Rapa Nui is a tiny South Pacific island with a towering presence.
Officially it's part of Chile, three and a half thousand kilometres to the east.
Named Easter Island by an 18th century Dutch explorer, Rapa Nui would have been nothing
more than a dot on a map if not for its megalithic stone statues - the Moai.
"There are about a thousand Moai scattered round the island and at first glance they
all look pretty similar, but once you get up close and personal, and really take a good
look, you can see that each one is unique. And rather than all looking austere, some
have other expressions like this one which... well, rather wistful I think".
But the famous faces of Rapa Nui are in danger of becoming faceless. Lashing wind and rain
and searing sun are all taking their toll. Now the race is on to preserve these centuries'
old sentinels so they and their secrets are not lost to eternity.
"These objects are very friable, they're very fragile. They're not going to last forever
and the record that we have we.... we're certain of, is required in order to take care of them
properly".
"Look at that! Can you see it?"
"What is it?"
"It's a fishhook.
It's a fishhook made of bone".
Californian archaeologist, Dr Jo Anne Van Tilburg, has spent thirty years trying to
solve some of the mysteries surrounding ancient Rapa Nui civilisation.
"Oh we're very excited. We've been wanting one of these for a long time. Even if it's
broken it's still special".
"Cristian, can you explain what you're doing?"
"We are suffering down here!" Working alongside Dr Van Tilburg is Cristián
Arévalo Pakarati, a Rapa Nui graphic artist. Together they run the Easter Island Statue
Project.
"So what you're finding is..."
"It's all new".
"It's all completely new?"
"It's all completely new".
Over more than two decades, they've measured, mapped and documented every Moai on the island.
At last count, 1045.
"It's so exciting. Well done!"
Now they're conducting the first comprehensive scientific excavation of statues inside Rano
Raraku, the volcanic crater where nearly all the Moai were carved.
The inner rim is a place of privilege, off limits to all but a few.
Nearly 400 statues remain in various stages of creation. Were they abandoned in haste,
and if so why? War? Famine? Or were some of them just not up to scratch?
"It's like walking into a factory where.
everybody's assembling cars and they say okay guys, this is finished, yeah and then you
find all these cars in the line of assembly."
This season's dig aims to uncover more pieces of the Rapa Nui jigsaw.
"And what are you hoping
that will lead you to?"
"The answer to all the mystery.
I'm interested first in
coming to understand human behaviour on this island relative to this clear obsession to
produce a very large number of objects.
The second thing I'm really interested in is how our work and our records can help conserve
and preserve the statues".
Despite their formidable appearance, the statues are delicate.
The volcanic tuff from which most were sculpted as many as 900 years ago is crumbling. In
some cases, to the ground. "I've been seeing already in 27 years entire
statues being
degraded into the ground. It's melted to the ground already. It's soil now, it's not a
statue anymore".
Cristian Pakarati has an artist's eye for detail.
He sees not only the features of his ancestors in the statues, but also a carved record of
their lives, their values and their activities.
"If you see the nostril of the statue from any angle you're going to see like ...
that this nostril is actually a fishhook instead of a nostril".
The Moai are an invaluable - if still inscrutable - map of the society which created them and
about which so many questions remain.
"I just want to draw as much as I can before the statues are gone.
The more we archive the better for the statues and for the Rapa Nui people".
It's now largely accepted that Rapa Nui was settled by Polynesian voyagers, sometime between
400 and 1200 AD. Maori sailors from New Zealand last year proved that such a daring journey
was possible.
In traditional, double hulled canoes they sailed the 7,000 kilometres to Rapa Nui using
only the sea and sky to navigate.
Oral tradition has it that Rapa Nui's first king, Hotu Matua, came ashore with his family
here at Anakena Beach. That small group was the nucleus for what became an extraordinary
civilisation.
"And my idea about Rapa Nui is that artists have shaped this island and its culture
from its beginning in a profound way, in ways that we don't see on some other Polynesian
islands.
So I think the ability to articulate in an object an idea is what drives religion".
In ancient Rapa Nui, religion centred on the Moai, the deified representation of a family's
ancestor. The Moai watched over their clans and lands and passed on their full power - or
mana - when fitted with coral eyes. For Vaiheri Tuki Haoa, handling the tools
that her forebears used to carve the statues is spine tingling.
