A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [175]
The Huastec expert Kim Richter gives us her more secular understanding of the statue:
I’ve argued that the sculptures represent the Huastec elite, who dressed up with these fancy costume elements that were actually common within the international elite of Meso-America. I’ve linked the Huastec headdresses to similar types of headdresses found in other regions.
I think it’s the fashion of the day but also so much more … it’s not unlike, for example, a Gucci bag today. You see it in wealthy people all over the world – it’s a symbol of status and it symbolizes the connections between these different regions of the globe today, and these headdresses had a very similar function. They showed to their own people that they were part of this larger Meso-American culture.
Kim Richter may be right, and these statues may simply be representations of the local elite, but I find it hard to believe that these geometric naked female statues are aristocratic family likenesses, even of the most ritualized sort. We know that groups of them stood high up above their communities, on artificial mounds where people could congregate for ceremonies and processions, but it is hard to be certain about anything in the face of our statue. And, sadly, there is nobody now who can tell us. Kim Richter says:
I don’t think the sculptures really have much meaning to local people there today. So when I was in the field and I spoke to indigenous people, they were interested and curious, and they wanted to learn more, but they didn’t know anything about these sculptures. I heard a report that in one of the sites the farmers would shoot at sculptures and use them as target practice.
This object reveals more about what we don’t know than what we do. Our statue’s physical presence speaks to us with peremptory directness, but of all the objects in our history, she is perhaps the hardest to read confidently through the filters of the historical record. With the next object, I will also try to reconstruct a lost spiritual world, but there is much more evidence to go on. It involves investigating one of the last places on earth to be settled by human beings – Easter Island – with some of the most instantly recognizable sculptures in the world.
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Hoa Hakananai’a Easter Island Statue
Stone statue, from Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Chile
AD 1000–1200
Rapa Nui – Easter Island – is the most remote inhabited island, not just in the Pacific, but in the world. It’s about half the size of the Isle of Wight, approximately 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) from the nearest inhabited island and 3,200 kilometres (2,000 miles) from the nearest landmass. Not surprisingly, it took human beings a long time to get there. The people of the southern Pacific Ocean, the Polynesians, were the supreme open ocean voyagers in the history of the world, and their ability to move in double-hulled canoes over the vast expanses of the Pacific is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. They settled both Hawaii and New Zealand, and between 700 and 900 they got to Rapa Nui, bringing to an end one immense chapter of human history – for Easter Island was probably one of the last places on Earth to be permanently inhabited.
It was another thousand years before European sailors matched the Polynesian feats of navigation, and when they reached Rapa Nui on Easter Day 1722 they were astonished to find a large population already established. Even more astonishing were the objects that the inhabitants had made. The great monoliths of Easter Island are like nothing else in the Pacific, or indeed anywhere, and they’ve become some of the most famous sculptures in the world. This is one of them. He’s called Hoa Hakananai’a – the name has been roughly translated as ‘hidden friend’. He came to London in 1869, and he has been one of the most admired inhabitants of the British Museum ever since.
It is a constant of human history that societies