Download or read book Discoveries Easter Island written by Catherine Orliac and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 1995-02-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the remote island in the Pacific Ocean that was discovered by Dutch sailors on Easter Sunday, 1722, is pieced together by archaeologists and considers the mysteries of an awe-inspiring place filled with giant statues.
Download or read book The Statues that Walked written by Terry Hunt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works? No such astonishing numbers of massive statues are found anywhere else in the Pacific. How could the islanders possibly have moved so many multi-ton monoliths from the quarry inland, where they were carved, to their posts along the coastline? And most intriguing and vexing of all, if the island once boasted a culture developed and sophisticated enough to have produced such marvelous edifices, what happened to that culture? Why was the island the Europeans encountered a sparsely populated wasteland? The prevailing accounts of the island’s history tell a story of self-inflicted devastation: a glaring case of eco-suicide. The island was dominated by a powerful chiefdom that promulgated a cult of statue making, exercising a ruthless hold on the island’s people and rapaciously destroying the environment, cutting down a lush palm forest that once blanketed the island in order to construct contraptions for moving more and more statues, which grew larger and larger. As the population swelled in order to sustain the statue cult, growing well beyond the island’s agricultural capacity, a vicious cycle of warfare broke out between opposing groups, and the culture ultimately suffered a dramatic collapse. When Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began carrying out archaeological studies on the island in 2001, they fully expected to find evidence supporting these accounts. Instead, revelation after revelation uncovered a very different truth. In this lively and fascinating account of Hunt and Lipo’s definitive solution to the mystery of what really happened on the island, they introduce the striking series of archaeological discoveries they made, and the path-breaking findings of others, which led them to compelling new answers to the most perplexing questions about the history of the island. Far from irresponsible environmental destroyers, they show, the Easter Islanders were remarkably inventive environmental stewards, devising ingenious methods to enhance the island’s agricultural capacity. They did not devastate the palm forest, and the culture did not descend into brutal violence. Perhaps most surprising of all, the making and moving of their enormous statutes did not require a bloated population or tax their precious resources; their statue building was actually integral to their ability to achieve a delicate balance of sustainability. The Easter Islanders, it turns out, offer us an impressive record of masterful environmental management rich with lessons for confronting the daunting environmental challenges of our own time. Shattering the conventional wisdom, Hunt and Lipo’s ironclad case for a radically different understanding of the story of this most mysterious place is scientific discovery at its very best.
Download or read book Mysteries and Discoveries of Archaeoastronomy written by Giulio Magli and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-04-09 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is divided into two parts. In the first, the reader is taken on an ideal ‘world tour’ of many wonderful and enigmatic places in almost every continent, in search of traces of astronomical knowledge and lore of the sky. In the second part, Giulio Magli uses the elements presented in the tour to show that the fundamental idea which led to the construction of the astronomically-related giant monuments was the foundation of power, a foundation which was exploited by ‘replicating’ the sky. A possible interpretive model then emerges that is founded on the relationship the ancients had with “nature”, in the sense of everything that surrounded them, the cosmos. The numerous monumental astronomically aligned structures of the past then become interpretable as acts of will, expressions of power on the part of those who held it; the will to replicate the heavenly plane here on earth and to build sacred landscapes. Finally, having formulated his hypothesis, Professor Magli returns to visit one specific place in detail, searching for proof. This in-depth examination studies the most compelling, the most intensively studied, the most famous and, until recently, the most misunderstood sacred landscape on the planet - Giza, in Egypt. The archaeoastronomical analysis of the orientation of the Giza pyramids leads to the hypothesis that the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren belong to the same construction project.
Download or read book The mystery of Easter island written by Katherine Routledge and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The mystery of Easter island" by Katherine Routledge. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Download or read book Easter Island s Silent Sentinels written by Kenneth Treister and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This richly illustrated book of the history, culture, and art of Easter Island is the first to examine in detail the island's vernacular architecture, often overshadowed by its giant stone statues"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania written by Ethan E. Cochrane and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania presents the archaeology, linguistics, environment and human biology of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. First colonized 50,000 years ago, Oceania witnessed the independent invention of agriculture, the construction of Easter Island's statues, and the development of the word's last archaic states."--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Among Stone Giants written by JoAnne Van Tilburg and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of the first woman archaeologist to work in Polynesia documents Routledge's experiences on Easter Island, beginning with the launch of the 1913 Mana Expedition and continuing with her emersion into local customs and beliefs and battle with schizophrenia.
