- 2 days ago
The episode suggests that a loss of faith in the statues' protective power (known as mana) may have led to an internal "massacre," which involved the widespread toppling of the statues from their platforms (ahu). The show also touches on the impact of Western contact, including disease and colonization, which contributed to the near-annihilation of the Rapanui people.
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00:00On a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, a frightening and mysterious massacre took place.
00:16A race of stone giants carved a thousand years ago guard the shore in silence,
00:21as if unable to endure what they had witnessed.
00:25The clues to the mystery remain locked behind mute lips.
00:30There is no voice to tell who carved the giants and why hundreds of them were destroyed in the Easter Island Massacre.
01:00The shattered remains of the Easter Island giants defy mankind to reveal their story.
01:20This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.
01:34The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanation,
01:38but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries we will examine.
01:42In the beginning of time, legends tell us, land and sea were at war with each other.
01:57The crust of the earth exploded in fury and sent molten lava boiling into the sea.
02:02The lava cooled and hardened into black rock.
02:08Eons ago, an island was born, forged in agony and cursed with a destiny that hangs over it to this day.
02:16It is Easter Island, a jagged speck of land on the endless seas halfway between the coast of South America and Tahiti.
02:33Easter Island is perhaps the loneliest inhabited place on earth.
02:37It's existence was unknown until it was discovered by a Dutch explorer in 1722.
02:47The Dutch ship landed on a warm and balmy Easter Sunday.
02:52It was welcomed by a band of natives who swam out to the boat carrying gifts.
02:56At one time, the population exceeded 10,000.
03:01But since that fateful Easter Sunday, slave raids, civil war, and a smallpox epidemic nearly decimated an entire race.
03:11Today, less than 1,000 people live in the only village, Pangaroa.
03:17The island is owned by Chile, and the official language is Spanish.
03:21But the faces of the people hold no clue to the origin of the first islanders.
03:26Over the years, the mix of Polynesian, South American, and European blood has blurred lines of ethnic purity.
03:40It was on Easter Island that mankind had one of its most curious ideas.
03:45No one knows who had it or why.
03:49But the inhabitants of that lonely island undertook what is perhaps one of the most amazing engineering projects of ancient times.
03:56They did not build pyramids or tombs.
04:00Instead, they carved colossal stone idols in the likeness of man.
04:06The stone figures of Easter Island are so massive, their size is difficult to grasp.
04:16Standing beside them, a person becomes as small as a fly speck.
04:21Statues range between 30 to 80 tons of solid volcanic rock.
04:26A small one is equal to the weight of a thousand men and stands as tall as a two-story house.
04:32They cover the entire island.
04:40Each has a unique character.
04:42Some morose and brooding, others almost comical.
04:46The mysteries that surround the giants begin with the question of why the islanders created so many of these enormous idols.
05:02It is as if their fear of life was so terrifying, they needed a multitude of gods to protect them.
05:10Even more mystifying is evidence that many statues appear to have been systematically massacred.
05:18Some savagely decapitated and mutilated.
05:22A ritual murder seems to have taken place.
05:25No one knows who did it or why.
05:38The search for answers begins in the quarry, the crater of an extinct volcano, Rano Raraku, a dark and forbidding womb.
05:47There are enough questions here to intrigue an army of scientists and fill a bank of computers.
05:57But only a handful of men have pursued the quest.
06:01Foremost in the search is Dr. Edmundo Edwards, a Chilean archaeologist who has spent the last 10 years probing the riddle of the statues.
06:10Five hundred years ago, the quarry rang with the blows of hammers and the rhythmic chanting of workers chipping stone.
06:33Then, quite suddenly, work was abandoned.
06:37Half-finished forms are embedded in the side of the volcano, ranging from embryos to fully formed young gods.
06:48Some are difficult to discern because their contours have merged with the crater.
07:01Work was stopped so suddenly that the presence of the workers can still be felt.
07:05Tools lie in their place, undisturbed for centuries.
07:11Crude basalt chisels that were used to carve the expressive faces of the stone gods.
07:17Where once the sound of a thousand hammers filled the air, now there is not even an echo.
07:24Once finished, all that remained was to sever the umbilical cord.
07:33An elaborate pulley system lowered the statues from the mouth of the volcano down the slope.
07:39Here, the monoliths were free to begin their lumbering march to the sea.
07:43Ancient legend has it that the stone gods were endowed with a supernatural power called mana.
07:53A power that enabled them to walk from the volcanic quarry to the sea.
07:58There, they stopped, each in its place, and turned their backs to the sea so they could cast their mana over the land.
08:06The mana emanated through the eyes.
08:11The last ritual act of the carvers was to open the stone lids so the mana could escape.
08:20At one time, open-air temples lined the coast.
08:24Then, all the statues with open eyes were smashed and desecrated.
08:39The work of restoring the monoliths has only recently begun.
08:45Mario Arevalo is a topographer and one of the prime movers in the restoration project.
08:50According to the most recent count, there are over 500 battered giants on the island.
08:57And many are in the final stages of degeneration.
09:05Mario and archaeologist Edmundo Edwards wage a desperate battle to stave off the effects of erosion.
09:12The work involves the painstaking process of plotting the position and alignment of each statue.
09:20So far, only 12 have been restored because there isn't enough manpower or machinery to save more.
09:29Somehow, the statues were transported across 20 miles of rough terrain to the sea.
09:35No evidence remains of how the engineering feat was accomplished.
09:38But a primitive boat-rolling method, still used by local fishermen, provides a glimmering of how it was done.
