Few sights are more mysterious than the enormous carved heads of Easter Island. These stone sculptures were created by ancient people whose accomplishments still puzzle us today. How did the original islanders reach the island? What do the stone moai signify? How were they constructed? What caused the collapse of this civilization? Readers are invited to consider these questions and possible answers. Full-color photographs and 20 exciting facts bring this remote wonder of the world into focus for young readers.
Provides information about Easter Island and its moai statues, including such facts as that its largest volcano can be seen from space and that some moai wear red "hats" for special rituals.
From short-lived celebrity marriages to athlete nicknames, here is a trivia book that eclipses all others. It isnt useless information, nor is it the conventional trivia that you might expect to find anywhere else. In short, it is all the stuff that you didnt even know that you wanted to know. Fortunately we have made it our business to know what you didnt know that you wanted to know in order to include it into this book. Choosing material that we anticipate you didnt know you wanted to know was a significant challenge. We were required to make a distinction between four things: stuff you wanted to know, but knew you wanted to know; things that you didnt know but knew you didnt know and didnt want to; things you didnt know, didnt know you didnt know, but wouldnt want to even if you did; and most elusive of all, things you didnt know you even wanted to know, but would soon discover that you wanted to, once you knew them. It is this stuff that appears in this book. If there is anything that you feel strongly that you now know you didnt know you wanted to know that isnt here, please let us know.
The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works? No such astonishing numbers of massive statues are found anywhere else in the Pacific. How could the islanders possibly have moved so many multi-ton monoliths from the quarry inland, where they were carved, to their posts along the coastline? And most intriguing and vexing of all, if the island once boasted a culture developed and sophisticated enough to have produced such marvelous edifices, what happened to that culture? Why was the island the Europeans encountered a sparsely populated wasteland? The prevailing accounts of the island’s history tell a story of self-inflicted devastation: a glaring case of eco-suicide. The island was dominated by a powerful chiefdom that promulgated a cult of statue making, exercising a ruthless hold on the island’s people and rapaciously destroying the environment, cutting down a lush palm forest that once blanketed the island in order to construct contraptions for moving more and more statues, which grew larger and larger. As the population swelled in order to sustain the statue cult, growing well beyond the island’s agricultural capacity, a vicious cycle of warfare broke out between opposing groups, and the culture ultimately suffered a dramatic collapse. When Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began carrying out archaeological studies on the island in 2001, they fully expected to find evidence supporting these accounts. Instead, revelation after revelation uncovered a very different truth. In this lively and fascinating account of Hunt and Lipo’s definitive solution to the mystery of what really happened on the island, they introduce the striking series of archaeological discoveries they made, and the path-breaking findings of others, which led them to compelling new answers to the most perplexing questions about the history of the island. Far from irresponsible environmental destroyers, they show, the Easter Islanders were remarkably inventive environmental stewards, devising ingenious methods to enhance the island’s agricultural capacity. They did not devastate the palm forest, and the culture did not descend into brutal violence. Perhaps most surprising of all, the making and moving of their enormous statutes did not require a bloated population or tax their precious resources; their statue building was actually integral to their ability to achieve a delicate balance of sustainability. The Easter Islanders, it turns out, offer us an impressive record of masterful environmental management rich with lessons for confronting the daunting environmental challenges of our own time. Shattering the conventional wisdom, Hunt and Lipo’s ironclad case for a radically different understanding of the story of this most mysterious place is scientific discovery at its very best.
"The mystery of Easter island" by Katherine Routledge. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Easter Island is famous for its 887 monumental statues. Nobody really knows who made those statutes, or how or why. New Theories are being advanced, new studies made and new books published about this all the time.It is the only book that adequately explains how the giant statues were created and how they were transported. Basically, the statues were cut from the lips of the three volcanoes on the island. This still does not answer the question of how they were brought down to the water's edge.
From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times
In this extraordinary fiction debut—rich with love and betrayal, history and intellectual passion—two remarkable narratives converge on Easter Island, one of the most remote places in the world. It is 1913. Elsa Pendleton travels from England to Easter Island with her husband, an anthropologist sent by the Royal Geographical Society to study the colossal moai statues, and her younger sister. What begins as familial duty for Elsa becomes a grand adventure; on Easter Island she discovers her true calling. But, out of contact with the outside world, she is unaware that World War I has been declared and that a German naval squadron, fleeing the British across the South Pacific, is heading toward the island she now considers home. Sixty years later, Dr. Greer Farraday, an American botanist, travels to Easter Island to research the island’s ancient pollen, but more important, to put back the pieces of her life after the death of her husband. A series of brilliant revelations brings to life the parallel quests of these two intrepid young women as they delve into the centuries-old mysteries of Easter Island. Slowly unearthing the island’s haunting past, they are forced to confront turbulent discoveries about themselves and the people they love, changing their lives forever. Easter Island is a tour de force of storytelling that will establish Jennifer Vanderbes as one of the most gifted writers of her generation.
