Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.