The Archaeology of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Author(s):  
Terry L. Hunt ◽  
Carl Lipo

The public and scholarly fascination with Rapa Nui or Easter Island has stimulated research on this isolated island since the late nineteenth century. In the last twenty years such research has contributed greatly to knowledge of the archaeological record, as well as prehistoric agriculture, community structure, settlement patterns, and the carving and transport of roughly 1,000 anthropomorphic statues or moai. Although the popularized story of Rapa Nui is one of self-inflicted population devastation through destruction of the environment—ecocide—this research suggests that decentralized social systems, including those related to moai carving, and innovative subsistence practices within a marginal environment contributed to the ultimate survival of the Rapa Nui people.

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Torres Hochstetter ◽  
Sergio Rapu Haoa ◽  
Carl P. Lipo ◽  
Terry L. Hunt

AbstractThe archaeological record of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has long captivated the public and archaeologists alike. The monumental statues (moai) are the most famous of the archaeological features of the island. Other aspects of the record, however, include platforms (ahu), statue (moai), transport roads, and a wide range of architectural features. Although large portions of the island have been surveyed as part of government-funded projects to document the archaeological record, there is yet no single publicly available and published source providing data on the composition and distribution of moai, ahu, or the many other architectural/artifact classes of the island. Here, we describe a project to build a publicly accessible archaeological database. Using the freely available Google Earthtm mapping service, which provides high-resolution color images of the earth’s surface, photographs, and data generated from recent surveys, we show how researchers can contribute to this database making the archaeological record freely available to everyone with an interest in the archaeology of Easter Island.


Author(s):  
Emile Fromet de Rosnay ◽  
Dennis Ioffe ◽  
Samantha Rowe

Symbolism is a late-nineteenth-century literary movement centred mostly around the work of poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and the later Maurice Maeterlinck, as well as novelists like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Edouard Dujardin. Although Tristan Corbière died in 1875, he is an important figure associated with the movement thanks to his image as a poète maudit (‘poet of the damned’) and to this poetic style. A broad term that occasionally extends to early twentieth-century modernists like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, Symbolism is traditionally dated from circa 1870 to 1900. (The term ‘Symbolist’ was coined by Jean Moréas in the review La Vogue in 1886.) The movement became more international in the 1890s with the emergence of European Symbolism such as Russian Symbolism, German Symbolism etc., and with poets such as Emile Nelligan in Canada. Of equal importance is its influence as an artistic movement. Symbolism reacted to broader cultural tendencies related to scientific and literary Positivism such as Realism and Naturalism, and the language of the popular press, particularly as it appeared in the form of best-sellers. Where popular language informs the public with moral narratives, Symbolist language tries to avoid such a reduction.


Author(s):  
Kate Flint

This chapter studies British–First Nations relations, looking at Indians and missionaries. The missionaries in question, though, are not just the British who worked in Canada, but First Nations men who toured Britain as preachers and spokespeople. The chapter extends the category to include George Copway, whose account of his 1850 visit to Britain, en route to the third World Peace Conference, provides an extended example of native engagement with, and enthusiasm for, modernity. Many of the white missionaries believed they were importing spiritual and material benefits that would allow their native flocks to engage more effectively with an increasingly technological, less localized, and less subsistence-based world. Native commentators who left accounts likewise often position themselves, however awkwardly, as mediators between old and new lifestyles and discourses. Although they often situate themselves quite confidently as supporters of progress, setting the supposedly ahistorical and primitive against the teleological imperatives that informed late-nineteenth-century social systems, this confidence often breaks down when it comes to the question of belief. Not only do they—both native and white—often seek to establish a common ground between native and Christian spirituality, but they have, perhaps inevitably, a blind spot when it comes to asking whether the substitution, or overlaying, of one belief system with another does, in fact, constitute a form of modernity.


Author(s):  
Giorgio Pestelli

The meaning of the bicentenary that solemnizes Verdi and Wagner two hundred years after their birth essentially derives from the emotion of facing two personalities extraordinary for their creative energy and inventive continuity. In all fields of art and culture, the late Nineteenth century image is conditioned by their presence. Born the very same year, they both looked for and created by themselves the accomplishments that musicians of the previous generation already possessed when they were barely twenty years old. They reached almost at the same time both the revelation of their personality (Der fliegende Holländer 1841, Nabucco 1842), and the fullness of their artistic means (Rigoletto 1851, Der Rheingold 1853), before attaining the acme of their trajectory with the astonishing operosity of their final years.While the analogy of this parallel course is impressive, the individuality of their creative patrimony is no less strong. This dissimilarity – more than on aesthetic or dramaturgic reasons, such as the distinction between naif and sentimental, or between “melodrama” and “musical drama” – rests on the different environments where it took root, each of them with its own alternative ideas of bourgeois society, of relationship with the public, the contemporary theatre and literature: that’s why it is important today to engage to enlighten the cultural and social contexts in which the genius of the two masters developed.


