The great moai (stone statues) on Easter Island are one of the most recognizable symbols in the world. Scientists have worked diligently to restore them and to study the culture that produced them, but today there is a conflict -- what should the balance be between those two tasks. Should every moai be restored, or should the overwhelming majority be left in situ and buried or toppled, or should each and every one of them be brought back to its original state?

For local people, though, they also present a problem: what should be done about the hundreds of other stone icons scattered around the island, many of them damaged or still embedded in the ground?

Commercial and political interests, as well as some archaeologists, would like nothing better than to restore more — or perhaps eventually all — of the moai, as the statues are known. But many residents of Rapa Nui, the Polynesian name for Easter Island that is favored here, regard that possibility with a mixture of suspicion and dread.

“We don’t want to become an archaeological theme park, a Disney World of moai,” Pedro Edmunds Paoa, the mayor of Hanga Roa, the island’s largest settlement, said in an interview. “If we are going to keep on restoring moai there has to be a good reason to do so.”

The repaired and re-erected moai on display to visitors at the most popular half-dozen or so sites around Easter Island amount to fewer than 50. But estimates of the total number unearthed on the island have now climbed to more than 900 and keep growing as excavations continue, with nearly half of that total found at the hillside quarry at Rano Raraku, where the islandÂ’s original inhabitants mined and carved the statues out of compressed volcanic ash.

“Having so many is both a blessing and a curse,” said Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an American archaeologist who has worked here since 1982 and is the director of the Easter Island Statue Project. “Some are already lost, of course, but because there are so many, decisions are going to have to be made about which ones to save.”

Many of the islandÂ’s 3,800 residents argue that the moai already restored are sufficient to ensure a constant flow of tourists, the islandÂ’s main source of income. Tourism here zoomed to more than 45,000 visitors in 2005 from 6,000 in 1990 as airline flights have increased, but the influx is viewed as a mixed blessing because it has resulted in strains on public services and natural resources.

To restore even more statues, local critics argue, would only divert scarce resources from other scientific work that could reveal more about the culture that existed here for 1,000 years before the Dutch landed on Easter Sunday of 1722.

Let's put it in context -- the island is three times the size of Manhattan, and has 20,000 archeological sites. Much of the island has been declared to be off-limits to development, meaning that 80% of the land is uselesss to the 3800 inhabitants of the island.

And there is the economic question -- the restoration and maintenance of all 900 moai would cost somewhere int eh neighborhood of half a billion dollars. And given that many of the restored maoi have deteriorated due to renewed exposure to the elements, the question exists on how to best preserve these great stone faces.

Posted by: Greg at 11:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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