Easter Island Statues Might Have Been "Walked" Out of Quarry
By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine
Easter Island’s gargantuan stone statues walked. That is the controversial claim from archaeologists who have demonstrated the feat with a 4.4-tonne model of one of the baffling busts. They describe their work in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Nearly 1,000 statues litter Easter Island's 163 square kilometers, with the largest weighing 74 tons and standing 10 meters tall. Much about the megaliths is mystery, but few of the enigmas are more perplexing than how the statues were shuttled kilometers from the rock quarries where they were carved.
Archaeologists have proposed that the Polynesians who settled Easter Island 800 years ago or more laid the statues (called moai) prone and rolled them along on logs. That idea supports the theory that the settlers, known as Rapa Nui, became so obsessed with statue-building that they denuded the island of its forests. In his book Collapse (Viking, 2005), Jared Diamond, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, touted Easter Island as the poster child for a civilization that blew through its natural resources and folded.
more with video
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=easter-island-statues-might-have-been-walked-out-of-quarry
= new reply since forum marked as read
