Say it with stone: constructing with stones on Easter Island

Abstract

By considering the stones of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) on a landscape scale, their sources, properties and elemental use in architecture during the statue production period and beyond – from modest ovens to immense statues, a case is made that stone and stones were an essential connective substance of Rapa Nui society. It is posited that stone connected understandings of the land and sea both directly and inversely, that it expressed through colour the sacred status of the ancestors, and that it aligned human life-cycles with the natural lives of stone and stones. Work with stone on Rapa Nui was potentially sacred work and to harvest and move stone required that places and people were linked in face-to-face and hand-to-hand labour. This related to far more than the task of making and sometimes moving colossal statues. Whole beaches or at least their stones were transposed from sea to land and a wide range of land and sea stones were used conjointly to create webs of meaning on an island-wide scale.

Keywords:

• Poro
• Puna Pau
• Rano Raraku
• Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
• sea
• stone shape
• stone size
• stone colour
• volcano

Acknowledgements

The Rapa Nui work described in this article forms part of the Rapa Nui Landscapes of Construction Project, which is directed by Sue Hamilton (University College London) and Colin Richards (University of Manchester, UK) in collaboration with Susana Nahoe (CONAF, Rapa Nui), Francisco Torres H. (P. Sebastian Englert Museum, Rapa Nui) and Kate Welham (Bornemouth University, UK). We thank Kate Welham for help with mapping the pukao. The preliminary fieldwork was funded by the British Academy, the Bank of Santander and University College London and ongoing fieldwork is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.