Rapa Nui (Other Keyword)
1-6 (6 Records)
Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) is a remarkably resource-poor volcanic island. Significantly, it lacks surface streams found on more tropical Polynesian islands, other than several remote access volcanic crater lakes. Due to the island’s highly permeable, volcanic subsurface, rainwater infiltrates rapidly and becomes groundwater. Only along the coast does the water table intersect the topography to form seeps or springs. We hypothesize these seeps and springs were a primary source of fresh water...
The colossal hats (pukao) of monumental statues: an analysis of shape variability among the pukao of Rapa Nui (2015)
As part of monumental statue (moai) construction during the prehistory of Rapa Nui, islanders quarried bodies of red scoria, carved them into hats (pukao), and placed them atop statues measuring up to 10 meters tall. Despite overall great interest in moai and the improbable magnitude of pukao that were raised to reach their positions on the heads of statues, few studies have investigated pukao production and transport. This study seeks to analyze three-dimensional variability of pukao using...
Exploring the Spatial Distribution of Rapa Nui Ahu with Costly Signalling Theory: An Agent-Based Model (2015)
Despite, its small size and marginal environment, Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) boasts some of the world’s most impressive monumental ceremonial architecture. While the production of ahu and moai have been linked to an assumed collapse of Rapa Nui society, we suggest instead that the construction of these stone monuments contributed to social stability by reducing inter-group violence and endemic warfare. To examine this hypothesis, we develop a theoretical agent-based model using concepts...
Prehistoric Diet on Rapa Nui via Stable Isotope Analyses of Bone Collagen and Carbonate (2015)
Previous analyses of carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in dentin collagen from prehistoric individuals on Rapa Nui suggested a predominately terrestrial diet in the early phase of occupation, followed by a slight expansion into marine-based subsistence post-AD 1650. This was unexpected as the documented pattern across Polynesia is a marine-dominated strategy in the early phases of occupation with terrestrial resources incorporated later, as agricultural systems supplant foraging behaviors. To...
Rapa Nui: The influence of Freshwater sources on Prehistoric Settlement distribution (2015)
One of the many mysteries of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) is how the ancient inhabitants survived with so few sources of freshwater. The scarcity of freshwater suggests that water resources may have been a constraining factor in settlement growth, patterning, and distribution. As a first step of addressing this hypothesis, we conducted field work to identify classes of terrestrial sources of freshwater and compared them to early settlement distribution. From May-June, 2014, we generated...
Ring Graph Analyses of Early Communities on Rapa Nui Measuring the Distribution of Stone-lined Earth Ovens (umu) (2015)
Agricultural societies are commonly thought to have begun as small, kinship-based groups of people that eventually extended their social interaction beyond the household level and intensified their adaptive efforts through a variety of means. Most of these early, sedentary communities began to demonstrate aspects of social inequality and had cooperative, centralized settlements which have left a detectable pattern in the archaeological record. For this paper, stone-lined earth ovens from the...