Easter Island is said to have been settled between 700 and 1100 CE. The island is in the Pacific and the farthest of the Polynesian islands to be settled. The people of the island suffered through famines and wars, but what is most unique are the giant statues, called moai, found on the island and the mystery of how they were built and moved. It is said that the statues rocked their way down the hills.
Recent excavations have shown that the statue heads that are buried have bodies.
Overpopulation of the island occurred and ancient cults gave way to the Birdman cult. According to wikipedia:
As the island became overpopulated and resources diminished, warriors known as matatoa gained more power and the Ancestor Cult ended, making way for the Bird Man Cult. Beverly Haun wrote, "The concept of mana (power) invested in hereditary leaders was recast into the person of the birdman, apparently beginning circa 1540, and coinciding with the final vestiges of the moai period." This cult maintained that, although the ancestors still provided for their descendants, the medium through which the living could contact the dead was no longer statues, but human beings chosen through a competition. The god responsible for creating humans, Makemake, played an important role in this process. Katherine Routledge, who systematically collected the island's traditions in her 1919 expedition, showed that the competitions for Bird Man (Rapanui: tangata manu) started around 1760, after the arrival of the first Europeans, and ended in 1878, with the construction of the first church by Roman Catholic missionaries who formally arrived in 1864. Petroglyphs representing Bird Men on Easter Island are exactly the same as some in Hawaii, indicating that this concept was probably brought by the original settlers; only the competition itself was unique to Easter Island.Today the island is still inhabited but by the European settlers and indigenous people.
by Rita Jean Moran (www.thelibrarykids.com)
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