[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:05] We’re in the American Museum of Natural History, and we’re looking at a moai, from an island in the Pacific called Rapa Nui. It’s very popular because it appeared in a recent movie, so lots of folks come to the museum and want to take their picture with it.
Dr. Jenny Newell: [0:21] People really love coming to see this moai. It’s a cast, it’s not an actual moai from Rapa Nui.
[0:26] It’s brought a lot of people into the Pacific Hall, and we’re hoping that people will not just take their selfies with the moai, but they’ll also stop and read more about the moai and understand a bit more about the culture that he comes from and also stop and look around the Pacific Hall and learn a bit more about the amazing cultures that are there.
Dr. Harris: [0:42] We normally think about museums having original works of art, but this one is a cast.
Dr. Newell: [0:47] Yes, I’m so glad it’s a cast and not an actual moai because they really do belong in Rapa Nui. They were sacred figures. They’re ancestor figures and they’re very heavy, they’re made out of massive stone carved on the island. They were worshiped through different ceremonies, and what’s happened over time is that they have become very iconic, and people from beyond the Pacific recognize them.
[1:09] The museum wanted to have something really substantial and impressive and recognizable in their new Pacific Hall when they were putting it together. It was first opened in 1971.
[1:19] When they had an expedition there, they didn’t bring back an actual moai. They were bringing back more documentation about the ways of life there, the different types of people there. They were doing onithological and other collecting.
[1:30] They had an artist with them, Toshio Asaeda. He created a plaster cast of one of the moai that was on the inner slope of the volcanic crater, Rano Raraku. What they decided to do was take this plaster cast and bring it back to the museum.
Dr. Harris: [1:45] Let’s go back a minute and talk about Rapa Nui, because so many people in the West know it as Easter Island, which is a name given to it by…
Dr. Newell: [1:53] The Dutch explorers who landed there in 1722 on Easter Day.
Dr. Harris: [1:58] There are close to 900 of these figures. They were part of a sacred precinct, where they helped to form a bridge, as ancestors, between the earthly realm and the supernatural realm, and they stood on these platforms called “ahu.”
Dr. Newell: [2:15] The ahu were platforms that raised these moai up high above the people who were communing with them.
Dr. Harris: [2:22] They were already quite tall.
Dr. Newell: [2:24] On average about 14 feet high, so extremely impressive. Very large eyes and very imposing bodies and heads. Their backs were to the sea, they’re facing inwards towards the middle of the island. They were carved inland, where the rock quarries were.
[2:39] Their fronts were carved, and they were still attached to the rock. Then the rest of them would be chipped away from behind, and then raised.
Dr. Harris: [2:46] We believe that many of them did originally have inlaid eyes, which would have made them look very different.
Dr. Newell: [2:51] They had eyes made of coral, and they were inset.
Dr. Harris: [2:55] Their faces are very imposing, and they seem to stick their very squarish chin slightly forward. Their shoulders are a bit narrow, so that we really focus on that head, and the nostrils, the nose is very pronounced. The brow is very pronounced, but it must be very different to see these on the island arranged in a row with their backs to the sea.
Dr. Newell: [3:20] I think also you have the elongated ears, which was another part of the ritual power, I think, that many of the early ancestors would have had, and you could also see the wonderful curved nostrils, which are on all the figures on Rapa Nui.
[3:34] The one here doesn’t have those wonderful nostrils unfortunately. We’re not quite sure why, but we think we have an artist’s impression here. We don’t have an actual cast of the moai’s face.
Dr. Harris: [3:43] This is a very standard type, but they’re identified with specific ancestors. For example, the one in the British museum.
Dr. Newell: [3:49] The one at the British museum, Hoa Hakananai’a, was found in the ritual center in the middle of Rapa Nui, and was brought by an archaeological expedition back to England. At the time when they unearthed it, the expedition team saw that he was painted. And the most amazing thing was he had Bird man religion images carved into his back.
[4:12] So it’s this incredible transition from one religion to another, was represented in this one object.
Dr. Harris: [4:17] So by around 1400, we begin to see the decline of the religion that inspired these ancestor figures and the rise of a new religion called the Bird man religion.
[4:30] The people of Rapa Nui today, the Indigenous people, are interested in repatriating some of the figures that made it to museums like in Washington, D.C., or in London.
Dr. Newell: [4:42] There’s been close continuity throughout the history of Rapa Nui, even though the population did drop terribly because of European diseases that were brought in, [and] because of the slave raids, when people were taken off the island forcibly and taken to work in the mines in Chile.
[4:57] The population has grown again, but it’s been a hard period for a lot of the cultural traditions to survive in the kinds of ways that the Rapa Nui would like. There’s been a lot of ways of remembering those kinds of traditions and bringing them to the fore again. Even though there’s been a lot of the usual sorts of difficulties that people have in a colonized and missionized environment.
Dr. Harris: [5:17] It is unfortunate that the character in the movie “The Night at the Museum” is called “Dum Dum.”
Dr. Newell: [5:23] It does unfortunately continue these ideas about the Pacific being a primitive place, which is, of course, not at all true.
[5:30] This ancestor figure is a figure of great mana, great personal and ancestral power, with great wisdom and dignity, and it would have been great if the character could have been a character like that.
[5:41] [music]