Download or read book Easter Island written by Caroline Arnold and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2004-10 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the formation, geography, ecology, and inhabitants of the isolated Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean.
Download or read book Collapse written by Jared Diamond and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times
Download or read book Easter Island written by Jennifer Vanderbes and published by Dial Press Trade Paperback. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extraordinary fiction debut—rich with love and betrayal, history and intellectual passion—two remarkable narratives converge on Easter Island, one of the most remote places in the world. It is 1913. Elsa Pendleton travels from England to Easter Island with her husband, an anthropologist sent by the Royal Geographical Society to study the colossal moai statues, and her younger sister. What begins as familial duty for Elsa becomes a grand adventure; on Easter Island she discovers her true calling. But, out of contact with the outside world, she is unaware that World War I has been declared and that a German naval squadron, fleeing the British across the South Pacific, is heading toward the island she now considers home. Sixty years later, Dr. Greer Farraday, an American botanist, travels to Easter Island to research the island’s ancient pollen, but more important, to put back the pieces of her life after the death of her husband. A series of brilliant revelations brings to life the parallel quests of these two intrepid young women as they delve into the centuries-old mysteries of Easter Island. Slowly unearthing the island’s haunting past, they are forced to confront turbulent discoveries about themselves and the people they love, changing their lives forever. Easter Island is a tour de force of storytelling that will establish Jennifer Vanderbes as one of the most gifted writers of her generation.
Download or read book The Mysteries of Easter Island written by Jean-Michel Schwartz and published by . This book was released on 2011-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Easter Island is famous for its 887 monumental statues. Nobody really knows who made those statutes, or how or why. New Theories are being advanced, new studies made and new books published about this all the time.It is the only book that adequately explains how the giant statues were created and how they were transported. Basically, the statues were cut from the lips of the three volcanoes on the island. This still does not answer the question of how they were brought down to the water's edge.
Download or read book Island at the End of the World written by Steven Roger Fischer and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a long stretch of green coast in the South Pacific, hundreds of enormous, impassive stone heads stand guard against the ravages of time, war, and disease that have attempted over the centuries to conquer Easter Island. Steven Roger Fischer offers the first English-language history of Easter Island in Island at the End of the World, a fascinating chronicle of adversity, triumph, and the enduring monumentality of the island's stone guards. A small canoe with Polynesians brought the first humans to Easter Island in 700 CE, and when boat travel in the South Pacific drastically decreased around 1500, the Easter Islanders were forced to adapt in order to survive their isolation. Adaptation, Fischer asserts, was a continuous thread in the life of Easter Island: the first European visitors, who viewed the awe-inspiring monolithic busts in 1722, set off hundreds of years of violent warfare, trade, and disease—from the smallpox, wars, and Great Death that decimated the island to the late nineteenth-century Catholic missionaries who tried to "save" it to a despotic Frenchman who declared sole claim of the island and was soon killed by the remaining 111 islanders. The rituals, leaders, and religions of the Easter Islanders evolved with all of these events, and Fischer is just as attentive to the island's cultural developments as he is to its foreign invasions. Bringing his history into the modern era, Fischer examines the colonization and annexation of Easter Island by Chile, including the Rapanui people's push for civil rights in 1964 and 1965, by which they gained full citizenship and freedom of movement on the island. As travel to and interest in the island rapidly expand, Island at the End of the World is an essential history of this mysterious site.
Download or read book Easter Island Earth Island written by Paul Bahn and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Easter Island, isolated deep in the South Pacific and now a World Heritage Site, was home to a fascinating prehistoric culture—one that produced massive stone effigies (the moai) and the birdman cult—and yet much of the island’s past remains shrouded in mystery. Where did the islanders come from, and when? How did Rapa Nui culture evolve over the centuries? How, and why, did their natural environment change over time? Paul Bahn and John Flenley guide readers through the mysteries and enigmas of Rapa Nui, incorporating the records of early explorers, folk legends, and archaeological evidence along the way. They cover the island’s geological and environmental history and explore its flora and fauna, illustrating how human actions affected the natural environment of the island. This fourth edition draws in: recent DNA studies of ancient human and animal bones as well as plant remains; evolving understandings of how the moai were transported; and current efforts to reforest the island.
Download or read book Rongorongo written by Steven R. Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive documentation of Rongorongo, Easter Island's enigmatic script and Oceania's only known pre-twentieth-century writing system. The author tells the full history of rongorongo's exciting discovery and the many attempts at a decipherment and provides full transcriptions of all the 25 surviving rongorongo inscriptions along with detailed photographs of nearly every incised artifact.
