The Ancient Solar Observatories of Rapanui: The Archaeoastronomy of Easter Island (The Easter Island Series) [Paperback]

William Liller (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 62 pages
• Publisher: Cloud Mountain Pub; 1st edition (August 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880636018
• ISBN-13: 978-1880636015
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,175,531 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing contents amidst much white space, August 28, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ancient Solar Observatories of Rapanui: The Archaeoastronomy of Easter Island (The Easter Island Series) (Paperback)

This A4-sized slim book is disappointing. Thirty illustrations occupy 19 of its 76 pages, covers included. Twenty-three of those illustrations are small, low-quality, black-and-photographs, typically 60x90mm or 70mmx110mm, which is roughly 2.5x3.5 and 3x4.5 inches. The only colour photograph, on the front cover, of a moai, has nothing to do with astronomy. Lavish use of white space reduces the textual contents to perhaps two dozen full pages.

Rather disappointed and quickly glancing through the text for information I immediately noticed two disturbing inaccuracies. Figure 30, p.50 has this caption: "The Trilithon on the main island of the Republic of Tonga". Tonga is a kingdom, not a republic. The author knows it too, as he writes on page 48: "In 1967 the current monarch, King Taufa'a hau Tupou IV, took interest in the Trilithon".
Page 36: "The markings consisted of a series of straight lines emanating from a point, as shown in Figure 24." Figure 24, overleaf, is a photograph showing markings on a rock, consisting of straight lines connected into a tree-shaped graph, which do not emanate from a single point at all. The photograph is so poor that identifying branches and nodes is difficult, nevertheless I see sixteen branches and eight nodes. The whole thing looks like a quipu, and not at all like lines radiating from a point.

Such discrepancies cast a shadow over the reliability of the rest, which is not presented in an organized fashion easily amenable to scrutiny. Much is second hand, some is vacuous. Thus p.36: "Modern astronomers know that an extremely rare astronomical event took place over the Pacific Ocean in the morning skies of September 13, 1170 A.D. Mars, at the time not far from the Pleiades, passed directly in front of Jupiter. Just as the first light of dawn was appearing, these two big planets [...] appeared to the naked eye as one. This event surely must have galvanized the Islanders. If only someone had recorded what the astronomer-priests had to say about that."
What is the point? Further, was that an exact conjunction and did Mars and Jupiter really did appear as one? Carl Friedrich Gauss reported his surprise at discovering that his mother had such acute eyesight that she saw the phases of Venus. May we not reasonably expect ancient astronomers to have been selected for their eyesight?

Low-quality photographs, inaccurate commentaries, a bare two dozen pages of text presented in disorganized fashion. I feel cheated.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting book - purchase supports EI Foundation, July 11, 2003

By 

Claus Hetting (Gentofte, Copenhagen Denmark) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ancient Solar Observatories of Rapanui: The Archaeoastronomy of Easter Island (The Easter Island Series) (Paperback)

This book is a rather academic-paper type publication, but quite interesting in its own right. There are some good observations and proof of the use of solar astronomy in the orientation of many Ahu (Easter Island ceremonial sites), demonstrating clearly that the ancient Islanders knew something about astronomy. There are not, however, any wild and crazy theories, nor does the author elaborate or speculate at any length on the significance of these findings. In this sense the book is relatively dry.

One final important remark: This book is published by EI Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting the conservation of Easter Island and its amazing archeological heritage. It is also relatively old in layout and style, since the Foundation seems to me focused more of scholarly issues than in the area of marketing, which seems to me fair enough.