Figure 68: Easter Island and its region. (After Eric Gaba, Wikimedia Commons).
Nor do the parallels stop there. Since the late 1940s, when Thor Heyerdahl undertook his Kon-Tiki expedition (named after Kon-Tiki Viracocha, the civilizing deity of Tiahuanaco, whom we met at the end of the last chapter), it has been noticed that there are similarities between the statues of Tiahuanaco and the Moai of Easter Island. For example, as we’ve seen, the figures of Viracocha at Tiahuanaco display prominent and pronounced beards (a sharp contrast to the indigenous inhabitants of the Andes who are not able to grow strong beards) and there is no doubt that the prominent chins of the Easter Island figures are also meant to represent beards (Plates 78 and 79). As Heyerdahl commented:
The statues on Easter Island … had their chins carved pointed and projecting, because the sculptors themselves grew beards.13
The Norwegian adventurer was likewise struck by the way that the Easter Island figures and the Tiahuanaco figures have “their hands laid in position on their stomachs.”14 Both also wear distinctive broad belts. “The sole decoration of the Easter Island figures,” he wrote:
is a belt which was always carved round the figure’s stomach. The same symbolic belt is to be found on every single statue in Kon-Tiki’s ancient ruins by Lake Titicaca.15
Heyerdahl, who I had the privilege to know and who was a strong supporter of the lost civilization hypothesis,16 did not have the opportunity to visit Göbekli Tepe before he passed away in 2002. Had he done so, however, I think he would have been struck by the resemblance between the hand positions depicted on the “Totem Pole” figure from Göbekli Tepe and the hand positions on the Viracocha pillar statue and on the Ponce and El Fraile monoliths at Tiahuanaco. I pointed these resemblances out in the last chapter, but there’s more.
For example, the larger anthropomorphic pillars at Göbekli Tepe feature thick sculpted belts very similar to those seen on the Tiahuanaco and Easter Island figures. Also noteworthy are the hand positions seen on the larger Göbekli Tepe pillars, with long fingers placed forward and almost meeting across the belly. Identical hand positions are seen on the Easter Island Moai. Last but not least, just as Easter Island, Tiahuanaco and Cuzco share the odd concept of being “navels of the earth,” so too does Göbekli Tepe; whether expressed in Turkish, or in the Armenian language as Portasar, its very name means “the hill of the navel.”17
If all these are coincidences then their profusion is rather extraordinary—unless, of course, the same Magicians of the Gods who created and then buried the Göbekli Tepe time capsule at the end of the Younger Dryas some 11,600 years ago were also at work in Easter Island.
Unless, in other words, the Moai of Easter Island are older—much older—than archaeologists think they are …
A remnant of antediluvian lands?
Archaeologists believe that the oldest of the Easter Island Moai was made around AD 690 and the youngest about a thousand years later in AD 1650. This chronology is based on radiocarbon dating which also puts the earliest human settlement on the island at AD 318.18 As we have seen, however, radiocarbon cannot date stone monuments directly. Inferences have to be made about the relationship between the organic materials that have been dated and the stone, and sometimes these inferences can be extremely misleading.
For example, it would be a mistake to conclude that the Ahu (platform) at Ahu Nau Nau on Anakena Bay is the same age as the seven Moai mounted on it. The platform is obviously the work of a later culture that must have re-erected the statues because, incorporated in the masonry of the platform itself, an ancient and heavily weathered Moai head has been reused as a construction block.
Likewise, if, for example, human beings had settled here during the Younger Dryas when sea level was much lower than it is today, and Easter Island was part of a chain of steep and narrow antediluvian islands as long as the Andes mountain range, then how much in the way of organic materials would they have left for archaeologists to carbon date? Perhaps the peak of the East Pacific Rise that we now know as Easter Island was not used for residential purposes at all, but kept exclusively for religious ceremonies in which the great monolithic statues played a part? Perhaps people came from other parts of the archipelago to attend those ceremonies and then returned to their home islands—islands that are all now underwater?