Download or read book The Enigmas of Easter Island written by John Flenley and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-05-29 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Easter Island, an isolated speck in the Pacific Ocean, produced one of the most fascinating and yet least understood of ancient cultures. Who were the inhabitants of this unimaginably remote volcanic island? Where did they come from? What, and equally intriguing, how did they erect the giant stone statues found all over the island? And what became of their civilization? - ;Easter Island, an unimaginably remote volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean, produced one of the most fascinating and yet least understood prehistoric cultures. Who were its inhabitants, and where did they come from? Why, and equally intriguingly, how did they erect the giant stone statues found all over the island? Paul Bahn and John Flenley tackle these and a host of other questions, introducing us, along the way, to the bizarre birdman cult found in the island's art, and the only recently deciphered Rongorongo script engraved on wooden panels. The Enigmas of Easter Island combines a wealth of new archaeological evidence, intriguing folk memories and the records of Captain Cook and other early explorers, to reveal how the island's decline may stem from ecological catastrophe. The result is a fascinating portrait of a civilization which still retains many of its mysteries. This book, originally published in 1992, was hailed as the best account of Easter Island ever written. Now it has been brought substantially up to date with a wealth of new material. -
Download or read book Stanley s Dream written by Jacalyn Duffin and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1964–65, an international team of thirty-eight scientists and assistants, led by Montreal physician Stanley Skoryna, sailed to the mysterious Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to conduct an unprecedented survey of its biosphere. Born of Cold War concerns about pollution, overpopulation, and conflict, and initially conceived as the first of two trips, the project was designed to document the island's status before a proposed airport would link the one thousand people living in humanity's remotest community to the rest of the world – its germs, genes, culture, and economy. Based on archival papers, diaries, photographs, and interviews with nearly twenty members of the original team, Stanley's Dream sets the expedition in its global context within the early days of ecological research and the understudied International Biological Program. Jacalyn Duffin traces the origins, the voyage, the often-complicated life within the constructed camp, the scientific preoccupations, the role of women, the resultant reports, films, and publications, and the previously unrecognized accomplishments of the project, including a goodwill tour of South America, the delivery of vaccines, and the discovery of a wonder drug. For Rapa Nui, the expedition coincided with its rebellion against the colonizing Chilean military, resulting in its first democratic election. For Canada, it reflected national optimism as the country prepared for its centennial and adopted its own flag. Ending with Duffin's own journey to the island to uncover the legacy of the study and the impact of the airport, and to elicit local memories, Stanley's Dream is an entertaining and poignant account of a long-forgotten but important Canadian-led international expedition.
Download or read book Forgotten Civilization written by Robert M. Schoch and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Updated throughout with recent developments and additional illustrations • Reveals how solar outbursts caused the end of the last ice age, unleashed catastrophe upon ancient advanced civilizations, and led to six millennia of a Solar-Induced Dark Age • Includes evidence from solar science, geology, oceanic circulation patterns, the Sphinx, the underground cities of Cappadocia, the Easter Island rongorongo glyphs, and the Göbekli Tepe complex in Turkey In this newly revised and expanded edition, updated throughout with recent developments, geologist Robert Schoch builds upon his revolutionary theory that the origins of the Sphinx date back much further than 2500 BCE and examines scientific evidence of the catastrophe that destroyed early high culture nearly 12,000 years ago. Combining evidence from multiple scientific disciplines, Schoch makes the case that the abrupt end of the last ice age, circa 9700 BCE, was due to an agitated Sun. Solar outbursts unleashed electrical/plasma discharges upon Earth, triggering dramatic climate change as well as increased earthquake and volcanic activity, fires, high radiation levels, and massive floods. Schoch explains how these events impacted the civilizations of the time, set humanity back thousands of years, and led to six millennia of a Solar-Induced Dark Age (SIDA). Applying the SIDA framework to ancient history, he explores how many megalithic monuments, petroglyphs, indigenous traditions, and legends fall logically into place, including the underground cities of Cappadocia, the Easter Island rongorongo glyphs, and the Göbekli Tepe complex in Turkey. He also reveals that our Sun is a much more unstable star than previously believed, suggesting that history could repeat itself with a solar outburst powerful enough to devastate modern society. Weaving together a new view of the origins and antiquity of civilization and the dynamics of the planet we live on, Schoch maintains we must heed the megalithic warning of the past and collectively prepare for future events.
