Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/403

 in regard to Easter Island. 369

regions being other than merely fortuitous. The heavy, overhanging brow, the long, upward-curving nose, the protruding lips and prominent chin of the Rapanui statues all find a parallel in the figures from the Solomon Islands. The distended ear-lobe is usually very marked in the more strictly human figures from the latter group. It is true that the eyes are nearly always indicated in the Solomon Islands (usually by inset pieces of pearl-shell), but occasion- ally they are omitted and are merely suggested by the shadows cast by the overhanging brow, as, for instance, in the specimen shown in Fig. 14. which in this respect adds another point of similarity to the Easter Island statues, which are eyeless.

Lastly, in connection with these statues, I have a sug- gestion to make in regard to the so-called " hats," or " crowns." These, as I have already mentioned, are huge cylinders of red volcanic ash or tufa, which were placed on the tops of the heads of some of the cfiigies. Now, if these merely represented hats or other head-gear, it is difficult to see why the natives did not carve them out of the rock in one piece with the statues. That would have been an easy and obvious method of arriving at an adequate result where only a hat was intended. Why, then, did they take the trouble to go nearly across the island to another crater in the Teraai Hills (some 7 miles or so from Rano Roraku, where the statues themselves were hewn out), in order to employ as material for the " hats " a special kind of very rough rock, a vesicular red tufa 1 I wish to urge as a tentative and heterodox suggestion, that the reason was that these red cylinders were not intended to represent hats at all, but hair. The selection of a particularly rough, vesicular rock for such a purpose would be natural enough ; but I may be asked, why should a red material be specially used, when the normal native hair-colour would be black or very dark.

To find an explanation of this, we may again turn to the