Easter Island's Silent Sentinels: The Sculpture and Architecture of Rapa NuiKennethTreister, PatriciaVargas Casanova, and ClaudioCristino. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.

Abstract

Easter Island's Silent Sentinels: The Sculpture and Architecture of Rapa Nui Kenneth Treis ter, Patricia Vargas Casanova, and Claudio Cristino. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.Explorers from many countries have visited Easter Island since the first Dutch expedition from 1722, when this isolated island and its thousands of inhabitants were discovered on Easter Day, thus its name (see pp. 15,16,20, and also endnote 6, p. 117). For their first book, three experts (US journalist Kenneth Treister and Chilean scholars Patricia Vargas Casanova and Claudio Cristino) have interrogated the famous site of Easter Island, universally known for its fascinating, gigantic, vertical statues that endlessly question the world. An architect and photographer, co-author Kenneth Treister even co-produced a documentary about this fascinating place some twenty years before contributing this book; incidentally, his film had a similar title: Silent Sentinels: The Mystery of Easter Island (1990).While there are nowadays many studies and countless lavish publications available in English about Easter Island, this new addendum is rather a scholarly work (although with countless illustrations) and a rigorous academic discussion about the and the unique ethnology of this region of about sixty-three square miles. Focusing on the island's Golden Age (that is, prior to the European presence), Easter Island's Silent Sentinels: The Sculpture and Architec- ture of Rapa Nui has six chapters which focus on the island's surrealistic geography and vegetation, its tortured history since AD 800-900, village planning, architecture and local art (other than statues), the sculptures, and the disappearance of the Natives because of diseases and enslavement (24,110).What makes this large book unique is its main focus on archeology and stone architecture; instead of concentrating only on the giant statues, the authors study (and present) the Rapa Nui tradition and mythology, the caves and places where the Easter Island inhabitants used to live and their everyday life, and their beliefs and ceremonies (see pp. 53, 60, 71-77). Audaciously, the authors propose their own hypothetical reconstructions of a few large, elliptical houses based on archeological survey records from 1992, computerised extrapolations and some old descriptions of Easter Island houses written prior to 1770 (55, 56). Elsewhere, recent photographs of the foundations of some boathouses in the southern region of the island can be seen (57, 58). …