標題: Pacific Island - Easter Island [打印本頁] 作者: orchids 時間: 2010-6-30 08:58 PM 標題: Pacific Island - Easter Island
Easter Islandis a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeastern most point of the Polynesian triangle. A special territory of Chile annexed in 1888, Easter Island is widely famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai , created by the early Rapanui people. It is a World Heritage Site (as determined by UNESCO) with much of the island protected within the Rapa Nui National Park. In recent times the island has served as a cautionary tale about the cultural and environmental dangers of overexploitation. Ethnographers and archaeologists now argue that the introduction of diseases carried by European colonizers and the slave raiding that devastated the population in the 1800s had a much greater social than environmental impact. The name "Easter Island" was given by the island's first recorded European visitor, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered it on Easter Sunday 1722, while searching for Davis or David's island and named it Paasch-Eyland (18th century Dutch for "Easter Island"). The island's official Spanish name, Isla de Pascua, also means "Easter Island". The current Polynesian name of the island, "Rapa Nui" or "Big Rapa", was coined following the slave raids carried out in Rapa Nui in the early 1860s because of Easter Island's geographic resemblance to the island of Rapa in theBass Islands of the Austral Islands group. However, Thor Heyerdahl has argued that the naming would have been the opposite, Rapa being the original name of Easter Island, and Rapa Iti was named by its refugees.作者: chowold2 時間: 2010-6-30 10:21 PM
I don't know much about the monumental statues. It just give the feeling of classic elegant and 望鄉感覺
