Texas Tech professor David Larmour has studied and taught the classics for decades. But since his childhood, he’s held a fascination for Easter Island, a Chilean Territory in Polynesia. In the summer of 2018, he spent time there taking in the lots of moais, hundreds of statues mysteriously made and placed on the triangular island by its original inhabitants hundreds of years ago.
“The whole thing is a national park, really, and when you go around to the major sites, the quarry is the major one, because that’s where you can walk up and see how they carved these things out of the rocks. There are some statues that were obviously on their way down to the coast that made it, and then there are some still in the rock. There’s a famous one known as El Picante, the giant, which is the largest of them.”
Larmour, a Horn professor of classics in the university’s Classical Languages and Literature Department, will share his adventure and thoughts about it next week. He says he hopes those who come take away the importance of comparative study.
“I’m absolutely convinced that you cannot just study classical mythology, or deep classical literature, or classical sculpture without branching out into other fields that may provide useful parallels or inspiration of some kind for one’s own studies.”
Larmour says he found a deep fascination with the moai statues on Easter Island. More than 880 moai have been found. They are monoliths of volcanic rock with various carved visages. The average is 20 tons and measure 20 feet tall or more.
“And it ties in with my interest, in one aspect of Greek sculpture; statues that survive from Greco-Roman times. I’ve always been fascinated by the very few number of statues that contain the eyes, the original eyes, because most Greek statues have lost their eyes over time, they fell out, or they were taken away because they were made of valuable stones. But there is a small proportion of statues that survived from the ancient world with the eyes. It creates a completely different effect on the viewer, when you have these eyes staring at you.”
For a long time, many researchers believed that the placement of the moais was in tribute to ancestors of the island’s inhabitants, or to seek blessings from their gods after the deforestation of the island’s palm trees. But earlier this year, according to a CNN report, other researchers came up with different theory.
The Polynesian people of Easter Island, one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world, placed the moai near sources of fresh water.
“The really interesting thing is that, down by the seashore where the fresh water meets the salt water, the salt water becomes less brackish, less salty, and they can tolerate that. It seems that the moais may have marked these sites, which would have been of course very precious in a sense, in being a place where humans could actually drink the water, though it very well could have been salty for them too.”
Larmour says seeing the moai up close and in large numbers in their original locations can take one’s breath away. It would be, he says, like approaching an altar, creating a feeling that one is seeing something outside the realm of normal human experience.
“Because you are looking at something that was created by a group of people who remain something of a mystery to us. And the scale of the statues, and the care which was taken to make them, and arrange them in certain locations is very impressive, given the lack of anything like modern technologies available to them.”
Larmour’s talk is scheduled for 5:30 Thursday in Room 105 of the Foreign Languages building.