
The Statues That Walked
Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island
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Narrated by:
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Joe Barrett
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By:
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Terry Hunt
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Carl Lipo
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.
Download the accompanying reference guide.©2011 Terry Hunt and Carl Weber (P)2011 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















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the secret revealed
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The History of Easter Island
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The authors are two archaeologist, Terry Hunt from the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo from California State University Long Beach. They have lived on the Island for many years bringing graduate students to work on scientific exploration and archaeological digs. They describe the first colonists to the island in 1200 A.D. of 30 to 100 Polynesians. The climate of the island wasn’t conducive to their growth. Rats that came to the island with the colonists decimated the large palm trees. The authors claim it was the rats rather than over use of the land that led to the devastation of the land. They claim the building of the statues helped maintain social networks that allowed a small closely related population to stay alive and work cohesively. They found that the large statues protected the soil from erosion and regulated the temperature changes over the day and night. In addition, the cracked surfaces of the stone on open ground added essential mineral nutrients to the ground. They also build small walled gardens, called manavai, that protected crops from the wind. They also present their hypothesis of how the statues were moved to their final location. The visits by Europeans brought disease, violence and slavery to the Island.
The book is well written and researched. The authors present a different hypothesis to the environmental conditions of the island. Unlike prior authors they have conducted extensive, long term scientific exploration and analysis to the mysteries of the island. I found the book most interesting and it was easy for the lay person to read.
Joe Barrett does an excellent job narrating the book. Barrett is a theatre actor and award winning audiobook narrator.
Fascinating
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Is a tiny island in the South Pacific and when I mentioned I was reading this book at lunch one of my co-workers said; "oh that is the island they clear cut the trees so they could farm." I said the authors have another theory and that theory makes more sense than man kills his environment on purpose.
I was surprised at the theory about the cost of war. I was interested in how the different explorers went about their expeditions hundreds of years ago. I was shocked to learn the islanders where thief's stealing any thing and everything including the hat off your head.
It was insightful to learn how the South Pacific people viewed what we would consider normal morality. Meaning that happily traded sex much to the delight of the earlier explorers. Of course one of the trades we made was VD.
Learning about the different ways the Islanders farmed by breaking up rocks to fertilize the ground and prevent erosion from the trade winds was another tidbit that adds to the whole.
Last but not least the architecture of the statues and how they moved the really big ones (some up to and over 75 tons) is still got people scratching their heads. The walked part is a catchy title for a book that encompasses much more than statues and the enigma they hold.
Rapa Nui
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Thanks Audible!
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If you could sum up The Statues That Walked in three words, what would they be?
Hunt and Lipo presents a compelling new theory about the history of Easter Island.What did you like best about this story?
The available historical sources clearly summarised and the conclusions drawn are clear and logical.Any additional comments?
A must for everyone with a more than passing interest in Easter Island and Polynesia.A "new" theory of Easter Island history
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If you could sum up The Statues That Walked in three words, what would they be?
Mysterious Polynesian PeopleWhich scene was your favorite?
Engineering of Rapanui people: how they curved and moved the statues are amazing.Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Not really, there were too many examples of archeological surveys in other areas.Any additional comments?
Archeological survey does not always reveal truth, because sometimes it is based on hypothesis.Mystery of Easter Island is solved by archeology
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Great structure
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Any additional comments?
I've always been fascinated with the archeology of Easter Island. I hope to get a chance to go there some day, but this was a good second best alternative. Hopefully some day it will help me enjoy my trip there that much more.I was curious how they would fill 6 hours talking about the mysterious statues. They did so quite elloquently by dealing with a lot of related issues. I would certainly recommend it.Interesting Listen
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Only a few chapters are dedicated to the statues themselves, relating mostly to how the statues could have been carved and moved by the islanders, and these are quite interesting. However, explanations as to WHY the islanders carved such an abundance of the statues, what they were supposed to represent, why they were placed where they were, etc., were unsatisfying, to put it mildly.
The authors' discussion on the reason for the statues almost exclusively revolves around a theory relating to status accumulation and population control in a limited environment, seeming to suggest, as far as I understand it, that the men were kept busy building and moving statues in order to limit their opportunities to father children and keep them from fighting with each other (not consciously, mind you, but as a function of population dynamics). I can't help but find this argument patronizing in the extreme and totally inadequate in explaining the astonishing creativity and energy of these island people.
The "Mystery of Easter Island" remains raveled
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