"It's a dream
that I have since I was a little child".
She's part of the archaeological team working in Rano Raraku. She believes it's only in
understanding their history, that Rapa Nui can build a prosperous future, free of their
colonial overlords in Chile.
"When you are in school you learn the history of Chile,
but you are not learning the history of Hotu Matua, the first kind of Rapa Nui and that
is the story that the children really want to know
and that is what make us Rapa Nui". The ancient Rapa Nui established a highly
sophisticated society geared around making and moving the statues. But Moai mania which
reached its height between 1200 and 1600 came at a cost.
"Giant palm trees with massive trunks once covered much of the island. They provided
food, shelter, fabric and wood for the Rapa Nui. Those trees no longer exist. This is
one of the few pockets of palms on the island. They're not native trees, they were imported
from Tahiti".
By the time European explorers arrived in 1722, Rapa Nui was denuded. Its population
had shrunk from perhaps ten thousand people to a few thousand.
Some scientists argue that cutting down trees to move and erect the statues was largely
responsible for deforestation and ultimately the collapse of Rapa Nui's ecology and society.
Dr Van Tilburg is not entirely convinced by the collapse theory. From her own experiments,
she believes logs were used to move the Moai in much the same way as the sea-faring Polynesians
moved their heavy canoes across land. But she says other factors, such as climate,
may have played a key role in determining the highs and lows of Rapa Nui society.
"We don't know for example about how nature intervened here.
And one of the things that we're looking at, particularly in the quarry because of the
water there, is what drought would mean on this island. It would cause serious problems".
What is known is that European contact had a devastating impact on a proud and resourceful
people.
By the late 1800s, Peruvian slave raids and introduced disease had reduced the population
to just 111.
Rapa Nui had been annexed by Chile, leased to a foreign company and turned into a sheep
and cattle farm. Its indigenous people confined to the settlement of Hanga Roa.
Hanga Roa is still the only town on Rapa Nui, but today it's home to nearly 6,000 people.
Only half have Rapa Nui roots. A growing number of residents are from mainland Chile.
Then there are the tourists - 50,000 a year and rising.
"Today in Rapa Nui the only solid source of employment is tourism.
If tourism didn't exist Rapa Nui would have a lot of economic problems".
Pantu Tepano runs a successful horse-riding business. He takes tourists across his ancestral
lands, but needs permission to do so.
Most of the island's 170 square kilometres is national park - administered by the Chilean
government and that gives it control of Rapa Nui's most precious resource - the Moai.
"Chile is making good deal of money because of Rapa Nui.
They publish their tourism with Rapa Nui Moai, with our intellectual property.
The Rapa Nui parliament is fighting to return all the land that today remains in the hands and administration of
Chile, to return to the Rapa Nui people, to the owner, to the inheritors".
"I thank the Gods for allowing us to meet today on this special occasion".
Erity Teave is the Human Rights Minister in the Rapa Nui parliament, a self-styled group
comprising representatives from each clan.
"Every word and everything we say, it's the law of the land - law given to us by our ancestors.
We need to start believing that". The parliament is suing the Chilean Government
for allegedly breaching its 1888 treaty with the Rapa Nui king. MPs say nothing short of
independence will safeguard Rapa Nui's heritage. "Our ancestor left behind a fortune for us.
Like the Middle East have oil, this is our oil, our patrimony, our culture. We don't
need Chile. We are three thousand people".
Vaiheri Tuki Haoa is a strong supporter of independence.
"Oh wow, it's a dream, that is a dream, because we are losing now our language, our culture.
There's many
people from... foreigners... they came here, they start their life here, their business...
and they change our cultural system".
Despite a strong turnout at a recent pro-independence march, not all Rapa Nui believe going it alone
would work. Many favour regional autonomy - under the umbrella of Chile but only if
it delivers them control of their resources such as the Moai.
"For me it means managing our own resources.
I think that is one of the important points here in order to protect archaeology".
"Jo Anne?"
"Yeah?"
"We have a bone, maybe a human bone".
Rafael Rapu is a 24 year old archaeology graduate, a trained scientist who also feels a deep
emotional connection with the Moai.
"For me it is very moving especially when I am discovering things beneath the moai.
It totally affects me".
