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By Root 1996 0

of Easter Island (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), a short illustrated overview; and John Loret and John Tancredi, eds., Easter Island: Scientific Exploration into the World’s Environmental Problems in Microcosm (New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 2003), 13 chapters on results of recent expeditions. Anyone who becomes seriously interested in Easter Island will want to read two classic earlier books: Katherine Routledge’s own account, The Mystery of Easter Island (London: Sifton Praed, 1919, reprinted by Adventure Unlimited Press, Kempton, Ill., 1998), and Alfred Métraux, Ethnology of Easter Island (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Bulletin 160, 1940, reprinted 1971). Eric Kjellgren, ed., Splendid Isolation: Art of Easter Island (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001) assembles dozens of photos, many in color, of petroglyphs, rongo-rongo boards, moai kavakava, barkcloth figures, and a red feather headdress of a type that may have inspired the red stone pukao.

Articles by Jo Anne Van Tilburg include “Easter Island (Rapa Nui) archaeology since 1955: some thoughts on progress, problems and potential,” pp. 555-577 in J. M. Davidson et al., eds., Oceanic Culture History: Essays in Honour of Roger Green (New Zealand Journal of Archaeology Special Publication, 1996); Jo Anne Van Tilburg and Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, “The Rapanui carvers’ perspective: notes and observations on the experimental replication of monolithic sculpture (moai),” pp. 280-290 in A. Herle et al., eds., Pacific Art: Persistence, Change and Meaning (Bathurst, Australia: Crawford House, 2002); and Jo Anne Van Tilburg and Ted Ralston, “Megaliths and mariners: experimental archaeology on Easter Island (Rapa Nui),” in press in K. L. Johnson, ed., Onward and Upward! Papers in Honor of Clement W. Meighan (University Press of America). The latter two of those three articles describe experimental studies aimed at understanding how many people were required to carve and transport statues, and how long it would have taken.

Many good books accessible to the general reader describe the settlement of Polynesia or the Pacific as a whole. They include Patrick Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), and The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Peter Bellwood, The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island People, revised edition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987); and Geoffrey Irwin, The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). David Lewis, We, the Navigators (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1972) is a unique account of traditional Pacific navigational techniques, by a modern sailor who studied those techniques by embarking on long voyages with surviving traditional navigators. Patrick Kirch and Terry Hunt, eds., Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands: Prehistoric Environmental and Landscape Change (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997) consists of papers about human environmental impacts on Pacific Islands other than Easter.

Two books by Thor Heyerdahl that inspired my interest and that of many others in Easter Island are The Kon-Tiki Expedition (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950) and Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island (London: Allen & Unwin, 1958). A rather different interpretation emerges from the excavations of the archaeologists whom Heyerdahl brought to Easter Island, as described in Thor Heyerdahl and E. Ferdon, Jr., eds., Reports of the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific, vol. 1: The Archaeology of Easter Island (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961). Steven Fischer, Glyph Breaker (New York: Copernicus, 1997) and Rongorongo: The Easter Island Script (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) describe Fischer’s efforts at deciphering the Rongorongo text. Andrew Sharp, ed., The Journal of Jacob Roggeveen (London: Oxford University Press, 1970) reprints