44 ANTHROPOLOGY IN ^^^ESTERN HEMISPHERE AND PACIFIC ISLANDS. 



One ought only to recall how difficult it is to get at the beginnings of 

 things human in order to see the importance of an exhaustive and compara- 

 tive study of the Negritos. They are culturally the most primitive Pacific 

 people of to-day, and are perhaps as primitive as any in the world. 



PREHISTORIC STONE REMAINS. 



Not all of the great anthropological problems of the Pacific are among 

 the living people. One of the greatest world mysteries before the prehistoric 

 anthropologist is that of the carved stone remains found in Easter Island. 

 This island is a small piece of land about 45 square miles in area, lying 2,000 

 miles from the west coast of South America. Several attempts have been 

 made to solve the riddle of its stone remains, but unsuccessfully. 



Churchill, in his recent study of the language of Easter Island, says of 

 these rude masses of tufa-crowned human shapes mounted as termini upon 

 platforms along the edges of the cliff: "Utterly beyond our comprehension, 

 since apparently so utterly beyond the present capacity of the islanders, the 

 enduring memorials of workers in cyclopean stone are preserved in the South 

 Sea." Again he says the natives claim that these gigantic carved rocks are 

 the work^of their quite recent forefathers, yet, "despite the tradition, we 

 can not see how a people unacquainted with metals could hew these great 

 masses of hard volcanic rock; nor can we see how, without mechanical 

 assistance of which they had no knowledge, they could lift the weights over 

 the crater rim, transport them for considerable distances, and rear them on 

 end." On these monuments are carved images of men and animals, and 

 also characters which may be picture writing, though all attempts to decipher 

 them have so far failed. 



Who were the authors of those records in Easter Island? Some students 

 have been led to ascribe them to early Papuans, because skulls of the type of 

 those people were found at hand. Sir Clements Markham rather inchned to 

 identify the skuUs with those of the AjTuara of Bolivia. The question is still 

 open. Stevenson was right when he called one of these carved rocks of 

 Easter Island 



"the rude mouument 

 Of faiths forgot and races undivined." 



Great as is the mystery in Easter Island, the problem becomes larger 

 and vastly more alluring, and perhaps more certain of reasonable solution, 

 when we note that similar carved rocks extend in a broken line from the 

 Carolines and Mariannes, just east of Japan, to Easter Island. Some of the 

 best-known monuments are the massive walls of jSIetalianum Harbor in the 

 Carolines, rows of pillars on Tinian in the Mariannes, Fale o le Fe'e in the 

 mountains of 'Upolu behind Apia in Samoa, the great trihthon of Tonga, 

 and the scarped mountain erections on Rapaiti. 



Who erected these rocks? Was there once a migrating people who 

 crossed the vast Pacific by its longest island route, leaving records of a stone 

 culture which the present islanders do not and apparently never did possess? 



