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Easter Island Statues ‘Walked’ Into Position, Say Experts
By David Batty, The Guardian
Thursday, October 25, 2012 1:05 EDT
Experiment reveals how giant stone statues may have been put into resting places without wheels or animals
For hundreds of years they have gazed inscrutably upon the most remote island in the world, standing with their backs to the Pacific Ocean as if defying attempts to understand their enigma. But the mystery of how the giant stone statues of Easter Island came to their resting places without wheels or animals may finally have been unravelled – they walked.
The seemingly unlikely proposal comes from a team of local and US anthropologists and archaelogists who have conducted experiments that suggest the statues, called moai by the islanders, could have been “walked” upright down a path by teams pulling them with ropes.
The successful demonstration at Kualoa Ranch in Hawaii with a three metre tall, 4.35-tonne concrete replica moai, captured on video by Nature magazine, offers an alternative to the traditional hypothesis that the 887 statues, which stand as high as 32 feet and weigh up to 80 tons each, were rolled across the island, now know as Rapa Nui, on wooden logs.
A team of 18 people attached three ropes to the replica moai’s head, with two groups pulling forward on either side and one group at the rear steering the statue and preventing it from toppling over. Chanting “heave-ho”, they managed to shuffle the statue 100 metres in under an hour.
The study, led by Carl Lipo, from California State University, Terry Hunt, from the University of Hawaii, and archaelogist Sergio Rapu Haoa, the former Easter Island governor, looks at the moai that were successfully placed on stone pedestals and those that the original islanders apparently abandoned on road sides during their journey from the stone quarry where they were carved.
Seems that someone in academia heard of retired construction worker Wally Wallington’s work on moving heavy, up to ten tons or more, cement blocks by hand. See his website at: http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/newpage1
Anyone who has moved heavy stuff by themselves intuitively understands the correctness of Wallington’s technique. He deserves a lot of credit not just for working this method out, but for being a great example of the type of individual who makes their society strong.