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Easter Island

Started by SGOS, June 12, 2020, 11:10:28 AM

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SGOS

I can seldom watch anything on utube that lasts more that 10 minutes.  This one is a record for me at 1 hour and 43 minutes.  I really don't expect anyone here to watch it, but I'm going to put it here if anyone is so inclined. 

Everyone knows about Easter Island, and everyone knows that we know is mostly that it's a mystery.  I've seen movies and read books going back to high school starting with the voyage of the Kon Tiki, my initial introduction to the South Pacific, up to a recent book researching the settlement of Polynesia just published in the last few years.

This is a surprisingly well done documentary, both for the content, photography, and narration, and adds more to my understanding of Easter Island than all of the (scant) resources that account for what I know and what I know that I don't know about the place.  It cautiously deconstructs and reconstructs many of the myths about the long lost culture of the Islanders.  This mostly happens in the last 45 minutes where it reveals the reasons for the loss of a once vibrant civilization, and is all new theory for me.

Is it true?  I don't know.  It's from utube, although professionally seeming, enough to possibly be from an original historical documentation done with a big budget by some serious foundation.  The demise of the culture is more gut wrenching than what I had previously thought.  I never would have made it to the end, except that beginning although familiar, was interesting and beautifully done, even though it covered what most of us have heard before.

In the past, I've sometimes considered if I wanted to blow thousands of dollars on travel to some interesting place, it would likely be Easter Island.  Venice, Rome, the Acropolis wouldn't even come close.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j08gxUcBgc

Baruch

You must have missed this when I posted it a few weeks ago ...

Kon Tiki and Thor Heyerdahl is racist crap.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Sal1981

Quote from: Baruch on June 23, 2020, 05:35:58 PM
Kon Tiki and Thor Heyerdahl is racist crap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl

QuoteWhen the Spaniards came to Peru, Heyerdahl asserted, the Incas told them that the colossal monuments that stood deserted about the landscape were erected by a race of white gods who had lived there before the Incas themselves became rulers. The Incas described these "white gods" as wise, peaceful instructors who had originally come from the north in the "morning of time" and taught the Incas' primitive forebears architecture as well as manners and customs. They were unlike other Native Americans in that they had "white skins and long beards" and were taller than the Incas. The Incas said that the "white gods" had then left as suddenly as they had come and fled westward across the Pacific. After they had left, the Incas themselves took over power in the country.

Pretty much.

I can't say what Fall of Civilizations YT channel is though, I'll have to watch the vid to ascertain for myself.

SGOS

Quote from: Sal1981 on June 23, 2020, 06:12:22 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl

Pretty much.

I can't say what Fall of Civilizations YT channel is though, I'll have to watch the vid to ascertain for myself.
The one about Easter Island is just one more theory, but more likely that Heyerdahl's by a far cry.  It reflects much of what is currently understood about the ancestry an settlement of the South Pacific as verified by DNA testing.  Polynesia was settled by Asians, not by South Americans, which is current wisdom.  The video ends by filling in many of the blanks in our understanding of Easter Island with reasonable theories and decent arguments, but I don't think there has been much in the way of peer review.  It's more like, "Well yeah, maybe."

Even when I read Kon Tiki in high school, I thought it was a grand seafaring adventure, but proved nothing about the South Pacific.  Can the trip be made on a primitive raft?  Well, duh?!  Of course.  I could have told you that without ever doing it. Rafts usually float in the direction of the prevailing wind and currents, after all.   I remember wondering if Heyerdahl needed backing for an adventure, and he put together some of the myths told to him by the natives in Peru to make a scientifiky sounding package to make financiers think it was more than just a bunch of guys wanting to take a really cool two month voyage in the south seas on a quirky raft.

OK, that was exaggerated for effect.  He probably sincerely thought it was important, not just something to enter into Ripley's Believe it or Not, but a team of archeologists and anthropologists on the actual sites could have learned more than what Heyerdahl proved by the trip in the same amount of time if you include all of the prep time before the big float, which was more of a curiosity in itself, than a scientific discovery.

Baruch

#4
Quote from: Sal1981 on June 23, 2020, 06:12:22 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl

Pretty much.

I can't say what Fall of Civilizations YT channel is though, I'll have to watch the vid to ascertain for myself.

Whole series of modern analysis leading to great storytelling by a great voice.  I go to sleep with it.  I enjoyed all of them.

Thor based his theory at that time on the balsa reed canoes on Lake Titicaca.  So it was based as it could be then.  Of course he was unaware of how the impact of Whites on Easter Island was devastating, and the White preference to think that anyone not White is a violent barbarian.

Peer review in sociology/history? Aka current version of fashionable Marxism?
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.