Easter Island Mystery
p. 33 · Read in the full issue
A CLAIM to have solved the mystery of the gigantic statues on Easter Island, in the Pacific, is made by M. Henri Lava chery, curator of the Museum of Art and History at Brussels, says the London “Daily Telegraph.’’ He was a member of the Franco-Belgian expedition which went out to study them last year.
These extraordinary monuments, which vary in height from 15ft. to 30ft., and number some hundreds, are not, he says, the vestiges of an extinct civilisation, but the work of the Maori ancestors of the present population who settled on the island between the years 1000 and 1200 of our era. The statues, he holds, are the memorial stones of mass graves measur ing about 250 ft. by 30ft.
The expedition located 15 of these graves, each of which apparently belonged to a separate village.
M. Lavachery says that, in consequence of the ravages of the weather and of the natives, who use the statues as quarries, it is to be feared that after the lapse of two or three centuries nothing will remain of these curious monuments but formless blocks of stone.