Images, sometimes of stone, but more frequently of wood, were also habitually made in the Marquesas to represent the dead, but we do not know of the presence of pyramids in these islands. The me’ae or sacred places had two or more platforms, but there is no evidence of a pyramidal form. The nature of these structures in the Marquesas may have been due, as Tautain suggests,[1] to the nature of the mountainous country in which the people built their villages.
While there are statues in the Marquesas comparable with those of Easter Island, but pyramids are unrepresented, it is this latter feature which is prominent in Tahiti. An especially large example of a pyramid was recorded by Captain Cook,[2] and pyramidal structures were regular features of the marae, or sacred places, of this island. According to the description of a Tahitian pyramid given by Moerenhout[3] they seem to have been not far removed from the platform of Easter Island and, as in that island, to have been surmounted by images. The example described by Moerenhout was 300 feet long by 120 broad at the base, while at the summit, 60 feet above the ground, the length had diminished to 200 and the breadth to only 12 feet. It was on this narrowed platform at the summit of the pyramid that the images were placed. It is probable that some at least of these images were, as in the Marquesas, images of the dead, and certainly the marae with which they are associated are closely connected with a cult of the dead.
Statues of stone also occurred in other islands of the Pacific. Gill[4] speaks of a great stone “idol” of the god Rongo in Mangaia which was smashed to atoms when the people renounced their native gods.
- ↑ L’Anthropologie, t. viii. (1897), p. 671.
- ↑ Captain Cook’s Journal. London, 1893, p. 83.
- ↑ Op. cit. i. 467.
- ↑ W. W. Gill, Life in the Southern Isles. London, 1876, p. 100.
