The New Yorker:

Why Western writers have shrouded the history of Rapa Nui in myth and mystery.

By Margaret Talbot

Finding out what actually happened in the deep past can be a slog, so when ancient history is packaged as mystery—spine-tingling but solvable—it’s hard to resist. Who doesn’t want to know how a lost civilization got lost, or where it might be hiding? The trouble is that what gets touted as a lost civilization often turns out to have been there all along. The people who can’t or won’t see the continuity in front of them have typically been European adventurers or armchair archeologists, busy spinning dismissive theories about the cultures of non-Europeans. The idea that the Pyramids of Egypt are so awesome they could only have been built by aliens is now a meme-able joke, fodder for Reddit debunkers and cheesy History Channel shows.

Still, the fancy persists, implanted like a microchip, ever since Erich von Däniken’s 1968 best-seller, “Chariots of the Gods,” begat the hugely popular 1973 television special “In Search of Ancient Astronauts.” Von Däniken argued that extraterrestrials must have visited Earth to lend a hand with various prehistoric undertakings—the Pyramids, the massive stone carvings of Easter Island, the Nazca Lines. What may have begun as trippy speculation fed on a darker premise: that the present-day peoples of Africa, Polynesia, or Latin America were simply not impressive enough to have had ancestors capable of such feats. (Stonehenge was the rare European site to make an appearance among von Däniken’s confounding examples.)

Go to link