Easter Island Statue Project Official Website

Letters from the Director

Happy New Year!

Dear Friends of EISP,

This letter brings you special greetings for the coming year from all of us at EISP. Since our last Letter from the Director we have been on hiatus from excavation and hard at work doing all of the other important tasks you so rarely hear about but which are essential to good research:  lab work, radiocarbon analyses, museum studies, and writing reports!

This has been an intense period of cooperative research with gifted colleagues, and we are grateful for their involvement.  Beginning in early 2015 José Miguel Ramírez, co-investigator of EISP, arranged for Chilean scholar Pauline Peralta to examine our obsidian collections.  Through Joan Wozniak we met Jon Krier, who studied our basalt collections.  My UCLA colleague Tom Wake  reviewed our bone collections.

Cristián Arévalo Pakarati accomplished detail drawings of important artifacts, and then he and I traveled to Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand to examine objects of comparative research interest. I reviewed Bishop Museum collections in Honolulu. Radiocarbon determinations on our charcoal samples were accomplished.  Other botanical analyses were carried out successfully with very interesting results. We are now collating these findings in collaboration with soils micromorphologist Sarah Sherwood and geologist Richad K. Dunn.

Alice Hom and the EISP staff keep us on track with all of these data and Alice is hard at work completing our cartographic projects. She has collaborated closely with Pat McCoy on entering his 1968 archaeological survey data into Datashare. We are on deadline with our upcoming publication and looking forward to launching it in 2018!

So, as you can see, we have not been sipping Margaritas on the beach at Anakena….oh, wait….actually, in February, 2017 we had the pleasure of sharing our project with Jimmy Buffet and his party!  We are grateful to  the Singing for Change Foundation, our UCLA supporters and, especially, to all of you.

Happy New Year!

Jo Anne Van Tilburg

 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Ph.D. Director, EISP | December 20th, 2017 |

Phase 2 Season 2

Easter Island Statue Project

August 12- 31, 2014

Dr. Jo Anne Van Tilburg, UCLA Project Director

Cristián Arévalo Pakarati/ Rapa Nui Project Co-director

José Miguel Ramírez A., Universidad de Valparaiso, Co-investigator

 

Introduction

This report is prepared as part of a numbered series that describes the excavations conducted by the Easter Island Statue Project in Rano Raraku Quarry Zone, Interior Region, Quarry 02, Statues RR-001-156 and RR-001-157. The team is composed of an all-Rapanui excavation staff directed by the project Co-directors. With the completion of the conservation and scientific investigations conducted by our Chilean collaborator, Monica Bahamondez P, and our UCLA collaborator Dr. Christian Fischer, we were joined this season by our new Chilean collaborator Sr. José Miguel Ramírez A., Universidad de Valparaíso. Our research agreement is contained in a Memo of Understanding between the Universidad de Valparaíso and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. This report summarizes our collections and investigations for the period beginning Monday, March 10 and ending Monday, March 14, 2014.  This report is part of a preliminary final report that includes some but not all of our in-process laboratory test results and collections analyses, as per our permit CMN ORD 5467-09. A final report will be published in 2015-2016 by the The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.

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Posted on October 28th, 2014 by Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Ph.D.
Categories: 2000s, AIA Partnership, Conservation Reports, EISP Excavation, Featured Articles |

Phase 2 Season 1

Easter Island Statue Project Phase 2, Season 1

August 2013

Jo Anne Van Tilburg and Cristián Arévalo P.

This report describes recent excavations beginning Phase 2 of the project and concentrating on the ventral side of Moai RR-001-156. These excavations are a continuation of limited excavations conducted on the ventral side during Phase 1, which focused on reaching the base of the statue on the dorsal side.  The excavation season commenced on August 6, 2013 and actual excavation ended on August 29, 2013. The excavation was subsequently closed to protect it from heavy rains and with the help of personnel from CONAF and CMN.

[Read More…]

Posted on October 28th, 2014 by Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Ph.D.
Categories: 2000s, AIA Partnership, Conservation Reports, EISP Excavation, Featured Articles |

Phase 1 Season 6

Easter Island Statue Project (EISP) Conservation Initiative

March 2012

Jo Anne Van Tilburg and Cristián Arévalo Pakarati have accomplished an archaeological survey and inventory of the monolithic stone sculpture (moai) of Rapa Nui. To date, we have accounted for 1,300 monolithic sculptural objects within the island-wide survey sections, in museum collections, and within the Rano Raraku quarry zone, including complete (as opposed to intact) statues, heads, torsos, fragments, shaped block. The latter are considered to be evidence of human activity in the form of incomplete or abandoned projects elucidating energy investment. The most recent object entered into our collaborative on-line database (DATASHARE) is a red stone torso submitted by Enrique Tucki M. of the Oficina Provincial, the Corporación Nacional Forestal (CONAF).

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Posted on October 28th, 2014 by Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Ph.D.
Categories: 2000s, AIA Partnership, Conservation Reports, EISP Excavation, Featured Articles |

Phase 1 Season 5

 

Easter Island Statue Project Conservation Initiative

Season V Excavation Summary

RR-001-156 and Square 4, RR-001-157

Jo Anne Van Tilburg

November 2011

Introduction

This report is another in a series of reports dealing with the excavation of statues RR-001-156 and RR-001-157 in Rano Raraku quarry, Rapa Nui, Chile. The previous reports were filed with the appropriate Chilean and Rapa Nui agencies and also provided to the general public on the Easter Island Statue Project web site (www.eisp.org). This report deals with the continuing excavation of statue RR-001-156 to the base and Square 4 of RR-001-157. These activities took place during Season V (November 2011) of the Easter Island Statue Project Conservation Initiative.
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Posted on October 28th, 2014 by Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Ph.D.
Categories: 2000s, AIA Partnership, Conservation Reports, EISP Excavation, Featured Articles |