This is conjecture, of course, pure speculation, but it is temptingly suggested by a legend of the Easter Islanders themselves concerning a supernatural being called Uoke who in remote times:
traveled around the Pacific with a gigantic lever with which he pried up whole islands and tossed them into the sea where they vanished forever under the waves. After thus destroying many islands he came at length to the coast of Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua, then a much larger land than it is today. He began to lever up parts of it and cast them into the sea. Eventually he reached a place called Puko Pihipuhi … in the vicinity of Hanga Hoonu [La Perouse Bay, site of the “golden navel stone”]. Here the rocks of the island were too sturdy for Uoke’s lever, and it was broken against them. He was unable to dispose of the last fragment, and this remained as the island we know today. Thus Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua continues to exist only through the accident of Uoke’s broken lever.19
Legends also speak of a primeval Pacific homeland called “Hiva” from which the first inhabitants of Easter Island came—a homeland that also fell victim to the “mischief of Uoke’s lever” and was “submerged under the sea.” What is particularly intriguing about all this, because of its resonance with the Seven Sages—the Apkallu—spoken of in Mesopotamian antediluvian traditions, and with the Seven Sages of the Edfu Building Texts, who sought out new lands in which to recreate the drowned and devastated world of the gods, is that Seven Sages—“kings’ sons, all initiated men”—are also said to have been instrumental in the original settlement of Easter Island.20 Exactly as was the case with the Apkallu, who laid the foundations of all the future temples of Mesopotamia, and with the Edfu Sages who traveled the length and breadth of Egypt establishing the sacred mounds on which all future pyramids and temples were to be built, the first task of the Seven Sages from Hiva after their arrival on Easter Island was “the construction of stone mounds.”21
Could there be anything to this? Is it possible that the Moai statues of Easter Island are the work of the survivors of a lost civilization dating back to the Ice Age 12,000 or more years ago?
One possible hint comes from a discovery made by Dr. Robert J. Menzies, Director of Ocean Research at the Duke University Marine Laboratory, Beaufort, North Carolina. In 1966 Menzies led a six-week oceanographic investigation of the Pacific off the coast of Peru and Ecuador in the waters of the Milne–Edwards Deep, a trench that drops off in places to almost 19,000 feet (5,791 meters). Dr. Menzies’ research vessel, the Anton Bruun, deployed underwater cameras that were state of the art at the time and about 55 miles west of Callao (the port of Lima, capital of Peru), at a depth of 6,000 feet in an area prone to marine subsidence, “strange carved rock columns” were photographed on the sea bed:22
Two upright columns, about two feet or more in diameter, were sighted extending five feet out of the mud. Two more had fallen down and were partially buried, and another angular squarish block was seen.23
“We did not find structures like these anywhere else,” commented Dr. Menzies in an interview with Science News. “I have never seen anything like this before.”24 The later official report of the cruise of the research vessel added that one of the columns bore markings that appeared to be “inscriptions.”25
So far as I have been able to establish Dr. Menzies’ discovery, which hints at a real basis to the submerged land of Hiva, was never followed up. Meanwhile what of Easter Island itself, where the survivors are said to have settled in order to reconstitute their lost world? The science of geology has some clues for us to consider.
What lies beneath …
Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University, renowned for his geological redating of the Great Sphi
nx of Giza, does not easily or quickly bestow greater antiquity on monuments than is allowed by mainstream archaeology. Most often he goes with the orthodox chronology but when he diverges, as he has with the Great Sphinx, and with Gunung Padang in Indonesia (see Chapter Two), it is only because he has first been persuaded by strong geological evidence that archaeology has overlooked.
