Akahaŋa

Ahu Akahaŋa

Rapa Nui has one of Polynesia's largest collections of petroglyphs, pictorial designs carved into stone.

Near the center of the above banner picture you can see Make-make, the chief deity of the Bird-Man cult.

Ahu Akahaŋa, our second stop, has several sacred red scoria stones covered with petroglyphs.

Akahaŋa is the Rapa Nui spelling, English and Spanish use Akahanga.

It was a short walk down to the site from the parking area.

Akahaŋa is further east along the south coast. Below is the view looking back toward Vaihū and beyond that to Rano Kau, the large volcano at the southwest tip of the island.

Toppled Mo'ai

Ahu Akahaŋa is one of the sites where all the mo'ai have remained toppled.

The first European visitors in 1722 and 1770 reported seeing only standing statues, which the Europeans said were still venerated. However, they couldn't communicate with the Rapa Nui people, and they may have simply assumed that people they saw as savages must worship the large dramatic statues.

But then just four years later, when James Cook visited in 1774, many had been toppled. The mo'ai toppling continued into the 1830s. By 1838, the only mo'ai still standing were at the quarry site at Rano Raraku, plus one on the rim of the Rano Kau caldera which the British stole in 1868.

Why did the Rapa Nui people topple the mo'ai? Or if they were toppled by a series of strong earthquakes, why did the people not stand any of them back up? We have no idea.

Some of the toppled mo'ai are broken, but for some of them the face-down pose has protected the faces, leaving them in better shape than if they had been re-erected and their relatively soft and porous stone exposed to the weather since the toppling around 1770–1830.

So far, researchers have catalogued about 1,000 sites on Rapa Nui with more than 4,000 petroglyphs.

Polynesian petroglyphs served various purposes: memorials of persons or events, religious totems, or to mark territory.

Different locations on Rapa Nui have varying petroglyph themes. The Bird-Man, the winner of an annual contest to receive resources from all the clans, is common at the settlement along the rim of Rano Kau. At this site I noticed several representations of Make-make, the chief deity of the Bird-Man cult. Others depict komari or vulvas, or sea turtles.

Between the second and third mo'ai in the next picture, with the second one missing its head, you can see a dark red stone that formed part of the perimeter of the ahu. It bears several petroglyphs.

A broken-off mo'ai head and a relatively small mo'ai lie near the ahu.

The Bird-Man cult came to a quick end in the 1860s as it underwent violent suppression by Christian missionaries. At the same time, slave-capture raids from Peru and waves of European diseases almost completely eliminated the Rapa Nui people. The ability to read the Rongorongo script was lost when all the wise men were taken away to work and die in mines in Peru.

Did the Bird-Man cult replace the older veneration of deified ancestors through the mo'ai? Or did the two religions co-exist? We don't know, and there's no way to find out.

As for the Bird-Man cult, we know that Make-make was the primary deity, the creator of humanity and god of fertility. There were three otherwise top gods — a male named Haua-tuu-take-take or "Chief of the Eggs" who was Make-make's companion, Haua's wife Vî'e Hoa, and another female god Vî'e Kenatea. Each of those four had an associated servant god.

Beyond that, we don't know very much. The dwarf planet 136472 Makemake was named for Make-make. We know more about the dwarf planet way out in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune than we do about pre-European-contact Rapa Nui religions.

Petroglyphs in Red Scoria

Here is a straight-on view of that rectangular block with a face of petroglyphs. It is red scoria, the same material reserved to make the pukao, representing topknots.

The scoria came from a quarry within the Puna Pau crater. Scoria is ejected from a volcano as a molten blob containing gas bubbles. It cools and solidifies somewhat as it travels through the air. The name comes from the Greek σκωρία or skoria, meaning "rust", because of the red color caused by oxidized iron.

Human cultures and their languages start by distinguishing light from dark. As for specific colors or hues, red is usually the first specific color that a culture recognizes and gives a word. Red tends to be a sacred color.

The Neandertal people used red ochre, manganese and iron oxides, in ritual burial contexts. There are many examples from 60,000–40,000 years ago. The cited paper describes an earlier find dating back at least to 200,000–250,000 years ago. Red has been a sacred color for a long time!

Here is that same image enhanced with localized histogram equalization over a radius of 30 pixels:

Mo'ai On Its Way to Another Ahu

There were four ahu around this site.

A large mo'ai was left lying where it was when they quit transporting it to its new location.

Volcanic Cave

A volcanic cave is a short walk from the main ahu here.

Definitely not the water-eroded limestone caves that I am accustomed to!

The volcanic caves tended to be damp inside. The wooden Rongorongo tablets were considered tapu, sacred and needing to be hidden away. That led to many of them being stored in damp caves where they decayed rapidly.

Manavai Gardens

Theories arose about strong early population growth followed by "ecocide", inadvertent ecological damage, and a population crash involving widespread cannibalism centuries before the first European visitors arrived.

However, by 2024 a series of recent genetic and archaeological studies had provided strong evidence that there were never more than about 3,000 people living on Rapa Nui. There had been no earlier failure of large-scale farming because that had never existed in the first place. Rapa Nui agriculture was always much more like gardens rather than farms.

The settlements used manavai, an ancient system of cultivation within stone walls. The islanders may have gotten the idea by observing the microclimates formed around the rano, the lakes within volcanic calderas.

Next❯ Rano Raraku — The Mo'ai Quarry and Workshop