The Connection Between Peru and Easter Island – Part I

Thor Heyerdahl, the famous Norwegian anthropologist who is not LDS, led the first archaeological expedition to Easter Island in 1955-56. In 1962, the year my wife and I were married, he gave a series of lectures to the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography in Stockholm. He also wrote a book on the expedition, entitled Sea Routes to Polynesia.

Having attended his lectures, I quote from his work, “At some unidentified date prior to AD 380, the first settlers landed on Easter Island, and found a verdant island covered by trees, shrubs, and palms." He proved this to be true from the extensive pollen samples taken from the crater lakes with the aid of 26 feet long cores from the sediments.

His excavations on Easter Island proved that there were three separate epochs in the history of the island, which the archaeologists have named Early, Middle and Late Periods. In the Early Period there was no production of giant statues, only altar-like elevations of very large, and most precisely cut and joined stones, which were erected with their facades towards the ocean, and a sunken court on the inland side. They were astronomically oriented, and constructed by highly specialized stone masons.

During the Second Period the well-known Giant Statues were quarried and placed on the platforms. The archaeologists believe that during this period, the commencement of the raising of the large ancestor statues took place. During a period of less than 6 centuries, more than 600 giant ancestor statues were carved from the quarries on the slopes of Rano Raraku after the forests had been cleared. When the statue production reached its peak the island engineers were able to erect statues up to 40 feet tall, weighing more than 80 tons, and balance a red stone cylinder hat, weighing up to 12 tons, on top of the statue’s head. A gigantic statue 70 feet long, was left almost completed by the sculptors in the quarry when the Third Period was initiated by the sudden end of all work in Rano Raraku quarries.

(Image A – While most people know about the Easter Island statues, few know about the similarity between them and those found in the cliffs of northern Peru, attributed to the Chachapoya culture. There is a unique similarity between the stone heads on Easter Island (left images) and the sarcophagus images found in northern Peru (right images)

During this Third Period the Statues were one by one overthrown, and everywhere are evidence of warfare and destruction. When the first Europeans settled ashore and could communicate directly with the Easter Islanders, they were told of two different arrivals, one from the East and one from the West. They consistently stressed that after a period of peaceful coexistence, their forefathers had almost exterminated the original people, thus leaving the present Polynesian population as sole inhabitants of Easter Island.

For want of clarity, since Heyerdahl was neither LDS nor a reader of the Book of Mormon, it might be suggested that the original people were Nephites who went west in one of Hagoth’s ships (to a destination no one knew about—Alma 63:8), and later, Lamanites arrived, or separated themselves from the original people, and took up the ancient warfare between Nephites and Lamanites. This suggestion certainly fits the scenario that Heyerdahl and his team of archaeologists mapped out.

In fact, Heyerdahl and his colleagues collected a great deal of evidence concerning the Early Period. Aquatic plants and the building of reed-boats, the use of double blade paddles, one-piece stone fishhooks, the shape of the dwellings, stone pounders, and needles, which, according to their investigations, all pointed to the East (Peru) and are not found in the West (Indonesia, Asia, etc.)

In addition, there is the existence of the rongo-rongo tablets. The Easter Island script was incised on wooden tablets, the only other place that this type of script has been found is among the early Indians who lived around Lake Titicaca high in the Andes. There is no evidence that the Polynesian people ever had the ability to write or invent a script, leaving the question of "How did they get there?" strictly in the Peruvian Andes and among the ancient Nephites.

It has been written in this blog many times about the ocean currents and winds, and the directions these flow, especially in the southern half of the Pacific Ocean—the large gyre known as the South Pacific Gyre (a circular ocean current driven by winds, gravity, and the Coriolis effect, which effect is this most commonly encountered in the rotating reference frame is the Earth—that is, by the rotation of the Earth and the inertia of the mass experiencing the effect. Because the Earth completes only one rotation per day, the Coriolis force is quite small, and its effects generally become noticeable only for motions occurring over large distances and long periods of time, such as large-scale movement of air in the atmosphere or water in the ocean. Such motions are constrained by the surface of the earth, so only the horizontal component of the Coriolis force is generally important, which force causes moving objects on the surface of the Earth to be deflected in a clockwise sense (with respect to the direction of travel) in the northern hemisphere and in an anti-clockwise sense in the southern hemisphere).

Heyerdahl used this southern current to sail his Kon Tiki raft, which he named after a Peruvian god, in his 1947 famous and epic drift voyage from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in Polynesia. The dead distance between the point of departure and the point of arrival is approximately 4000 miles, yet the raft only crossed 1000 miles of surface water. If another primitive craft had been able to travel with the same speed in an equally straight line, but in the opposite direction, it would have traversed about 7000 miles of surface water to reach Peru.

The reason is that the ocean surface itself was displaced about 3000 miles, or about 50 degrees of the Earth's circumference, during the time needed for the Kon Tiki crossing. Put another way it means that the Islands are located only about 1000 miles from Peru, whereas Peru is located 7000 miles from the Islands. The current travels at about 40 miles per 24 hours, and if the craft is sailing at 60 miles per 24 hours, it means that it would have travelling 100 miles in one day, and the duration of the voyage would be 40 days. Travelling the opposite way at the same speed against the current it will only travel 20 miles per 24 hours and thus need 200 days to make the voyage. If the craft was only travelling 40 miles per 24 hours it would sail from Peru to the islands in 50 days, but at that speed going in the opposite direction it would never leave the islands.

Which is also another way to say that those historians and scholars who claim the Lehi colony sailed eastward across the middle Pacific (from Indonesia/China eastward through the islands of the South Pacific and then open water toward South or Central America) simply do not understand currents, winds, and displacement speed. And this was the point that Thor Heyerdahl set out to prove and did so in such a flamboyant manner that he irritated other (book-type) archaeologist who never forgave him.

The top two images are of Easter Island stonework. Note the small rectangular and small curved inlay stones, cut perfectly to match and fitted in this interlocking manner. The middle two images and the bottom image are from various areas in Peru, showing the same small rectangular and curved stones cut to fit in the same interlocking pattern

(See the next post, “The Connection Between Peru and Easter Island – Part II, to see how amazing it is that men of letters have ignored the obvious connection between Peru and Easter Island despite these comparisons)