Off the mark
But not everyone is convinced by Lipo and Hunt's work. “What they did was a stunt and not an experiment,” says Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The shape of the team's model statue is not an accurate facsimile of the moai, she says, so any conclusions drawn from it are irrelevant. “What this work has done is disengaged the statues from the archaeological context, and I think any time you do that, you enter, however gingerly, into fantasy and speculation on a level that isn’t scientific," says Van Tilburg, whose own team has demonstrated that moai can be moved horizontally along logs (see video).
Yet aspects of the statues’ design seem intended for walking, contends Lipo. Their centre of mass is centered vertically and horizontally, but sits slightly forward of centre on the front-to-back axis, making it easy to rock the statues back and forth. Furthermore, the statues' relatively broad bodies and elongated heads make them stable when walking. “What’s cool is that their shape really reflects the engineering of the Rapa Nui people. They built these things to do this,” says Lipo.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on October 23, 2012.
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9 Comments
Add CommentThe methods used to carve a statue have never been remotely established. the stone tools found on site had nothing to do with the construction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like history but not sure of the point of all this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the statues are capable of being moved in this method, it doesn't mean they weren't moved via another method. It's a fun exercise but not much otherwise.
Perhaps the population collapsed under the falling statues.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like the idea. If the center of gravity is a little forward of the base, then tipping it to the side will cause it to automatically move forward and sideways, and all you need to do is keep it swinging back and forth. No logs required. This doesn't disprove the theory that they probably still totally destroyed their island.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suppose that a thousand years from now archeologists will examine the statues on Easter Island. They will find one five ton statue that was built in the early 21st century. From this they will conclude that statue building must have persited into the 21st century but that only one statue of that era survived. They will most likely conclude that the inhabitants of Easter Island probably were still building and transporting the statues in the year 2012 in order to worship the ancestors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt didn't say where the concrete statue was constructed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWasn't there also evidence that at one time they had a large forest that was cut down, that had given shade required for some crops?
This is almost certainly how they were moved. In the island legends, the statues 'walked'. An added wrinkle to the technique is to strap logs on either side of the statues so that the log ends protrude further than the base of the statue, then you can 'walk' it more easily on the log 'legs' and very rapidly. I think Thor Heyerdal showed this in the 1950s. So quite what these experimenters think they are proving, the heck knows!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI love the history and your article is giving history to us or it is amazing article about stone statues....
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