Labor Day- Rapa Nui style

Since today is Labor Day, I thought it fitting to pay tribute to some laborers of the past.  Twelve hundred years ago, a group of polynesian people who called themselves the Rapa Nui came in canoes to the island now known as Easter Island.  Thus called because it was "discovered" on Easter Sunday, the island is located between Tahiti and Chile in the South Pacific.  For reasons that are still being speculated about, the Rapa Nui began constucting giant statues constucted out of the volcanic rock on the island.  Because this substance was soft and easily carved the statues multiplied and huge sections of the island were cleared as they labored to create more and more statues.  The statues, called Moais, became something of an obsession and as the population on the island grew to an estimated 9,000, the natural resources on the island were dwindling.  This was due to the clearing of land to make room for the Moais and to make paths for their transportation to other places on the island.  It was also just a simple matter of too many people on a small island. 

The movement of the Moais to their final resting places was sometimes as much as a fourteen mile trip.  Speculation about just how this was done continues to this day, with some people even suggesting an extra terrestrial influence. Regardless of how it was completed, the fact that it was accomplished at all is amazing.  The Rapa Nui reached their peak with an approximate 1,000 Moais dotting the coastline until their obsession turned on them and the collapse of their people began.  With no trees left on the island, they ran out of resources and didn't even have any lumber to make boats to move on from the island they had destroyed by fixating on their creations.  The Rapa Nui turned on each other, battling and destroying the homes they had created and smashing out the eyes of many Moais.  Pictographs found in a cave in the south corner of the island called Ana Kai Tangata (translated to mean "cave where men are eaten") show ghost-like bird flying up into the sky, believed to be these souls escaping from the island only by death.  Three hundred years after they had arrived, the 750 Rapa Nui remaining were left to pick up the pieces. 

There is more to the story of Easter Island, but this marks the end of the statue laborers and therefore the end of this particular blog.  For more information on what happened to the remaining people on the island, check out the links below. 







http://www.mysteriousplaces.com/Easter_Island/index.html
http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/rapanui.html
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/lifelists/lifelist-easter-island.html