MUSEUM news MONUMENTS DE RAPA NUI Manchester—The gigantic Rapa Nui stone statues known as moai are certainly among the world’s most fascinating and well-known archaeological objects. Making Monuments on Rapa Nui, a new temporary exhibition 52 at the Manchester Museum, takes a fresh look at these colossal monuments. The imposing stone figures, ranging between two and twenty-four meters high and weighing as much as a hundred tons, have long been shrouded in mystery. According to researchers, the 887 known statues, sculpted in basalt with adzes and subsequently moved into their current positions, were erected between AD 110 and 1600. How could people have transported these giant stone slabs, often over distances in excess of a thousand meters, without modern equipment? Some have argued that extraterrestrial intervention was involved, while others have invoked Atlantis in order to answer this question. Archaeologist Colin Richard, professor at the University of Manchester, uses Making Monuments to debunk such myths. In the exhibition, Richard also examines the role that the stone giants played in the lives of the people who made them and explains contemporary theories on the decline of the island’s population. The exhibition also looks at pukao, the red tuff coifs that may weigh several tons and are perched atop the heads of some of the moai. As part of the show, the museum will present one of the basalt behemoths, Moai Hava, which was brought to Great Britain in 1868 and is on loan to Manchester from the British Museum. The exhibition will be on view until September 6. SEPIK ART Berlin and Zurich—The Sepik River is New Guinea’s longest waterway. Most of its fl ow runs through the Sandaun (West Sepik) and East Sepik provinces. Strikingly diverse landscapes and ecosystems exist along its long, meandering run: Swamps and tropical forests make way for mountains and plains, which are home to abundant fauna as well to man, who has inhabited these regions for more than 14,000 years. The some 12,000 kilometers of Sepik riverbank are populated by small cultural groups who, for the most part, live with little or no contact with one another. The heterogeneity of these groups is apparent when one considers their languages: Along the middle and lower courses of the river alone, at least ninety different tongues are spoken. Dance of the Ancestors: Art from the Sepik of Papua New Guinea, the Musée du Quai Branly’s exhibition, produced in association with the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, focuses on this region, which remained unknown to Western travelers and explorers until relatively recently. It was not until the latter part of the 19th century that a German ship fi rst encountered the river’s delta. The colonials aboard it dubbed it the Kaiserin Augusta Fluss (Kaiserin Augusta River). The elaborate local art and other material culture quickly caught the attention of museum curators and collectors all over the ABOVE AND LOWER RIGHT: Moai in Rapa Nui. Adam Stanford © Aerial-Cam Ltd for RNLOC. BELOW: Carved ornament. Sepik River, Papua New Guinea. Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußinscher Kulturbesitz, Ethnologisches Museum. Photo: Claudia Obrocki.
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