Easter Island Earth Island Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Easter Island Earth Island book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Easter Island, Earth Island by Paul G. Bahn,John Flenley Pdf
A myth-shattering study of the enigmatic Easter Island civilization uses new archeological evidence to unlock the mysteries of the island's massive effigies and its bizarre "birdman" cult. By the author of Images of the Ice Age.
Easter Island, Earth Island by Paul Bahn,John Flenley Pdf
Easter Island, isolated deep in the South Pacific and now a World Heritage Site, was home to a fascinating prehistoric culture—one that produced massive stone effigies (the moai) and the birdman cult—and yet much of the island’s past remains shrouded in mystery. Where did the islanders come from, and when? How did Rapa Nui culture evolve over the centuries? How, and why, did their natural environment change over time? Paul Bahn and John Flenley guide readers through the mysteries and enigmas of Rapa Nui, incorporating the records of early explorers, folk legends, and archaeological evidence along the way. They cover the island’s geological and environmental history and explore its flora and fauna, illustrating how human actions affected the natural environment of the island. This fourth edition draws in: recent DNA studies of ancient human and animal bones as well as plant remains; evolving understandings of how the moai were transported; and current efforts to reforest the island.
From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times
Island at the End of the World by Steven Roger Fischer Pdf
On a long stretch of green coast in the South Pacific, hundreds of enormous, impassive stone heads stand guard against the ravages of time, war, and disease that have attempted over the centuries to conquer Easter Island. Steven Roger Fischer offers the first English-language history of Easter Island in Island at the End of the World, a fascinating chronicle of adversity, triumph, and the enduring monumentality of the island's stone guards. A small canoe with Polynesians brought the first humans to Easter Island in 700 CE, and when boat travel in the South Pacific drastically decreased around 1500, the Easter Islanders were forced to adapt in order to survive their isolation. Adaptation, Fischer asserts, was a continuous thread in the life of Easter Island: the first European visitors, who viewed the awe-inspiring monolithic busts in 1722, set off hundreds of years of violent warfare, trade, and disease—from the smallpox, wars, and Great Death that decimated the island to the late nineteenth-century Catholic missionaries who tried to "save" it to a despotic Frenchman who declared sole claim of the island and was soon killed by the remaining 111 islanders. The rituals, leaders, and religions of the Easter Islanders evolved with all of these events, and Fischer is just as attentive to the island's cultural developments as he is to its foreign invasions. Bringing his history into the modern era, Fischer examines the colonization and annexation of Easter Island by Chile, including the Rapanui people's push for civil rights in 1964 and 1965, by which they gained full citizenship and freedom of movement on the island. As travel to and interest in the island rapidly expand, Island at the End of the World is an essential history of this mysterious site.
The Enigmas of Easter Island by John Flenley,Paul Bahn Pdf
Easter Island, an isolated speck in the Pacific Ocean, produced one of the most fascinating and yet least understood of ancient cultures. Who were the inhabitants of this unimaginably remote volcanic island? Where did they come from? What, and equally intriguing, how did they erect the giant stone statues found all over the island? And what became of their civilization? - ;Easter Island, an unimaginably remote volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean, produced one of the most fascinating and yet least understood prehistoric cultures. Who were its inhabitants, and where did they come from? Why, and equally intriguingly, how did they erect the giant stone statues found all over the island? Paul Bahn and John Flenley tackle these and a host of other questions, introducing us, along the way, to the bizarre birdman cult found in the island's art, and the only recently deciphered Rongorongo script engraved on wooden panels. The Enigmas of Easter Island combines a wealth of new archaeological evidence, intriguing folk memories and the records of Captain Cook and other early explorers, to reveal how the island's decline may stem from ecological catastrophe. The result is a fascinating portrait of a civilization which still retains many of its mysteries. This book, originally published in 1992, was hailed as the best account of Easter Island ever written. Now it has been brought substantially up to date with a wealth of new material. -
The Statues that Walked by Terry Hunt,Carl Lipo Pdf
