Museum
Objects Inventory
Following the work of Lynn
Lockie in 1984, EISP expanded to include museum collections
research. Statues, fragments, pukao and portable stone
sculpture have been documented using the same attribute list that
was applied to moai in archaeological contexts. Ten intact
moai, as well as 55 other stone sculptural objects including
moai heads, torsos, pukao and fragments from major
museums in the US, the UK, Chile, New Zealand, France, Belgium
and Canada are now included in the EISP database. These objects
have been culled from more than double that number that we have
examined, and represent objects with the best documented provenance
and what we consider to be the greatest formal relevance to moai
design and chronology.
Beginning in 1992, Cristián Arévalo
Pakarati produced finished drawings of the most important
of these objects in the island museum and on the Chilean mainland.
Some of those drawings were included in Van Tilburg's first paper
for the British Museum, “HMS Topaze on Easter Island: Hoa
Hakananai'a and Five Other Museum Statues in Archaeological Context”
(British Museum Press, 1992). From 2000 to the present, Van Tilburg
and Arévalo Pakarati have conducted further research at
the British Museum; the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish
National Museum in Edinburgh; the Ulster Museum in Belfast; the
Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and, in the US, at the Peabody Museum,
Cambridge; the Smithsonian Institution; the American Museum of
Natural History, NYC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chicago's
Field Museum of Natural History and elsewhere.
These studies are unique adjuncts to EISP field work, and are
the direct result of the generous and helpful collaboration we
have received from all museums and every curator and their staff
with whom we have come in contact. Our research goal is to seek
antecedents and design variants of the Rapanui stonecarving aesthetic,
and to establish a chronology of design vocabulary. In the process,
we hope to re-insert the moai that have been taken from
the island back into archaeological contexts, thus re-integrating
each object with its unique history. This research has been especially
enlightening in the case of the two moai in the British
Museum (collected in 1868) and the
moai and moai head in the National Museum of
Natural History, Smithsonian Institution (collected in 1886).
All four of these important objects, and the sites from which
they were taken, are now better understood. In Van Tilburg's forthcoming
"Remote Possibilities: HMS Topaze and Hoa Hakananai'a on
Easter Island" (British Museum Press, 2005), the comprehensive
results of the first stage of this study are outlined. Further
work, including stone sourcing, is anticipated.
Want to know more?
Van Tilburg, J. 2005. Remote Possibilities: HMS
Topaze and Hoa Hakananai’a on Easter Island. Research
Paper 158. London: The British Museum Press.
Van Tilburg, J. 2004. Objects in Focus: Hoa Hakananai’a.
London: The British Museum Press.
Related Information
Fieldnote
regarding moai in the Smithonsian Institution collections.
