450 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
give up hope that the remains on Easter Island will help to solve 
the problems of early American civilizations. 
The result of 3 years’ work on the island culture pursued at the 
Bishop Museum in Honolulu, with which I have been associated, 
shows that this Ultima Thule was discovered and settled by Poly- 
nesians, who arrived in a fleet of double canoes sometime, roughly, 
between the middle of the twelfth century A. D. and the end of the 
thirteenth. The time of the discovery and settlement can be estab- 
lished approximately from the lists of chiefs that have come to us. 
These the early missionaries took down from the dictation of the 
natives. I was permitted to copy another one from a list which my 
native informant had compiled himself. Many errors have, of course, 
slipped into these records, but a comparative study of them shows that 
Faster Island has been ruled by about 25 or 30 chiefs since the founder 
of the dynasty, Hotu-matua, and his people first came to its shores. 
Allowing 25 years for each ruler’s reign—the usual method of meas- 
uring time in Polynesian annals—we find that this must have hap- 
pened very close to the twelfth or thirteenth century. From other 
sources, we know also that this was a period of great sea expeditions, 
and that the settling of New Zealand and of many other islands in 
the Pacific occurred in what seems to have been a heroic age of 
ancient Polynesia. 
Curiously enough, the oral tradition of the migration to Easter 
Island has been preserved remarkably well even down to the present. 
While I was there, I was told in great detail many more or less legend- 
ary incidents of the voyage eastward of Hotu-matua and his associate, 
the noble Tuuko-ihu. These stories with their core of history were the 
glorious sagas of the first emigrants to this little lost world. 
At about the same time, the Tahitians, Maori, and Marquesans had 
a culture which was still undefined but was very similar in the different 
groups. In the course of the succeeding centuries, over each of these 
island areas a civilization developed along original lines, though still 
retaining the common background. The Kaster Island culture belongs 
to this purely Polynesian type. The ancestors of the present popula- 
tion merely improved upon the legacy they received. 
Where then did the Easter-Islanders come from? Since they are 
Polynesians in race, language, and culture, the problem of their origin 
coincides with that of the Polynesians as a whole and is as yet unsolved. 
That the Polynesians came from Asia is beyond doubt. India, Assam, 
and Indo-China have been variously given as the cradle of these sea- 
faring tribes, but sufficient evidence to validate these theories is still 
lacking. Within the Polynesian world the Easter Islanders offer 
many analogies with the Maori of New Zealand, the people of Manga- 
reva and those of the Marquesas. Actually the resemblances between 
Easter Island culture and that of the Marquesas are very striking. It 
