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Easter Island research & preservation
Tuesday 23 April 2019

 

An article by Jessica Wolf from the UCLA Newsroom on newsroom.ucla.edu - The stone faces and human problems on Easter Island - reports on the work of archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg who continues to seek insight from the statues and for the living descendants of their makers.

Easter Island research preservation
Excavation of Moai 156 and 157 (left). The visible difference in color and texture, and thus in preservation, is due to soil and depth coverage. Jo Anne Van Tilburg (right) and Cristián Arévalo Pakarati. Images: Easter Island Statue Project

In 1981, UCLA archaeology graduate student Jo Anne Van Tilburg first set foot on the island of Rapa Nui, commonly called Easter Island, eager to explore her interest in rock art by studying the iconic stone heads - moai - that enigmatically survey the landscape.

Van Tilburg was one of just a few thousand people who would visit Rapa Nui each year back then. And though the island to this day remains one the most remote inhabited islands in the world, a surge in annual visitors has placed its delicate ecosystem and archaeological treasures in jeopardy.

"When I went to Easter Island for the first time in '81, the number of people who visited per year was about 2,500," said Van Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Project, the longest collaborative artifact inventory ever conducted on the Polynesian island that belongs to Chile. "As of last year the number of tourists who arrived was 150,000 from around the world."

On April 21, CBS' '60 Minutes' aired an interview with Van Tilburg and Anderson Cooper filmed on the island, talking about efforts to preserve the moai, the monolithic stone statues that were carved and placed on the island from around 1100 to 1400.

Rapa Nui Easter Island Statue Project
Jo Anne Van Tilburg being interviewed (left) by Anderson Cooper of '60 Minutes'. Image: Keith Sharman/CBS News. Jo Anne Van Tilburg (right) with two workers from her Rapa Nui team of diggers. Image: Easter Island Statue Project

In 2003, Van Tilburg, who is research associate at the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and director of UCLA's Rock Art Archive since 1997, was the first archaeologist since the 1950s to obtain permission from Chile's National Council of Monuments and the Rapa Nui National Park, with the Rapa Nui community and in collaboration with the National Center of Conservation and Restoration, Santiago de Chile, to excavate the moai, which most people didn't know included torsos, which are buried below the surface, prior to her work and the publicity surrounding it.

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Her success in obtaining permission to dig on the island, she credits to a philosophy of 'community archaeology.' She has spent nearly four decades among the people of Rapa Nui, listening, learning, making connections, making covenants with the elders of the society, reporting extensively on her findings. Major funding has been provided by the Archaeological Institute of America Site Preservation Fund.

Van Tilburg credits the sustained and generous support of UCLA's Cotsen Institute as critical to her continued work on the island. She has also made it a point to include UCLA undergraduates from a variety of academic disciplines in the hands-on work on Rapa Nui, including Alice Hom who began as a work study student 20 years ago and who now serves as project manager for the Easter Island Statue Project.

Van Tilburg, who received her doctorate in archaeology from UCLA in 1989, is working on a massive book project harnessing her vast archive that will serve as an academic atlas of the island, its history and the meaning behind the moai. She used the proceeds of a previous book to invest in a local business, the Mana Gallery and Mana Gallery press, both of which highlight indigenous artists. And she helped the local community rediscover their canoe-making history through the 1995 creation of the Rapa Nui Outrigger Club.

Her co-director on the Easter Island Statue Project, Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, is Rapanui and a graphic artist by trade. Van Tilburg exclusively employs islanders for her excavation work. She's traveled the world helping catalog items from the island that are now housed in museums like the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the British Museum in London. Van Tilburg does this to assist repatriation efforts.

The '60 Minutes' interview also focused on how current residents - 5,700 in number - of the island are coping with increasing waves of tourism on an island with a fragile ecosystem. Moreover, the disrespectful nature of some travelers who ignore rules and climb on the moai, trample preserved spaces and sit on top of graves is becoming more evident.

Rapanui society was traditionally hierarchical, led by a class of people who believed themselves God-appointed elites. These leaders dictated where the lower classes could live, how they would work to provide food for the elites and the population at large. The ruling class also determined how and when the moai would be built as the backdrop for exchange and ceremony.

"This inherently institutionalized religious hierarchy produced an inequitable society," Van Tilburg said. "They were very successful in the sense that their population grew and they were good horticulturists, agriculturists and fisherman. But they were unsuccessful at understanding that unless they managed what they had better, and more fairly, that there was no future."

Population growth and rampant inequity in a fragile environment eventually led to wrenching societal changes, she said. Internal collapse (as outlined in UCLA professor Jared Diamond's book 'Collapse') along with colonization and slave-trading in the 1800s caused the population of Rapa Nui to drop to just 111 in the 1870s.

As an anthropologist, Van Tilburg is deeply interested in equity; "I'm interested in asking why do we keep replicating societies in which people are not equal, because in doing so, we initiate a crisis. Inequity is at the heart of our human problems."

Read more:
The stone faces and human problems on Easter Island

Read more:
Easter Island Statue Project (EISP)

Read more:
The Rock Art of Easter Island - Bradshaw Foundation

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