Thor Heyerdahl’s
Aku-aku: The Secret of Easter Island offers a vicarious adventure for young adult readers. The most
striking human accomplishment on Easter Island is the construction of what appeared to be colossal heads that turned out to be statues with the torso mostly buried. The adventure begins with a mystery: How did the
ancient people of Easter Island make and move these huge, numerous stone figures? Early in the book, it seems that no living soul knows how these colossal stone heads were carved out of rock or how they were lifted to an upright position. The ancient people who lived there buried their dead at the foot of the giant heads, until silence came to the island: There were no more people, no more sculpting, and no more signs of life. Such mysteries prompted Heyerdahl’s voyage, which required a year of planning.
The exploring team soon located the place where the sculpting work took place. Heyerdahl explains how the topography assisted in the sculpting of the gigantic heads. The ancient remains of volcanoes had become like small mountains with carved out tops that held water in natural pools. One of these water-filled volcanoes is called Rano Raraku, and it is here that the ancient
sculptors seemed to have been most busily at work. The whole mountain was reshaped as hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of rock were cut out and tens of thousands of tons of stone were carried away. In the midst of the mountain’s gaping top lie more than a hundred and fifty gigantic stone men in all stages of completion, from those just begun to those just finished. At the foot of the mountain stand finished stone men, side by side like an army.
Heyerdahl describes the team’s examination of the site and its findings. They first studied the numerous figures in various stages of production on the ledges in the quarry itself. It was clear that the work had been broken off suddenly. Thousands of primitive, unpolished stone picks still lay in the open-air workshop. Since different groups of sculptors had worked simultaneously on many different statues, all stages of carving production were represented. The stonecutters first attacked the bare rock itself to carve the face and the front part of the statue. Then, they cut channels along the sides and made giant ears and arms; they always carved extremely long and slender fingers over the belly. Next, they cut their way underneath the whole figure from both sides, so that the back part took the shape of a boat with a narrow keel.
When the figure was completed in every minute detail, it was rubbed with a sort of pumice and thoroughly polished. The only thing that the sculptors did not do was to mark the eye itself under the overhanging brows; at that point, the giant was to remain blind. Then, the keel was hacked away under the back while the colossus was wedged up with stones to prevent it from sliding down into the abyss. It seemed that the sculptors were indifferent as to whether they carved the figure out of a perpendicular wall or a horizontal slab, with head upward or downward, since half-finished giants lay bent in every direction. The only consistent thing about them was that the back was the last part to remain attached to the rock.
The solution to the mystery about how the colossi were moved is described. When the back was cut loose, transportation down the cliff to the foot of the volcano began. In some cases, colossi weighing many tons had been swung down a perpendicular wall and maneuvered over lower ledges, where there were statues on which work was still proceeding. Many figures were broken in transport, but the overwhelming majority had come down complete—that is to say, complete without legs, for every single statue ended where the abdomen ends and the legs begin, making them lengthened busts with complete torsos. The giant stone men were raised into a standing position at the bottom of the hill, where the sculptors worked on the unfinished back. Heyerdahl notes that the only articles of clothing carved onto the statue were belts decorated with rings and symbols. With only one exception, the colossi were all male figures.