This is the case with his analysis of the Moai statues of Easter Island. Here’s his considered opinion after a research visit:
I was particularly impressed by the varying degrees of weathering and erosion seen on the different moai, which could be telltale signs of major discrepancies in their ages. The levels of sedimentation around certain moai also impressed me. Some moai have been buried in up to an estimated six meters of sediment, or more, such that even though they are standing erect, only their chins and heads are above the current ground level. Such high levels of sedimentation could occur quickly, for instance if there were catastrophic landslides, mudflows, or possibly tsunamis washing over the island, but I could not find any such evidence (and landslides or tsunamis would tend to shift and knock over the tall statues). Rather, to my eye, the sedimentation around certain moai suggests a much more extreme antiquity than most conventional archaeologists and historians believe to be the case—or believe to be possible.26
Schoch adds that he has begun to collect evidence on typical weathering, erosion and sedimentation rates on Easter Island during the modern period since records began to be kept. “So far it seems that sedimentation over the past century has been on the whole relatively modest.”27
As usual, Schoch understates his case, which is best illustrated at Rano Raraku crater, an extinct volcanic caldera that served as the principal quarry from which the Easter Island Moai were extracted. The inner slopes of the caldera, leading down to a small, reed-fringed lake, are lined with an estimated 270 statues in various stages of completion. Some lie on their backs or sides, many are perfectly upright, others jut at various crazy angles out of the ground, and the overall impression is one of some extraordinary Surrealist show interrupted in mid-preparation and abandoned forever by the artist.
What it was all about, what it was all for, no one can honestly say, though there are many theories. Nonetheless, the setting is unmistakably geological and the statues are themselves first and foremost geological artifacts separated from the natural bedrock, yet still sufficiently in place to have remained part of their original setting. Mostly what you see, as you wander in bemused wonderment among them, are their serene, contemplative bearded faces, their long-eared heads, their shoulders, and parts of their upper torsos.
You could be forgiven for imagining that this is all there is to them—that they are set just a meter or so into the ground, sufficient to anchor them and no more. But Thor Heyerdahl, that indefatigable adventurer and explorer, proved this was not the case when he excavated a number of the Rano Raraku Moai in 1956 and again in 1987, discovering that, like icebergs, the larger part of their mass lies beneath the surface. Photographs from those excavations show statues that go down more than 9 meters (30 feet) beneath the ground into a deep thick sediment of yellow clay.28 Studying these images, it becomes immediately apparent that Schoch’s argument has merit and that there is no way, in just a few hundred years (as noted earlier, archaeo-logists maintain that production of the Moai stopped as recently as 1650) that such a massive amount of sedimentation could have accumulated.
That would be the case even if Easter Island were part of a large, continuous landmass, where there was potential for wind and water to transport soils from one area and deposit them in another. But Easter Island as we know it today, though an enigma of giant proportions, is just a tiny dot on the map in the midst of the world’s largest and deepest ocean. Not only is it situated more than 2,000 miles from the coast of South America, but it is also more than 2,000 miles from Tahiti, the next substantial group of islands.29 With a total land area of just 63.2 square miles (163.6 square kilometers) it is therefore all the more inconceivable that Easter Island itself could have contributed the 30-foot-deep sediment load seen around the Moai in Rano Raraku crater. Such a volume of sedimentation might, however, have been possible more than 12,000 years ago when sea-level was lower and, as we’ve seen, Easter Island was part of an extensive archipelago.
Here, too, could be the answer to another mystery identified by Schoch, which is the existence of a small number of Moai carved from basalt. The problem is that there are no deposits of basalt on Easter Island itself. Schoch speculates that:
the “lost basalt quarries” might be under sea level now because they are of extreme antiquity, and thus the basalt moai carved from them are extremely ancient. Sea levels have risen dramatically since the end of the last Ice Age, some ten thousand or more years ago, and if the basalt moai were quarried along the coast of Easter Island from areas since inundated by the sea, this could help to date the basalt moai and is immediately suggestive that they are thousands of years older than conventionally believed to be the case.30
The same solution—that Easter Island was once part of a much larger landmass—would also explain another, very different puzzle, namely the so-called Rongo Rongo script.31 It is unprecedented in human history for a sophisticated fully developed writing system to be invented and put into use by a small, isolated island community. Yet Easter Island does have its own script, examples of which, mostly incised on wooden boards, copies of copies of copies of much older lost originals, were collected in the nineteenth century and have found their way into a number of museums around the world. None remain on Easter Island itself and even in the period when they were collected no native Easter Islanders were able to read them. To this day the script remains undeciphered—yet another of the many enigmas of this island of mystery.
