Easter traditions and symbols have evolved over time, though some have been around for centuries. While to Christians, Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of Christ, many Easter traditions are not found in the Bible.
The most prominent secular symbol of the Christian On Easter Monday, April 24, , a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of the Irish Republic and, along with some 1, followers, staged a rebellion against the British government in Ireland. The rebels seized prominent buildings in Dublin and clashed with Anthropologists photographed the cylindrical hats, known as pukao, and used the photos to make In June , Japan had seized the remote, sparsely inhabited islands of Attu Tucked away in the rocky countryside northwest of Cuzco, Peru, Machu Picchu is believed to have been a royal estate or sacred religious site for Inca leaders, whose civilization was virtually wiped out by Spanish invaders in the 16th century.
For hundreds of years, until the Three Mile Island is the site of a nuclear power plant in south central Pennsylvania. In March , a series of mechanical and human errors at the plant caused the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.
Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Early Settlement The first human inhabitants of Rapa Nui the Polynesian name for Easter Island; its Spanish name is Isla de Pascua are believed to have arrived in an organized party of emigrants.
Recommended for you. Easter Island. Flashback: Easter History of Easter. The islanders call them "moai," and they have puzzled ethnographers, archaeologists, and visitors to the island since the first European explorers arrived here in In their isolation, why did the early Easter Islanders undertake this colossal statue-building effort? Unfortunately, there is no written record and the oral history is scant to help tell the story of this remote land, its people, and the significance of the nearly giant moai that punctuate Easter Island's barren landscape.
What do they mean? The moai and ceremonial sites are along the coast, with a concentration on Easter Island's southeast coast. Here, the moai are more 'standardized' in design, and are believed to have been carved, transported, and erected between AD and They stand with their backs to the sea and are believed by most archaeologists to represent the spirits of ancestors, chiefs, or other high-ranking males who held important positions in the history of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, the name given by the indigenous people to their island in the s.
Archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg , who has studied the moai for many years, believes the statues may have been created in the image of various paramount chiefs. They were not individualized portrait sculptures, but standardized representations of powerful individuals. He freely speculated on how the statues might have been raised, a little at a time, using piles of stones and scaffolding; and there has been no end of speculation, and no lack of scientific investigation, in the centuries that followed.
But the art of Easter Island still looms on the horizon of the human imagination. Just 14 miles long and 7 miles wide, the island is more than 2, miles off the coast of South America and 1, miles from its nearest Polynesian neighbor, Pitcairn Island, where mutineers from the HMS Bounty hid in the 19th century.
Too far south for a tropical climate, lacking coral reefs and perfect beaches, and whipped by perennial winds and seasonal downpours, Easter Island nonetheless possesses a rugged beauty—a mixture of geology and art, of volcanic cones and lava flows, steep cliffs and rocky coves.
Its megalithic statues are even more imposing than the landscape, but there is a rich tradition of island arts in forms less solid than stone—in wood and bark cloth, strings and feathers, songs and dances, and in a lost form of pictorial writing called rongorongo, which has eluded every attempt to decipher it.
A society of hereditary chiefs, priests, clans and guilds of specialized craftsmen lived in isolation for 1, years. History, as much as art, made this island unique. But attempts to unravel that history have produced many interpretations and arguments. But by no means everything. When did the first people arrive? Where did they come from? Why did they carve such enormous statues? How did they move them and raise them up onto platforms?
Why, after centuries, did they topple these idols? Such questions have been answered again and again, but the answers keep changing. Estimates of when people first reached the island are as varied, ranging from the first to the sixth century A. And how they ever found the place, whether by design or accident, is yet another unresolved question.
Some argue that the navigators of the first millennium could never have plotted a course over such immense distances without modern precision instruments. One archaeoastronomer suggests that a new supernova in the ancient skies may have pointed the way.
But did the voyagers know the island was even there? For that, science has no answer. The islanders, however, do. Benedicto Tuki was a tall year-old master wood-carver and keeper of ancient knowledge when I met him. Tuki has since died. His piercing eyes were set in a deeply creased, mahogany face. There, he could recount the story in the right way. Platforms are called ahu, and the statues that sit on them, moai pronounced mo-eye.
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