Archaeology is the branch of anthropology that aims to reconstruct the history of humanity from its material remains. The problem is that a very important part of human creation is not expressed in material form, and, on the other hand, many times it is not possible to understand the symbolic aspects that gave meaning to those material remains. The typical response, when a logical explanation for the sense or meaning of something is not found, is that the reason must be symbolic or ritualistic.
In Rapa Nui, there are some questions that have not had a satisfactory answer to date because oral tradition could not preserve the keys, or because scientific explanations are too mechanistic and do not consider Rapanui cultural tradition.
The case of the moai quarry is a good example. The tuff from Rano Raraku was not the best raw material for carving the moai. In fact, a few were abandoned at some stage of carving due to technical problems, or they broke in the quarry itself. What does not have a “logical” explanation is why they carved the figures in the same quarry, under the most difficult and risky conditions, instead of cutting blocks to slide them down to the plain with fewer complications. Therefore, the “explanation” must be symbolic. Perhaps there was something in Rano Raraku that made it necessary to do it that way, something natural but incomprehensible. Perhaps the exceptional fertility of the place was a demonstration of a very powerful mana. What they could not know is that the tuff of Rano Raraku contains a high proportion of phosphorus, a great fertilizer. Perhaps the images embodied the reproductive mana of Rano Raraku from their very birth in the quarry.
The hare paenga (houses with paenga foundations) or hare vaka (houses shaped like inverted boats) are another mystery. On one hand, they made efforts to cut, polish, transport, and install thousands of basalt blocks for foundations intended to support very fragile structures. That disproportion, from a constructive and mechanical point of view, does not make “sense.” They had to work the hardest rock with tools made of the same raw material, transport them for kilometers, and vertically bury the blocks in the ground, a greater effort than carving a couple of moai per year. It is still unclear how they drilled the cylindrical holes to support the poles of the aerial structure
Among the “mysteries” of the island, the colonization phase has no clear dates or contents. It is not precisely known when the first explorers arrived, nor where their traces are. Oral tradition places the southwestern tip of the island as that place, the most logical if they came from the west, based on the three sons of Taanga (turned into the motu), the spirit of Haumaka, the 7 explorers, and the subsequent arrival of Hotu Matu’a, where he separates from his sister to circumnavigate the island until landing at Hanga Rau o te Ariki (Anakena), up to the arrival of the Hokule’a in 1999.
The arrival of Ariki Hotu A Matu’a and the birth of his son Tu’u Maheke at the moment of landing in Anakena are data from tradition that mark the foundation of Rapanui society, but we do not know how much time it took to prepare the stage before their arrival, how many trips from Hiva to transport their people, how long it took to adapt the new domesticated species to different soil and climate.
Therefore, the “chronological hygiene” that allowed dozens of dates before 1200 to be discarded because no earlier dates were found in Anakena makes no sense. The oldest archaeological sites must be elsewhere on the island (to the southwest). Nor does it make sense to blame the mice introduced by immigrants for the disappearance of the forest because in Anakena, many coconuts with rodent traces were found. The ancient forest included other important trees before its destruction caused by extensive drought.
Moreover, the extraordinary findings of the German Archaeological Institute in Ava Ranga Uka Toroke Hau have shown that the ancient islanders worshipped water and trees, the complete opposite of the image of a collapse caused by the overexploitation of the island’s scarce and fragile resources, which someone called “ecocide.”
Unfortunately, from this new image, another extreme vision emerged, that of a population in perfect harmony with nature, where there were never any conflicts. Some argued that mata’a were not used as weapons but for peeling sweet potatoes and scaling fish, disqualifying the rich Rapanui tradition about mata’a as weapons, but according to a model of conflict different from the Western one of total war, but in terms explained by an informant to Katherine Routledge in 1914: “when we are not fighting, we are all cousins.”
A very interesting consequence of that time of extraordinary changes and adaptations is that the aristocracy had to abandon their houses next to the ahu, and thousands of paenga were reused to build the walls and tunnels of the ana kionga, the avanga to deposit bones on the recycled platforms of the ahu, the umu pae, and other structures. Probably, some did not do it willingly.
