The Colossal by Peter Mason

Author:Peter Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

68 Moai Hoa Hakananai’a, basalt, Wellcome Trust Gallery, British Museum, London, 2004.

The other large head in the collection of the same museum, with a height of 1.5 m, was found in the vicinity of Anakena, close to the Rano Raraku quarry from whose tuff both large heads were carved. It was collected by the Franco-Belgian mission that was dispatched in 1934 under the leadership of the archaeologist Louis-Charles Watelin to investigate the mysteries of Rongorongo script for the predecessor of the Musée de l’Homme at the Trocadéro, the Musée d’Ethnologie. After the death of Watelin on the outbound journey, the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux was appointed new leader of the expedition. When the expedition proved unable to find any Rongorongo tablets anywhere, the attentions of the Belgian ethnologist of the expedition, Henri Lavachery, turned to rock art, and he completed the first survey of mainly petroglyph sites and types, while Métraux collected data for a projected ethnography.21 Métraux had been a fellow student with Georges Bataille, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship until the former’s suicide in 1963. Both men were closely associated with the Surrealist movement that had turned its attentions from Africa to Oceania and was showing a particular interest in Easter Island at the time. Profiles of Easter Island moai heads feature in the work of another Surrealist, Max Ernst, whose collage novel Une semaine de bonté was published in the very year in which the Franco-Belgian expedition set its course for Easter Island. Clearly, Easter Island and its moai were in the air.

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