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The Smithsonian Life List28 Places to See Before You Die |
About 2,000 miles off the coast of South America sits the Chile-governed Easter Island. Just 14 miles long and 7 miles wide, it was named by Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who discovered it on Easter Sunday in 1722. Archaeologists and historians have debated the island's history, but it is believed that Polynesians landed on the island around A.D. 800 and depleted its resources until it was practically barren.
What they left behind, however, remains one of the most captivating riddles of engineering: nearly 1,000 monolithic statues. The massive effigies, on average 13 feet tall and weighing 14 tons, are thought to represent ancestral chiefs raised to the level of gods. According to archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg—who is the founder of UCLA's Easter Island Statue Project and has studied the artifacts for nearly 30 years—about 95 percent of the statues were carved in the volcanic cone known as Rano Raraku. Master carvers, who taught their craft over generations, roughed out the statues using stone tools called toki and employed sharp obsidian tools to make finer lines.
The real mystery—how a small and isolated population managed to transport the megalithic structures to various ceremonial sites—has spawned decades of research and experiments. "It is amazing that an island society made of 10 to 12 chiefdoms had sufficient unity and ability to communicate carving standards, organize carving methods and achieve political rights of way ...to transport statues to every part of the island," Van Tilburg says.
Comments
wow
Posted by momo on March 10,2009 | 02:54PM
so the past of a planet the Earth includes System in which Earth there was million years and Solar system in which the Earth is less than 500 thosaAll these monolithic statues, pyramids of Egypt, Stounhenge have been made when the planet the Earth was in System of planets which has arrived from other Galaxy when the Earth appeared casually in Solar system these constructions to make there was no opportunity, changing gravity and also changes which are proved on a site www.mammoths.50megs.com
Posted by cofu on June 29,2009 | 10:53AM