Island At The Edge Of The World by Mike Pitts: The mystery of Easter Island is finally
Island At The Edge Of The World by Mike Pitts (Bloomsbury £25, 384pp)
Island at the Edge of the World is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Everyone knows about Easter Island’s enigmatic stone heads, up to 30ft high, gazing out silently into the vast heart of the Pacific. They seem unfathomable, challenging us to explain their ancient mystery. Who built them? How? And why?
The mystery has provoked some wild theories, and in this revelatory new book, archaeologist Mike Pitts gives us a quick overview: the statues of Easter Island, right, are the remnants of a highly advanced civilisation from thousands of years ago, which once spanned the entire Pacific, or perhaps the globe.
Or they are something to do with aliens…
One purveyor of such theories was the plump little Russian psychic Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), who believed the statues were built by pre-Aryan giants who fled from Atlantis. She also believed in astral jellyfish.
Today’s eco-doomsters are just as bad: they tell us the islanders cut down all their trees to move their statues and thus destroyed themselves. It’s twaddle, says Mike Pitts. There was no eco-catastrophe.
He offers a far more pragmatic but still fascinating explanation. The islanders built the statues themselves around the 15th century, and later abandoned the practice as their customs and beliefs evolved.
Pitts’ great discovery is the neglected work of an early 20th century couple called Scoresby and Katherine Routledge, hugely wealthy and eccentric, who voyaged there to do extensive archaeological research and, crucially, listened to the islanders themselves. The islanders told them their ancestors built the statues, as a way of honouring their dead.
Stoic: The moai statues were carved mostly between 1250 and 1500 AD
But how did they transport these huge monoliths? The answer could be… on banana skins! Well, banana pulp to be exact.
Pitts thinks they used the stems of banana trunks, which ooze copious slippery sap when split. The island’s population of some 5,000 people would then have little trouble roping and hauling the statues along such a well-lubricated (and deliciously flavoured) trackway. Oddly, this echoes another current theory about how the stones of Stonehenge were transported: on huge slippery mats of seaweed.
In later life the Routledges’ marriage fell apart, and Katherine barricaded herself inside her grand house in Hyde Park Gardens, London. She cut off the phone, cooked eggs and bacon on a spirit stove in the bathroom, and pinned notices to her front door about her ‘struggle with Death’. In 1929 she was finally diagnosed with ‘mania’, and sent off to Ticehurst asylum in Sussex, where she died in 1935.
Tantalisingly, some of her notes remain in private hands and have still never been studied. But what Pitts describes is wholly convincing, and deeply indebted to her.