The Mystery of Easter Island
The Mystery of Easter Island.
As I intimated in my previous post, I've been working on procuring something very cool to add to my collection of Oceanic ephemera. Today, I returned to the antique mall and purchased (for the paltry sum of $5) a pristine copy of the December, 1921 issue of National Geographic which contains 4 (count 'em, 4) wonderfully illustrated articles about Polynesia, plus a color map of the Pacific Ocean!
I spent part of this afternoon scanning 13 photographs and illustrations from the article, The Mystery of Easter Island, and added them to my Vintage Oceania page.
The article was written by the first archaeologist to excavate on the island, Mrs. Scoresby Rutledge (AKA Katherine). It's a fascinating glimpse back in time, and her reaction to the mysterious disappearance of the original Easter culture; a conundrum that scientists have just started to unravel within the past 10 years. It now appears that the inhabitants of Easter were wiped out by a self-inflicted environmental disaster that decimated the island's forests and drove the native flora and fauna to extinction.
I'll be scanning the rest of the articles over the next week, so all you pre-verts who're drooling over the prospect of seeing the requisite NatGeo shots of topless native women will just have to wait! [Eye of the Goof]
9:50:58 PM 
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