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Researching Ancient Roads on Easter Island
Caption:
Scientists are studying roads once used by ancient Easter Islanders to move multi-ton stone figures to the coastline where they now reside.
More about this Image
Geology Professor Charlie Love of Western Wyoming Community College (WWCC), along with a crew of 17 students from WWCC and the University of Wyoming, archaeologists, and islanders, spent much of the last two summers working and conducting research on Easter Island.
Together they cleared and excavated sections of road once used by ancient islanders to move the multi-ton stone figures for which Easter Island is so famous today, to the coastline where they now reside.
The research helped to supply important details on Easter Island’s prehistory, including understanding the labor force necessary to create 30 miles of roads on an island only 12 miles long; the integration of labor and motivation to carve, move, and place multi-ton statues all across the island; the magnitude of the ecologic catastrophe these desires ultimately created; and the timing of the resulting equilibrium between food production, birth rates, and warfare. The research was funded in part by two grants from the NSF-Wyoming EPSCoR project. A brief article about this research appeared in the December 2000 issue of Discovering Archeology, a magazine published by Scientific American. [additional reference – NSF grant number EPS 99-83278]
(Preview Only)
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| Credit: |
Credit Dr. Charles Love, University of Wyoming |
| Decade of Image: |
2000 - 2009 |
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Categories:
EDUCATION / EPSCoR Program
Formats Available:
Restrictions:
No additional restrictions--beyond NSF's general restrictions--have been placed on this image. For a list of general restrictions that apply to this and all images in the NSF Image Library, see the section "Conditions".
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