JDG wrote:
I'm not sure that enough is known about Easter Island culture to
directly connect the moai to religion. I'm not sure that Diamond ever
conclusively demonstrates it in his Chapter (although it has been a
while since I read it now.) It certainly seems possible that the
building of moai could be a cultural phenomenon - sort of like how 19th
and early-20th Century Americans built numerous obelisks that serve no
religious purpose.
http://islandheritage.org/eihistory.html
"They built houses and shrines, and carved enormous statues (called moai),
similar to statues Polynesians made on Ra'ivavae and the Marquesas
Islands. The function of the statues was to stand on an ahu (shrine) as
representatives of sacred chiefs and gods. Ahu are an outgrowth of marae
found in the Society Islands and elsewhere in Polynesia. These shrines
followed a similar pattern: in the Society Islands, upright stone slabs
stood for chiefs. When a chief died, his stone remained. It is a short
step from this concept to the use of a statue to represent a sacred chief."
Diamond at least obliquely suggests that the building of the moai might
have been motivated as much by boredom as anything else. Diamond
mentions that Easter Island's relative isolation precluded devoting
surplus labor to warfare, exploration, and trading. You mention that
"it was critical that they conserve these resources" - and perhaps I am
being a bit of a devil's advocate to ask "why"? So that they would be
able to continue to build moai into the future? O.k. obviously the
loss of the trees resulted in a demonstrable loss in quality of life for
all Easter Islanders. I wonder, however, if the decline in quality of
life would be an almost inevitable consequence of a society on such a
small and isolated piece of land at that technology. Would it really
have been possible for such a civilization to develop "sustainable
forestry" technology? And if so, wouldn't this just make the moai
construction an irrelevant detail of an otherwise almost inevitable
outcome?
Indeed, it may have been that they started erecting more and larger
statues as a result of their realizing that they had stranded themselves
on that remote island.
--
Doug
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