Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 4. March 26 1968

Easter Island finds

Easter Island finds

Examples of Peruvian pottey from Easter Island in the Waikato Museum.

Examples of Peruvian pottey from Easter Island in the Waikato Museum.

One of history's ironies is that the significance of ancient items has often been recognised thousands of miles away from their point of origin.

The discovery of Egyptian tombs has been precipitated by the appearance of artifacts in European shops. The first scholar to postulate the existance of a giant flightless bird in New Zealand was Sir Richard Owen of the Royal College of Surgeons who deduced the size and character of the moa from a single bone in the 1840s.

There was similar irony in the recent depositing of seven pieces of Peruvian pottery from Easter Island with the Waikato Museum in Hamilton. Scholars like Thor Heyerdahl have scoured the eastern Pacific for tangible links between South America and Polynesia, but it was in the western extremity of the Polynesian triangle that the most concrete evidence for their theories appeared.

The pieces of pottery are made of hard blackware, and are both functional and beautiful. They are hollow and decorated with designs of monkeys, snakes and birds. Their shapes and surface marks show they were not made on a potters wheel but moulded in two pieces around solid material, such as round stone, and sealed together.

Mrs. R. E. Harries donated the pieces to the Waikato Museum where their value was recognised. They were given to her father in the mid-nineteenth century by the captain of a Pacific trading vessel who had taken them from Easter Island. Mrs. Harries received the pottery from her father in the 1880s.

Peruvian origin

Expert identification has confirmed the Peruvian origin of the pottery, and there is little reason to doubt that the pieces were taken from Easter Island in the nineteenth century as stated. At that time European contact with the island was rare.

The discovery of the pottery adds further evidence to the theory that there was at least contact between Polynesia and South America, and possibly a significant South American migration into the Pacific.

When Thor Heyerdahl suggested in the 1940s that some of the people who settled the Polynesian area had come from South America he was ridiculed in many quarters, mainly because the eastward movement of the Polynesians through Asia, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands had been accepted to the point of becoming dogma, and because the Polynesians possessed a tradition of navigation which the South Americans appeared to lack.

But evidence did exist for Heyerdahl's theory. Botanists belived the gourd plant and sweet potato originated in South America—not Asia or the Pacific. Yet both these plants were widely distributed throughout the Pacific area, as far as New Zealand, and the sweet potato retained the same name in this country as it had in Peru: kumara.

In the Galapagos Islands, about 700 miles off the coast of South America, thousands of blackware pottery fragments had been found, similar to those excavated in Peru.

It is well-known how Heyerdahl built his balsa wood raft and sailed from Peru almost as far as Tahiti, demonstrating that South Americans could have made comparable voyages. But Heyerdahl's later expedition to Easter Island in 1955-56 did not uncover any indisputable archaeological evidence of South American contact with the island.

A few fragments of blackware were given to him, but not from an archaeological context, and he found a brown earthenware jar of local but recent origin. He did not find any complete pieces of Peruvian pottery like those now in the Waikato Museum, and to the knowledge of the museum's curator, Mr. C. G. Hunt, these are the oily undamaged examples of such pottery known to have been taken from Easter Island.

In general, the Polynesians did not have a pottery-making tradition.

Apart from the potsherds already mentioned found at the Galapagos and Easter Islands, however, great quantities of ancient fragments of red and blackware have been excavated in Tonga, Samoa and Fiji. Complete pieces of pottery have not ben found in these islands to date, but Pacific archaeology is still in its infancy and whole specimens may eventually come to light.

In New Zealand a few pieces of porous redware have been found, but like the Easter Island fragments they have not been discovered in an archaeological context and could have been made after Maori contact with European expertise ... Two such fragments, one from Raglan and the other from Nelson, can be seen in the Waikato Museum.

Until further finds are made, the best preserved examples of pre-European pottery known to have been taken from the Pacific area remain the seven pieces of Peruvian blackware in the Waikato Museum, probably its most valuable acquisition.