The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works? No such astonishing numbers of massive statues are found anywhere else in the Pacific. How could the islanders possibly have moved so many multi-ton monoliths from the quarry inland, where they were carved, to their posts along the coastline? And most intriguing and vexing of all, if the island once boasted a culture developed and sophisticated enough to have produced such marvelous edifices, what happened to that culture? Why was the island the Europeans encountered a sparsely populated wasteland? The prevailing accounts of the island’s history tell a story of self-inflicted devastation: a glaring case of eco-suicide. The island was dominated by a powerful chiefdom that promulgated a cult of statue making, exercising a ruthless hold on the island’s people and rapaciously destroying the environment, cutting down a lush palm forest that once blanketed the island in order to construct contraptions for moving more and more statues, which grew larger and larger. As the population swelled in order to sustain the statue cult, growing well beyond the island’s agricultural capacity, a vicious cycle of warfare broke out between opposing groups, and the culture ultimately suffered a dramatic collapse. When Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began carrying out archaeological studies on the island in 2001, they fully expected to find evidence supporting these accounts. Instead, revelation after revelation uncovered a very different truth. In this lively and fascinating account of Hunt and Lipo’s definitive solution to the mystery of what really happened on the island, they introduce the striking series of archaeological discoveries they made, and the path-breaking findings of others, which led them to compelling new answers to the most perplexing questions about the history of the island. Far from irresponsible environmental destroyers, they show, the Easter Islanders were remarkably inventive environmental stewards, devising ingenious methods to enhance the island’s agricultural capacity. They did not devastate the palm forest, and the culture did not descend into brutal violence. Perhaps most surprising of all, the making and moving of their enormous statutes did not require a bloated population or tax their precious resources; their statue building was actually integral to their ability to achieve a delicate balance of sustainability. The Easter Islanders, it turns out, offer us an impressive record of masterful environmental management rich with lessons for confronting the daunting environmental challenges of our own time. Shattering the conventional wisdom, Hunt and Lipo’s ironclad case for a radically different understanding of the story of this most mysterious place is scientific discovery at its very best.
The Last Tree on Easter Island by Jared Diamond Pdf
In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. This is Jared Diamond's haunting account of visiting the mysterious stone statues of Easter Island, showing how a remote civilization destroyed itself by exploiting its own natural resources - and why we must heed this warning. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.
20 Fun Facts about Easter Island by Heather Moore Niver Pdf
Provides information about Easter Island and its moai statues, including such facts as that its largest volcano can be seen from space and that some moai wear red "hats" for special rituals.
Easter Island's Silent Sentinels by Kenneth Treister,Vargas Casanova Vargas,Claudio Cristino Ferrando Pdf
"This richly illustrated book of the history, culture, and art of Easter Island is the first to examine in detail the island's vernacular architecture, often overshadowed by its giant stone statues"--Provided by publisher.
Unearth the secrets of the mysterious giant stone statues on this tiny remote Pacific island. Easter Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean thousands of miles from anywhere, has intrigued visitors since Europeans first arrived in the 1700s. How did people first come to live there? How did they build the enormous statues and why? How were they placed around the island without carts or even wheels? Scientists have learned many of the answers, although some things still remain a mystery. Megan Stine reveals it all in a gripping narrative. This book, part of the New York Times best-selling series, is enhanced by eighty illustrations.
Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as it is known to its inhabitants, is located in the Pacific Ocean, 3600 kilometres west of South America. Annexed by Chile in 1888, the island has been a source of fascination for the world beyond the island since the first visit by Europeans in 1722 due to its intriguing statues and complex history. Inventing 'Easter Island' examines narrative strategies and visual conventions in the discursive construction of 'Easter Island' as distinct from the native conception of 'Rapa Nui.' It looks at the geographic imaginary that pervaded the eighteenth century, a period of overwhelming imperial expansion. Beverley Haun begins with a discussion of forces that shaped the European version of island culture and goes on to consider the representation of that culture in the form of explorer texts and illustrations, as well as more recent texts and images in comic books and kitsch from off the island. Throughout, 'Easter Island' is used as a case study of the impact of imperialism on the view of a culture from outside. The study hinges on three key points - an inquiry into the formation of 'Easter Island' as a subject; an examination of how the constructed space and culture have been shaped, reshaped, and represented in discursive spaces; and a discussion of cultural memory and how the constraints of foreign texts and images have shaped thought and action about 'Easter Island.' Richly illustrated and unique in its findings, Inventing 'Easter Island' will appeal to cultural theorists, anthropologists, educators, and anyone interested in the history of the South Pacific.
