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Easter Island: land of mystery

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Author Topic: Easter Island: land of mystery  (Read 635 times)
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Kara Sundstrom
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« Reply #30 on: July 06, 2009, 12:45:36 am »

The origins of the birdman cult are unknown. It has no parallel in the rest of Polynesia, but Heyerdahl notes that birdman motifs based on a prehistoric bird cult are typical of the pre-Inca empire to the east. Although we know little about the deities of the extinct pre-Inca civilizations, the Incas worshipped the sun and their royal ancestors, and depicted them symbolically as felines, as bird-headed men, or as faces with tear marks below the eyes – as on Easter Island.2

A relief found during excavations at Túcume, a village in northern Peru, shows two large sea-going reed boats with cabins on deck. Friezes around the ships depict dancing birdmen in two different variations lifting their arms, and holding eggs in their hands. The motif matches the Orongo rock carvings on Easter Island, and probably dates to the Lambayeque period, between the 12th and 14th centuries, though the earliest birdman motifs in Peru date back at least to the Chavin period (1800-1000 BC). Øystein Kock Johansen remarks that everybody is ‘desperately hunting high and low for vague Easter Island birdman parallels in Polynesia, Melanesia and Southeast Asia, while they more or less completely ignore the use of this motif in South America from times before Christ. The situation seems quite forced, almost ridiculous.’3
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