His discovery of a bone fragment should be a triumph, but as a Rapa Nui he has mixed
feelings about potentially digging up the remains of an ancestor.
"Really, I don't like to take these bones,
because maybe my great, great grandfather he wanted to stay in here. I can't explain
it really.
If we find a rock or an arrowhead or bone hooks, regardless of whether the body is there
or not, the human ideas are there. That is why it's a very sensitive issue especially
because we are in a community that still exists and has a sense of belonging".
The history being uncovered here is important not only to the Rapa Nui but to all of us.
It's as much a tale about survival as it is of collapse.
"I think the Rapa Nui people have shown themselves, historically and prehistorically, to be highly adaptable
They do, and have, shown us through the archaeological evidence that they can
change, that they changed. They changed their architecture, they changed their art".
And their religion.
At the other end of the island from the statue quarry is the spectacular Rano Kau.
Perched on the cliffs between the crater's rim and the ocean is Orongo village. Its low,
rock-slab houses were built in the shape of traditional canoes.
Between the 17th and 19th centuries, Orongo became the beating heart of a new religion,
the bird man cult.
On the rocks around the village are 500 petroglyphs, carvings of the birdman Tangata Manu and the
creator god, Make-Make. The religion may have been used to channel bitter inter-clan conflict
into a much healthier competition for resources.
"At the heart of the bird man cult was an annual do or die race to determine which clan
would hold power for the following year. The chiefs would choose their bravest warriors
and they had to be pretty brave to scramble down the cliffs at the edge of the crater
there, then swim across often treacherous waters to the islands and find the first egg
of the Sooty Tern. If they could get that bird egg back in one piece, their chief was
effectively king for a year". "It's hard to find many cultures of this size
that have created two versions, if you will, of religion, two ways of expressing their
belief, two icons to represent their belief.
I think that's what happened with the Moai, I think that's what happened at Orongo with
the birdman. That carving so fully articulated what the priests were saying, what people
were believing, that wow, let's carve that all over the place!"
Which brings us back to the challenge of saving Rapa Nui's ageing rock stars. A chemical coating
and water repellent is being trialled on the Moai being excavated by the Easter Island
Statue Project.
It's hoped the treatment will minimise the eroding effects of the elements.
'We're monitoring the ambient environment, the rainfall, the sun, the temperature, the
wind direction, the wind velocity - all of these things both around the statue and in
the stone
and at the end of a five year period when we complete our work in this particular quarry,
we'll be able to report what we know is attacking the statue".
Dr Van Tilburg believes the best way to conserve the incredible skill and art of the ancient
Rapa Nui may be to remove a handful of the statues from the landscape. Otherwise their
detail may be lost to all but Cristian Pakarati's drawn records.
"Could a museum be built on the island within which
five or six perhaps statues of the most importance could be taken and erected and protected?
Yes that's a real option and that should, in my opinion, be considered".
Cristian agrees. "I think it's time to do something for them.
They already have made so many for us. Why don't we do something for them?
Put them somewhere else under protection - like under a dome, or in the museum or in a chamber,
or whatever.
Maybe the best idea is to roof some of them right there in the field without moving them.
Put something on top". But it's a controversial idea which has yet
to win over powerful figures such as Mario Tuki, a member of the Rapa Nui parliament.
"We have to have a process of conservation because the erosion process has already started
on the statues. If the idea is to take them to a museum
so archaeologist can repair them, I have no objection to that. Take them, repair them,
but you must bring them back to their place. This is the land of the Moai and our ancestors.
That debate about conservation will be fought for some time yet.
For now though, Moai number 156 - fondly known as Papa - will be left in peace.
The excavated soil is being returned to the pit because, at the moment, that's Papa's
best protection.
"It's difficult because you know we've had, you know, taking that dirt out has been arduous
and we've screened every inch of it,
so seeing it go back in, hearing it go back in is really hard sometimes, [laughs] but
I thinks it's obviously the best thing to do, so we're okay with it."
Jo Anne Van Tilburg and her team will be back in a few months to do it all again as they
continue their dig to the bottom of the statue's six metre form. Such is archaeology and a
particular obsession with saving the Moai.
"I think that the value of the statue as an art object, as an aesthetic expression,
as an icon of religion, as a museum object even in a way is incalculable..
I think it would be a failure, a tremendous failure of us as scientists if we let this
go"