09:47The theory holds that the statues were rolled over miles of wooden skids to the beach.
09:52If true, this is one of the earliest uses of rollers known to man.
09:58Not even the more technologically advanced Egyptians knew of this method when they moved the giant blocks for their pyramids.
10:05How did a people, isolated by thousands of miles of endless sea, develop an advanced engineering skill?
10:13The riddle of how the statues were moved has challenged many men to come up with a concrete solution.
10:35Diagrams illustrate what the ancient method might have been.
10:38For Roberto Forster, a local engineer, the theory of the giant rollers is not enough.
10:45He swears he can demonstrate a more practical method.
10:49He calls his invention the fulcrumista.
10:57As in the seesaw, the principle of the fulcrum is to exert the greatest possible leverage in the lifting of an object.
11:08In an experiment executed on a small scale, Roberto intends to move a five-ton stone
11:19to prove how a 50-ton giant might once have been transported.
11:25Roberto prevails on the mayor to gather a workforce for his project.
11:30He vows he will solve the ancient riddle once and for all.
11:33The mayor has doubts, but agrees.
11:36The experiment is scheduled for tomorrow morning.
11:42The experiment will be carried out on a small scale.
12:01A five-ton stone replacing the 50-odd tons of a monolith.
12:04On the appointed morning, a workforce gathers for the momentous test.
12:14Roberto's fulcrumista will either stand or fall.
12:20Edmundo, Mario, and even the mayor himself have joined in the effort to put to rest once and for all
12:27the question of how the statues were moved.
12:30Hold it!
12:33Hold it, you're going!
12:47Get out of there!
12:53Come, come, come!
12:57This one!
12:58A fiasco.
13:12Indeed, if the attempts of modern man to solve these incredible engineering feats meet with failure,
13:19think of the ingenuity of the ancient carvers.
13:22One may well wonder if the peoples of those early times did not have gifts that have been lost to us.
13:29The secret remains locked behind stone faces.
13:33Faces that remind archaeologists of another face staring out over its mountain kingdom.
13:39The place is Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, an ancient civilization built on a bleak plateau in the Andes.
13:45Stone gods separated by 4,000 miles in a span of at least as many years.
13:53There is no evidence that there was any contact between the two cultures.
13:58And yet, the features bear an uncanny resemblance.
14:01With what common spirit might they have been invested?
14:05Perhaps one of the seven written tablets found on the island contain the answer.
14:35The pictographs are like those of no language known on Earth.
14:40They have not been decoded, but anthropologists believe they tell a dark and bloody tale.
14:46There is evidence that long ago the island was torn by terrible civil strife,
15:07with brother pitted against brother.
15:08The bones of hundreds of islanders have been found in caves that stretch for miles under the lava crust.
15:16What were the natives hiding from?
15:19Why were they slain?
15:22Edmundo ascribes it to overpopulation and starvation.
15:26He speculates that in mass frenzy, the strongest killed the weakest and survived by eating human flesh.
15:33The survivors set up the worship of a new god, the birdman, who dove on his prey from the sky.
16:00Folklore has it that on the first day of spring, the strongest men would swim through shark endangered waters
16:08to the tiny island that lies offshore.
16:11They would search the crags for the manutara egg and swim back, carrying the prize in their mouths.
16:22The first man back was proclaimed king for one year.
16:25Perhaps the petroglyphs tell the story of the days that preceded the birdman cult.
16:39Archaeologists have labored since the glyphs were first discovered in 1922
16:43to decipher the meaning of the bizarre symbols.
16:46The chalk paint accentuates the designs, but cannot unlock the meaning of the curious etchings.
17:06Only a tragic face remains as an emblem of past events.
17:13The strongest clues seem to lie in the myths and legends handed down by word of mouth over the centuries.
17:27Juanita Huera is a noted linguist who understands many tongues.
17:34The old woman begins to chant a tale about a war between the long ears and the short ears.
17:46Her story bears the epic ring of heroic battles and great conquests.
18:05It sounds like a tale out of ancient Greece.
18:08A great saga in which the short ears rose from enslavement
18:13and in a battle that rumbled like the quaking of the earth, slew every man, woman and child who had long ears.
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18:48legends
19:48Mythology, with its strange symbols, plays tricks on the imagination.
20:03But it springs from real events that once occurred.
20:07And there is little doubt that the events on Easter Island have been bloody and tragic.
20:11The tragedy was matched by the fate of the islanders and provides a final clue to the Easter Island mystery.
20:22History records that thousands of natives died under the guns of their conquerors and from the dread diseases brought with them.
20:29The endless waves, of course, have seen it all.
20:39They saw brave people put their hope and faith in mighty gods carved from stone.
20:45And they saw the failure of those gods to protect them.
20:48It was that failure that may have led to the massacre of the stone giants.
20:54On a remote speck of land in the South Seas, a great civilization flourished and died.
21:03The wide-scale destruction of the giants of Easter Island is symbolic of the tragic destiny of a people.
21:08It is also testament to the power of faith, a faith that motivated thousands of men to toil relentlessly on stone monoliths.
21:18And a faith so strong that when it was lost, it may have driven them to turn against their own gods with a terrible vengeance.
21:25And a faith so strong that when it was lost, it may have driven them to turn against their own gods.
21:56And a faith so strong that when it was lost or not, it may have driven them to turn against their own gods.
22:06It may have driven them to turn upon their own gods and their own gods.
22:12Well, that's also true.
22:15There is no faith in a real world without their own gods and their own gods and their own gods.
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