In this extraordinary fiction debut—rich with love and betrayal, history and intellectual passion—two remarkable narratives converge on Easter Island, one of the most remote places in the world. It is 1913. Elsa Pendleton travels from England to Easter Island with her husband, an anthropologist sent by the Royal Geographical Society to study the colossal moai statues, and her younger sister. What begins as familial duty for Elsa becomes a grand adventure; on Easter Island she discovers her true calling. But, out of contact with the outside world, she is unaware that World War I has been declared and that a German naval squadron, fleeing the British across the South Pacific, is heading toward the island she now considers home. Sixty years later, Dr. Greer Farraday, an American botanist, travels to Easter Island to research the island’s ancient pollen, but more important, to put back the pieces of her life after the death of her husband. A series of brilliant revelations brings to life the parallel quests of these two intrepid young women as they delve into the centuries-old mysteries of Easter Island. Slowly unearthing the island’s haunting past, they are forced to confront turbulent discoveries about themselves and the people they love, changing their lives forever. Easter Island is a tour de force of storytelling that will establish Jennifer Vanderbes as one of the most gifted writers of her generation.
"Since Easter Island (Rapa Nui) was first contacted by the Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen nearly three centuries ago, the people, culture and, most of all, the monolithic statues of this remarkable island have been seen by Westerners as an incredible puzzle, a riddle with no solution. At the heart of the so-called mystery of Easter Island stand the gigantic moai, the supreme sculptural achievement of the Rapa Nui people and, indeed, of all Polynesia. Re-erected upon their rectangular stone platforms, lying along ancient transport roads, hidden deep in seaside caves, or standing upon the slopes of Rano Raraku, where they were hewn from the living rock, the statues are palpable evidence of the genius and obsession of a people. How were they moved? What do they mean?" "Nearly 1,000 statues have been meticulously measured, drawn, mapped, and photographed by archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg and her Chilean and Rapa Nui colleagues over more than twelve years of dedicated research. Drawing on the insights that have been gained into sculptural techniques, design attributes, and formal variation, the author examines Rapa Nui prehistory in the context of new understandings of ecology and culture. Detailed drawings of statues by one of Rapa Nui's most talented artists, many published for the first time, reveal the fluidity of line and complexity of meaning encoded within these stone figures. Historical photographs from museum collections illustrate the vital role played by many Rapa Nui people in the documentation and preservation of their own culture. The latest methods of statistical analysis, computer imaging, and robotics programs are brought to bear upon the perplexing question of statue transport, and the author offers an exciting yet compellingly logical model of how a near-fourteen-ton statue could have been moved almost the entire length of the island." "Written by the foremost authority on the subject, this fascinating book is another important step toward unravelling "the mystery of Easter Island.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
What are our responsibilities as human beings in the exercise of our undoubted powers over all other creatures and the earth itself? The idea that human beings have dominion over the rest of creation is often regarded as the chief source of the world's current environmental crisis. From the universities to talk-back radio, this is a commonly repeated theme, but how strong is its basis? Is Anyone in Charge Here? is a critical conversation with the seminal Lynn White paper, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis." Easter Island, New Zealand, and ancient Mesopotamia, biblical exegesis, historical theology, monastic movements, and current environmental challenges are all explored. It examines the roots of the idea of human dominion, how the idea has been understood through the centuries, how people have worked it into their living, and how it might be constructively applied in our current crisis. All this is theologically evaluated in the light of Jesus Christ being both the true human, and God's way of involvement in the world as creative Word, representative image, and serving Lord.