Banana, taro and sweet potato traces in soil In one of these sites, Soil chemistry below two erect moai at Rano Raraku, banana, taro, and sweet potato have been found.
On the island, more commonly known as Easter Island, the most recognizable figures are the stone faces, turned towards the inside, with the body of these figures emerging out of grass and rubble. The moai have been treated as a riddle in one, the question on why they were carved, how they were transported and what they finally meant to the people who created them has always been a puzzle. One of the latest evidences starts not with rope, and roads, and legend, but with that which in an invisible adhesion sticks to the ground.
The samples of the soils at the foot of two standing upright moai upon the slopes of the quarry sampled by the researchers in and around the main statue on the island of Rano Raraku. Analysis revealed traces of chemicals that would have belonged to banana, taro, and sweet potato crops which have long been part of Polynesian food systems. The quarry soils in the same tests displayed higher concentration of constituents that are related to plant growth such as calcium and phosphorus, and indicators of improved water supply than much of the rest of the island. It does not merely mean that agriculture occurred in the vicinity, but that the game itself served as a useful geography where agriculture and monument-making intersected.
Such an overlap is important since Rano Raraku is not a small-scale workshop. An elaborate geological explanation of the crater recognizes it as a pyroclastic cone which yielded hyalotuff utilized in more than 95 per cent of the moai of the Island, and left the quarry crowded with statues in various degrees of workmanship. Those half-living burials of torsos and heads, so long understood as abandoned or awaiting transportation can also be taken as inscriptions in an area of a cult and utility, as monuments erected where soil, rock, water met. Jo Anne Van Tilburg described the change as follows: “This study radically alters the idea that all standing statues in Rano Raraku were simply awaiting transport out of the quarry.” The head of the soil analysis Sarah Sherwood explained the moment when the results had returned: “When we got the chemistry results back, I did a double take.”
The soil discovery also lies well alongside a second follow up of work that is more recent and which takes the quarry as systematic, though not centrally directed. With over 11,000 images, researchers had created a high-resolution 3D representation of Rano Raraku and had distinguished 30 different places of activity with varying carving styles. Instead of one authority controlling the production, the quarry seems to have subsidized hundreds of people operating simultaneously, sharing a landscape with a local practice. The erect figures of the quarry in that environment do not have to be conceptualized as leftovers of logistics; they can be conceptualized as deliberate presences, as an indication in a living workspace in which food security and cultural imperatives were discussed on equal terms.
The agricultural system of Rapa Nui also, more and more, looks like an artificially adjusted system instead of a direct decrease. Another study mapped the lithic “rock gardens” of the island and found that they occupied an area of approximately 188 acres or less than one-half of one percent of the island but with marine foods, the areas could support a small population. Rock mulch assisted in decreasing the wind stress as well as alterations in temperature and over time, it enriched the thin soils with weathered minerals. On that background, fertile pockets at Rano Raraku are all the more important: where the insufficiency of the island was addressed with specific, intensive solutions.
