Ghosts of the Ancients

Hundreds of giant stone statues, miles of lines and drawings carved into the ground, massive stone circles: what do all of these things have in common?

From Peru to Polynesia, and on to the British Isles, separated by thousands of miles, these amazing collections of ancient design share a mystery: the question of how centuries ago such massive monuments were erected without the benefit of modern technology and equipment.

Easter Island

Easter Island is a small island in the Southeast Pacific Ocean, comprising the Polynesian Triangle with Hawaii and New Zealand. It is a territory of Chile. The island and its surrounding islets are the summit of a massive volcano arising thousands of meters from the sea bed. It is one of the most isolated islands in the world.

On the island, there are hundreds of stone statues known as moai , 887 in all. The figures are kneeling with their hands over their stomachs. The average height of the statues is 14.5 feet, and the average weight is 13.75 tons. The largest, El Gigante, is 71.93 feet tall and weighs in excess of 150 tons.

Each statue was carved from volcanic ash with hand chisels. It is estimated that it would have taken 5-6 men about one year to complete one statue.

The extinct volcano, Rano Raraku, is a volcanic cone with a crater lake. There are 397 statues in various stages of completion around the cone. Even more amazing, there are 288 statues that are placed around the island on four-foot-high platforms, called ahu , and another 92 statues that were left lying on roads and tracks partway through transport to their intended sites.

Nazca Lines

On the Pampas de Jumana in Peru lies the Nazca Desert. It is flat, stony ground with lighter subsoil. The area has one of the driest climates on earth, an arid, windless area with a year-round temperature of 77 degrees and less than 20 minutes of rainfall annually.

Carved into the subsoil are 193 square miles of geoglyphs; geometric shapes, straight lines, and figures. Some of the lines are up to 12 miles long. The figures depict flowers and plants, objects, human-form figures, and animals, including a monkey, a spider, a whale, and a hummingbird.

The Nazca Lines were discovered in the 1920's when commercial airplanes began to fly over the area. It is impossible to view the totality of the geoglyphs from the ground, or to recognize the shapes and figures they depict.

Stonehenge

The Sarsen Circle , on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, is a series of 30 upright stone columns (17 standing today) that average 6.5 feet tall by 3 feet wide. They are evenly spaced 1-1.5 meters apart.

The columns support curved lintels that are 10.5 feet long and connected via tongue and grove fittings. The diameter of the circle is 108 feet. The columns and lintels are made of sandstone, believed to have come from Malborough Downs, which is 30 kilometers away.

Within the circle is a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of pillars known as Trilithons, a series of 10 uprights in 5 freestanding pairs, each with a single lintel. They are arranged symmetrically, by height, with the tallest in the center.

While Stonehenge is the most well-known stone circle, there are more than 900 stone circles throughout the British Isles.

Why were they built?

Many theories exist about why these incredible monuments were created. They include:

• Clan ceremonies and rituals
• Astronomy
• Human sacrifice
• Celestial calendars
• Depictions of gods

Regardless of the original reasons for creating the statues, circles, and geoglyphs, many mysterious questions arise:

• How were statues weighing several tons moved without machinery?
• Once the statues were moved, how were they erected?
• How were miles of straight lines drawn?
• How were figures that can only be seen from in air, accurately drawn?
• How could a stone column be erected and the lintel lifted onto it?

These ancient mysteries may never be fully answered; did ancient cultures have more modern equipment than we realize, or did they, in fact, get some help from the gods?