The Sage of Bada Valley
It’s 28 May 2014 and I’m thousands of miles from Easter Island in the middle of the Bada Valley of Central Sulawesi, in Indonesia, standing in front of a huge Moai-like figure carved from solid basalt and deeply embedded in a grassy field. What’s striking about the statue, apart from its sheer size—the visible part, which slopes steeply over to its left, extends more than four meters (13 feet) out the ground—is the posture of its arms and hands. These are arranged in exactly the manner of the Easter Island Moai, and also of the Göbekli Tepe figures, with the arms crooked at the sides and the hands brought together across the front of the belly with the fingers almost meeting. The big difference is that this figure, known locally as Watu Palindo, “The Wise Man,”32 shows off an erect penis and a pair of testicles between those extended fingers.
How old is the “Wise Man?”
“Nobody knows,” admits Iksam Kailey, Curator of the Province Museum of Central Sulawesi, who has kindly accompanied me on this sector of a long research journey through Indonesia, “archaeology is in its infancy in our island.” Kailey himself is inclined to the view that the statue, and a dozen others like it here in Bada Valley, are at least 4,000 years old.33 Other estimates vary between 5,000 years and less than 1,000 years,34 but none are of the slightest value since no definitive archaeological dating has been done or can be done; the intrusion of organic materials from the different cultures that have lived and farmed this valley for millennia, several of which have at different periods dug up Watu Palindo looking for treasure, mean that we will never get to the truth. Artifacts from the not too far distant Besoa Valley have been carbon dated to 2,890 years ago,35 but so what? That tells us nothing at all about the age of the Wise Man.
Figure 69: The island of Sulawesi in its regional context.
Getting to Bada Valley is quite a trek. Santha and I are traveling with Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, the geologist who has brought the mysterious pyramid of Gunung Padang in West Java (see Chapter Two) to the attention of the world. Also accompanying us is Danny’s friend and colleague Wisnu Ariastika, who has kindly looked after the logistics of our journey. We start off in Jakarta on 26 May and fly to Palu, the cap
ital of the province of Central Sulawesi, where Iksam Kailey joins us on the morning of 27 May. Then we drive all day on an awesomely bad road through spectacular mountain country, reaching the town of Tentana on giant Lake Poso the same evening. The following day, 28 May, we drive an additional fifty kilometers to the village of Bomba in the heart of the Bada Valley, which, like so much of Indonesia, is stunningly beautiful, a broad flat plateau, surrounded by green mountains plumed by silver clouds that reflect magically off gleaming rice fields. Reaching Bomba by mid-morning we check into a basic but comfortable guest house and go straight out megalith hunting.
There are, essentially, two kinds of megaliths in the valley, one being very large stone cisterns called Kalamba, precisely cut and hollowed out within and in some cases weighing more than a ton, the other being figures like Watu Palindo weighing up to twenty tons. For two days we tramp along the borders of waterlogged rice fields and on rough tracks through forests. At one point we come to a statue lying on its back in the midst of a clearing, staring up at the heavens, a little later we find another, also on its back, lying in the midst of a river. Both show the same hand and arm positions as Watu Palindo, the Sage. A third figure with weird, fish-like features is buried up to its neck in deep-water rice. A fourth stands lonely on a ridge gazing at a distant range of mountains.
The frustrating thing is that nothing—really nothing at all—is known about these megaliths. Who created them? When? Why? All is mystery.
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