Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/393

 /;/ regard to Easter Island. 359

The only other part of the world which, as far as I can recollect at the moment, offers parallels to the Easter Island mataa, is Japan, where tanged or pedunculated blades of stone, frequently of obsidian, occur which cer- tainly recall to some extent the form^ and technique of the mataa. The parallel is not a very close one, however, and the resemblance may, perhaps, be fortuitous.

II. The carved figures of toromiro wood representing the human form. These are too well known to need detailed description. Numerous examples have been brought from Easter Island and may be seen in museums, and many have been figured and described. These in their most typical form exhibit a type of conventionalized render- ing of the human form which is peculiar to Rapanui and finds no near parallel elsewhere. The nose is often very strongly aquiline, even to a highly exaggerated degree. The brows are exceedingly prominent and over- hanging. The staring eyes are of obsidian set in bone. The ears are distended, the lobes being greatly elongated, indicating the custom of wearing large plugs or rings as ornaments. Many of the figures have a very pronounced " goatee " beard, though no other facial hair is indicated. Many also are represented as greatly emaciated, the ribs and vertebral column being strongly indicated, the abdomen deeply sunken, and the orbits of the eyes hollow and with prominent lower margins. It is clear that the actual native type is not here represented and that a conven- tional rendering has been arrived at, just as in the Mar- quisas group, Hawaiian Islands and many other Pacific groups one finds local schools of art producing their own fanciful anthropomorphic types. The markedly aquiline nose reminds one of a Papuan type in New Guinea, rather than of a Polynesian or Melanesian type ; but since the nasal convexity appears, as far as I can see without further reference, to be especially exaggerated in the emaciated figures, it is just possible that it may originally have been