"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.

-Reveals the heretofore unknown identity of this 19th-century Easter Island (Rapa Nui) man, and the secrets hidden in his impressive tattoos -Body art reveals amazing insights into Easter Island history An impressively tattooed but unnamed Easter Island (Rapa Nui) man appears often in the pages of Pacific Island histories and museum catalogs. The Swedish ethnographer Dr. Knut Hjalmar Stolpe knew him only as Tepano, the Tahitian version of the Christian name Stephen. But what was his real Rapanui identity, and what can his life story tell us about the history of Easter Island? This book reveals his identity, who illustrated him, and how he transcended the tragic events of 19th-century Rapa Nui to become one of the most iconic faces of the Polynesian past. The authors summarize the history of tattoo as practiced by Rapanui artisans, link that history to island geography, and present rare barkcloth sculptures as a visual record of tattoo patterns. This title is the first in a new series on Polynesian Arts & Culture by Mana Press, in partnership with Floating World Editions. For a list of future titles, visit: www.FloatingWorldEditions.com. For more on Rapa Nui, the Mana Gallery and Mana Books, visit: www.eisp.org. An Introduction; The Tattooed Man; The Tattooed Man and Hoa Hakananai a: Rapa Nui, November 1868; The Geography of Rapanui Tattoo: Early Illustrations, Locales, and Key People; Rapanui Tattoo and Colonialism; Rapanui Tattoo Designs and Motifs; Discovering the Tattooed Man: Mataveri, April 1877; Knut Hjalmar Stolpe and Oscar Elkholm: Tahiti, May 1884; The Tattooed Man and Madame Hoare: Tahiti, circa 1870; Madame Hoare and Julien Viaud [Pierre Loti]: Tahiti, 1872; C. B. Hoare, Charles D. Voy, and Thomas Croft: Tahiti, 1873; Alphonse Louis Pinart: 1877; Constance Frederika Gordon Cumming and Alphonse Louis Pinart: 1877; Drawings by Julien Viaud [Pierre Loti]; Identifying Julien Viaud's [Pierre Loti's] Rapanui Subjects; Identifying the Tattooed Man: Viable Candidates; Acknowledgments; Map of Rapa Nui; Glossary; Notes; References.

"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.

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.

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.

"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.

Pictures, painted and carved in caves and on open rock surfaces, are amongst our loveliest relics from prehistory. This pioneering set of sparkling essays goes beyond guesses as to what the pictures mean, instead exploring how we can reliably learn from rock-art as a material record of distant times: in short, rock-art as archaeology. Sometimes contact-period records offer some direct insight about indigenous meaning, so we can learn in that informed way. More often, we have no direct record, and instead have to use formal methods to learn from the evidence of the pictures themselves. The book's eighteen papers range wide in space and time, from the Palaeolithic of Europe to nineteenth-century Australia. Using varied approaches within the consistent framework of informed and proven methods, they make key advances in using the striking and reticent evidence of rock-art to archaeological benefit.

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.