Young Archaeologist issue 145
Autumn 2010
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YAC travels to Easter Island in the Southern Pacific Ocean to discover the majestic Moai stone statues which are dotted across the treeless landscape. -
YAC accompanies Lady Tahathor, an ancient Egyptian mummy, on her visit to hospital and finds out more about her life and death using modern medical equipment.
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Julian Richards learns ‘What’s Under Your School?’ at archaeological digs that have taken place under two North Dorset schools.
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YAC joins YAC UK member, Oliver the Roman solider, on a Roman route march.
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Find out what YAC is watching in Norman’s Web Watch.
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YAC catches up with Raksha Dave on Time Team’s recent excavation on Jersey in the Channel Islands.
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This issue also includes a YAC Attack! which shows you how to create your own rock art masterpieces.
Easter Island
In this issue, we visited Easter Island in the ‘Where in the World’ feature. YAC finds out more about the ground-breaking work being undertaken by the Easter Island Statue Project.
If you want to know more about the Easter Island Statue Project, why not visit their website, you can also find out how you can help support their work and how to become a Friend of the Project.
Mummy Goes to Hospital
If you read the feature about Lady Tahathor’s mummy in this issue of Young Archaeologist, you might be interested in finding our more about the preservation and conservation of archaeological remains. There was a feature about this in Issue 143 of Young Archaeologist.
Word Trail
Did you have a go at the Word Trail on the Just for Fun page? If you did then you will know that the Norwegian man linked to Easter Island and Gobustan is Thor Heyerdahl. Well done for solving the puzzle, now it’s time to find out more about Thor Heyerdahl.
Thor Heyerdahl
Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian ethnologist (a person who studies people) and adventurer who wanted to prove his idea that the original inhabitants of Easter Island and other islands in Polynesia travelled there from South America on rafts made of balsa wood. When Thor Heyerdahl suggested his theory in the 1940s, no one believed that a simple wooden raft could carry men over 8,000km (4,300 miles) across the open sea. He is thought to have said, “Then I’ll prove that it’s possible!”
Heyerdahl’s project was named ‘Kon-Tiki’ after an Incan sun-god from Peru in South America. Tradition says that Kon-Tiki and his closest friends escaped from Peru when their city was attacked, and that they sailed on a balsa-wood raft across the Pacific Ocean to go home to the sun. Heyerdahl believed that Kon-Tiki and his friends were the original inhabitants of Easter Island and other islands in Polynesia. One reason that Heyerdahl came to this conclusion was because there is a God in Polynesian legend called Tiki. He was the son of the sun and was said to have led his people out into the Pacific. Heyerdahl thought that Kon-Tiki and Tiki were the same person.
In 1947, Heyerdahl and five others built a balsa-wood raft and set out from Callao near Lima in Peru. 101 days and 8,000km later they were washed up on Raroia Atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago in Polynesia. They had proven successfully that it was possible to cross the vast Pacific Ocean from South America to the East aided by the ocean currents and winds.
In 1955-56, Thor Heyerdahl led the first major archaeological expedition to Easter Island. He discovered that the island was originally almost completely covered with trees, but that they had been cut down by the early inhabitants of the island. He also proved that there were three separate periods in the history of Easter Island, which the archaeologists have named Early, Middle and Late Periods. The majority of the Moai were constructed during the Middle Period.
In his later life, between 1980 and 2000, Thor Heyerdahl made several trips to Azerbaijan where he studied the rock art at Gobustan. He believed that the rock art carvings in Gobustan were very similar to those found in his native Norway. The boat pictures in particular looked very alike. Based on the evidence from the rock art and other documents, Heyerdahl suggested that Azerbaijan was the site of an ancient and advanced civilisation that travelled north to Scandinavia. He said, “Azerbaijanis should be proud of their ancient culture. It is just as rich and ancient as that of China and Mesopotamia.”
Thor Heyerdahl was born in 1914 in Norway. He died in 2002 aged 87. In 1999, 4.5 million Norwegians voted him Norwegian of the Century in a newspaper poll.
You can find out more about Thor Heyerdahl at:
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