Word: easterlies
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Athens in Antarctica might be easier to explain than the riddling ruins on Easter Island. More than 2,000 miles from the coast of Chile, still farther from the reefs of Tahiti, Easter is the world's most isolated islet: a tiny (45.5 sq. mi.) blob of wind-scraped lava jutting from the gray Pacific like a roost for passing frigate birds. Yet on its stony surface, dozens of enormous statues, known in local dialect as modi, stand and stare. Some of them rear up to a height of 40 feet; many of them wear a subtle expression that...
...series of expeditions, including one in 1956 led by Norway's ever-enterprising Thor Heyerdahl, have attempted unsuccessfully to answer these familiar questions. The latest expedition was led by a French ethnologist, Francis Maziere, who in 1963 took himself, his Polynesian wife and an adventurous friend to Easter Island for a nine-month stay. In this translation of his absorbing though frequently perfervid text, Maziere describes discoveries that seem to open a crack into the heart of the prehistoric puzzle. In doing so, however, he had inadvertently generated another mystery: were the discoveries made by Maziere...
Capuchin priest who lived on Easter Island and wrote two books on the subject before he died last January...
Yankee Potshots. Maziere begins his tale with an indignant account of Easter Island's sufferings in recent centuries. The island was discovered on Easter Sunday, 1722, by a Dutch admiral named Roggeveen, who was intrigued by the stone giants and observed that although some of the natives were obviously Polynesian, others had white skins and red hair. He also let his men shoot down a few indigenes after a minor misunderstanding. Subsequent Western visitors apparently felt free to kill any native on whim. In 1811, an American whaler added a touch of Yankee ingenuity. Some island girls were lured...
Legends, transmitted through an oral tradition, are notoriously unreliable. Yet those confided to Maziere seemed to yield strong evidence that Easter Island has passed through three epochs. In the first, the island was inhabited by "the Others," who, according to native tradition, "were yellow, very big, with long arms. They came by boat from a land that lies beyond America." It was the yellow men, Maziere believes, who created the first stone giants, the finest sculptures on the island. In the second epoch, which in Maziere's rough chronology began in the 13th century, the island was invaded...