The changing faces of Easter Island: Revealing the secrets of shape-shifting figurines

This article is from World Archaeology issue 134

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The ancient Rapanui (Easter Islanders) excelled in different forms of artistic expression, producing about a thousand monumental stone statues and numerous wooden figurines. Almost 400 of the latter, known from museums and private collections worldwide, are old: they left the island before 1880, which marks the beginning of the commercial carving era.

In the 20th century, Rapanui stone- and woodcarvings made a large impact on modern art, inspiring the Surrealists. Now the recent reassessment of woodcarving techniques has brought a well-deserved esteem and artistic appreciation to the ancient Rapanui figurines. Produced using basic tools such as obsidian blades for carving and shark skin/fine sand/cowrie shells for polishing, these figurines feature an exceptional level of detail and very fine surface finishing. Their eyes have a lively glint of obsidian pupils, embedded into white bone rings for contrast.

Ahu Tongariki: the largest ceremonial platform on Easter Island, with 15 stone statues. Today, it is these sculptures that the Rapanui are best known for, but their woodcarvings have also been highly influential. Image: Paul Horley (Ahu Tongariki)

The aesthetic canon of Rapanui carvings were unfamiliar to the European crews who collected these objects; travelogues and early publications frequently complain about the shortness of figurines’ legs and their grimacing faces. Upon eventual compilation of ampler data about the old culture, these unusual shapes became easier to interpret. Analysis of a bird-man figurine from the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (St. Petersburg), collected during the Second Expedition of Captain James Cook, revealed a human nose and mouth carved on top of a bird’s beak. This meant that, when viewed from above, the bird head transformed into a human head. The mixture of human and bird characteristics in bird-man statuettes may be interpreted as a way to depict different transformation stages of a certain entity, or different avatars of the same entity.

Careful study of a selection of wooden figurines from Easter Island has revealed that they can present two very different countenances to viewers, depending on the angle they are viewed from. This striking example of a figurine is from the collection of Sir David Attenborough, and was probably brought back from Easter Island by a member of the crew on Captain James Cook’s expedition of 1774.

Our study of the St. Petersburg bird-man is based on a 3D model of the painted plaster cast from the Ethnologisches Museum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin. It turned out that the human face carved on the beak of this bird-man can be best viewed not by looking down from directly above the top of the figurine, but by slightly tilting it backwards. In this case, the lips flatten into a realistic smile, and the overall proportions of the human face are properly balanced. The slight sideways tilt of the figurine’s head adds an extra emotion to the image of a bearded old man, who seems to be returning an inquisitive glance straight into the eyes of the beholder.

This figurine, together with two others, was previously discussed by Thor Heyerdahl in his 1976 book The Art of Easter Island. Notably, all three depict bird-men, and, according to Heyerdahl, they allow a bird head to be turned into a human face. As the bird-man motif is a composite of human and bird elements, this transformation may seem to be almost trivial. But are there perhaps more multi-face Rapanui figurines that do not belong to the bird-man category?