Transcript
CARL LIPO: Easter Island is one of these places that has engendered a lot of speculation about what the statues mean and what they represent, but remarkably little evidence has been looked at, like what are the details about these statues and their locations and how are these things positioned in the landscape that might be telling us something about the context in which people in the past had made them. Because we need to understand that context in order to build an explanation for why this activity made sense to these people at this time. Because, certainly, Easter Island, which is just an incredibly tiny and remote island, it isn't the most obvious place you would find these gigantic, multi-tonne statues. Certainly, you wouldn't expect to find a number of them, much less the 400 that you find distributed across the island and the total 1,000 that are actually present. So, we've really needed to look at the details of the statues and where they're located to really understand this context. My colleagues have been working on the island for 20 years or so and over time we've been generating data about positions of the ahu, these big platforms, positions of the statues, where statues have fallen on the way to get to the ahu. And one of the things that we've always wondered is, well why did the ahu get constructed where they specifically did? They're not everywhere, and they're not even in the places you might expect to find if they're being used for symbols or ritual activities that show to everybody what was accomplished. You find them along the coast, often clustered together, sometimes in low spots along the coast, and it didn't quite make sense. Why would they have placed them there? Why invest there? So, we started to think, what kind of resources would be critical to people on Rapa Nui in order for survival? And one of them that became apparent, that we thought that no one's really looked at before, is the availability of fresh water. Now today, of course, on islands, fresh water is an incredibly important thing and you notice it and you carry it with you, but in pre-history, we realised that fresh water access is something that people would have to take seriously and have to shape their lives around where water is available, even on a small island. So, we did a study of the hydrology of the island and noticed that one of the remarkable things on the island, while water isn't available on the surface -- we don't see streams and rivers or things -- we find that the water goes into the ground almost immediately when it rains and flushes out at the coast, right at the margins of the oceans and the land, and that's where fresh water comes out. And when we started to map the places where this fresh water came out, we noticed that 'huh, there's statues and ahu every single place where there's fresh water'. And we wondered whether we were just observing this by chance, and that lead to this paper where we wanted to look statistically, is there a relationship between fresh water and the placement of these ahu and moai, and indeed there was."
MACKENZIE SMITH: Do you think this places a lot more significance on these statues than maybe was previously realised?
CL: I think what it does is it provides a context to sort of understand the choices that people are making. Because the statues are so extraordinary that it's hard to imagine what would be going through peoples' mind to lead them to say, 'let's make and move these multi-tonne statues and do it over and over and over again.' And part of resolving that mystery, the classic mystery of Easter Island, is really understanding the context in which people were making the decision. What choices did they have, what options did they choose in order to do daily life? And I think understanding the context in which we're studying these statues allows us to say, 'okay, part of the activities of people on a daily basis involved activities at the ahu and statue, and it also involved the resources they needed to survive.' That these statues and ahu were tied directly to daily life and that daily life was connected straight to freshwater.
