargas Casanova’s
summary of survey and excavation work completed
under her institute’s auspices and the settlement
patterns and developmental sequences this
work has revealed. The almost 80% full-coverage
survey of the island initiated in 1968 by
William Mulloy, and largely carried out
by the Chilean team, is remarkable by any
standards, and has permitted more specific
later projects, such as those described
in several of this volume’s chapters involving
land use, temple reconstruction, GIS, and,
of course, the famous statues, to take place
within a solid descriptive framework.
Marshall Weisler’s contribution regarding
his archaeological work in the Pitcairn
Islands as part of Cambridge University’s
“Pitcairn Islands Scientific Expedition”,
succeeds in providing a wealth of information
on this previously little-known island group.
Here and elsewhere, Weisler’s work using
XRF basalt sourcing to identify prehistoric
insular ‘interaction spheres’ has done much
to dispel the image of remote Oceanic islands
as hopelessly isolated unto themselves,
and by extension casts doubt upon the ability
of even the inhabitants of Easter Island
to have remained entirely isolated after
settling their extremely remote landfall.
Also of interest, Weisler has found lithic
and shell artifacts of imported materials
on Henderson Island, whose archaeological
contexts significantly pre-date the earliest
known habitation sites on their source islands
of Pitcairn and Mangareva. This may in fact
reflect the perpetual difficulty of locating
early sites in these geomorphologically
dynamic insular settings, a problem also
considered by Mark Eddowes in his chapter
regarding his excavations at coastal sites
in French Polynesia.
Weisler’s chronological and interaction
data from the Pitcairn Island group further
provides one critical link in Roger Green’s
contribution to this volume, in which Green
has methodically assembled a wide range
of data sets - derived from the realms of
ethnography, archaeology, historical linguistics,
biological anthropology, and oral traditions
- into a well-reasoned summation of Easter
Island’s cultural foundations and subsequent
developments. This piece leaves no doubt
as to the efficacy of a holistic approach
in addressing a wide range a critical research
questions in the region.
Patrick Kirch’s chapter, an introduction
to his long-term archaeological research
project in leeward Hawaii, demonstrates
the author’s long-standing theoretical concern
with the relationships between culture and
environment - specifically, in this case,
the role of ‘marginal’ landscapes in influencing
the course of Hawaii’s late pre-contact
political developments. Kirch points out
that despite the presence of a substantial
contract archaeology industry in Hawaii,
some basic research questions, such as the
nature of the economic systems relied upon
by the powerful proto-historic chiefs of
Maui, have remained unaddressed.
These works mentioned above are augmented
in this volume by the inclusion of several
shorter chapters focusing on specific excavation
projects or specialist analyses involving
work on Easter Island and elsewhere in East
Polynesia. Notable among these are Robert
Suggs’ discussion of cultural origins and
contacts in East Polynesia, based upon linguistic
data involving the distribution of lunar
calendar terminology, and the French-language
contribution of Michel and Catherine Orliac.
This latter work describes a preliminary
attempt to utilize previously neglected
evidence, in the form of carbonized plant
remains, to address Easter Island’s controversial
record of vegetative change, which was derived
initially from lakebed sediment coring and
pollen analysis. Also, a chapter co-authored
by Daris Swindler, Andrea Drusini, and Claudio
Cristino F., describes their discovery of
an unusually high proportion of a genetically-controlled
human dental characteristic (a three-rooted
lower first molar) in an excavated archaeological
sample from Easter Island. This may indicate
that a significant genetic ‘founder effect’
had taken place amongst this island’s prehistoric
population.
In all, this volume’s contributions seem
to reflect the existence of a thriving community,
comprising researchers whose work is focused
on East Polynesia but whose homes are spread
across the globe. While this is surely not
a situation unique to this particular region,
the editor’s success in bringing together
and making available the work of this international
group is testimony to the fact that geographical
and linguistic barriers of this nature can
be productively overcome. |
World
Archaeological Bulletin