Urban History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
MIKKEL THELLE

ABSTRACT:This article investigates the emergence of the Copenhagen slaughterhouse, called the Meat City, during the late nineteenth century. This slaughterhouse was a product of a number of heterogeneous components: industrialization and new infrastructures were important, but hygiene and the significance of Danish bacon exports also played a key role. In the Meat City, this created a distinction between rising production and consumption on the one hand, and the isolation and closure of the slaughtering facility on the other. This friction mirrored an ambivalent attitude towards meat in the urban space: one where consumers demanded more meat than ever before, while animals were being removed from the public eye. These contradictions, it is argued, illustrate and underline the change of the city towards a ‘post-domestic’ culture. The article employs a variety of sources, but primarily the Copenhagen Municipal Archives for regulation of meat provision.


2000 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 575-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen B. Braaten ◽  
Wayne Viney

A review of nineteenth century popular literature indicates a deep and sustained public interest in sex differences in emotional expression. The conclusions advanced by popular writers included a catalog of perceived sex differences, reinforced by an essentialist philosophy that provided justification for the separation of sexual spheres and restrictions on political, educational, and vocational opportunities for women. Current scientific research on sex differences appears in popular media and is often presented in the context of an essentialist philosophy comparable with that which was dominant in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the subtleties and complexities of sex differences are not always communicated to the public and there is thus a potential for misinterpretation or even misuse.


2003 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 247-278
Author(s):  
Cathleen M. Giustino

There was always much that was ordinary about the house numbered 207-V up to the time of its disappearance from Prague's built landscape in 1905. Like many other buildings sheltering some of the city's most underprivileged residents, this place had no artistic worth; no one had contemplated hanging a plaque on its exterior to commemorate a well-known person having slept inside its walls; no published material pointed out any history-altering event that took place behind or in front of its doors. The ordinariness of house 207-V becomes even greater when its final years are situated within the history of a common process taking place, with some exceptions, throughout nineteenth-century Central Europe. Many of the structure's last experiences were part of the growth of what German historians of Germany have called the “Leistungsverwaltung,” and what Austrian historians of Austria- Hungary have called “die aktive Stadt.”1 These two different lab ls are used to describe the fact that during the course of the nineteenth century, a great many Central European cities expanded tremendously, not only in terms of their territoriesś populations, but also in terms of the number and extent of public projects that their municipal governments managed. The public projects included, among others, gas and electric works, transportation lines, sewers, baths, parks, libraries, museums, market halls, slaughterhouses,


1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Brailey

AbstractThis is an article highlighting the limitations of Lord Salisbury as foreign secretary in an age when foreign policy was for the first time taking on a truly global character, and yet its practitioners still possessed a rather parochial, almost exclusively European experience, and distrusted ‘experts’. It was of course the late nineteenth-century spread of European imperialism that first called for such global policy making, and thus most of this Europe-dominated world was still for the time being quite susceptible to a Eurocentric approach.But if any area was the exception it was eastern Asia, in due course to be mainly responsible for decline of Western imperial world hegemony. And in the vanguard of this counter-challenge was to be Japan, a country with which Salisbury personally was to find himself all at sea. By contrast, Ernest Satow, more than any other figure of his time, found the key to Japan, and it is a sign of how poorly general Western understanding of that country has progressed since then that his voluminous diaries and papers sit in the Public Record Office, still largely untouched by researchers.


1961 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 298-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Topley

The majority of Singapore Chinese originate from the rural areas of Kwangtung and Fukien provinces. They had already started to immigrate in relatively large numbers by the late nineteenth century, that is before the traditional society of the countryside had been greatly disturbed by new political events and ideas. The social systems Chinese developed in Singapore therefore have been considerably influenced by those existing in “traditional” times in the homeland. Yet they have also been very much modified by the new social environment of Singapore. Overseas Chinese have been free to associate according to a number of principles not open to them in their home villages. New alignments have resulted from the immigration of a body of people of diverse origins and from the heterogenous structure of urban occupations. They become manifest in organisations set up for a number of different kinds of activity.


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