The journeys of Hoa Hakananai’a

  They are small steps compared to crossing part of the Pacific and the whole of the Atlantic, but Hoa Hakananai’a has moved around since it arrived at the British Museum in 1869. I’ve been looking through some old copies of Antiquity, and I came across this photo. It was taken by OGS Crawford for …

The age of A’a

Good to see Martin Bailey write about A’a in the Art Newspaper yesterday. We reported this story in British Archaeology in June, when British Museum curator Julie Adams wrote about the new research she led into the wonderful, unsettling carving from Rurutu taken to London by British missionaries in 1821. This and Hoa Hakananai’a (delivered …

Brian Cox, master of the universe

Well, at least of the wonders of the universe aphorism. In that regard he’s truly up there with Carl Sagan. And having criticised him for an archaeological presentation, I was delighted to see him at his best on Easter Island. I wrote earlier about a sequence in the first of the BBC’s Human Universe films. …

Hoa Hakananai’a: Important online resource

James Miles has posted links to some interactive models of Hoa Hakananai’a deriving from his digital work on the statue. The images are relatively low resolution, pending further moves for accessing very large files, but the opportunities they give to examine the statue are already stunning and unprecedented (and arguably of higher resolution than any …

Easter Island – alive and well in Soho?

The April 1986 edition of World of Interiors has a feature headlined “Soho strip”. It’s written by Doris Saatchi, as Doris Lockhart then was, a New York-born writer and art connoisseur married to advertiser Charles Saatchi. There is a great portrait of her by Robert Mapplethorpe, though somewhat undermined for me by Red Dwarf – …

En route for Easter Island

A century ago today, the Mana, an auxiliary schooner captained by Scoresby Routledge, stewarded by his wife Katherine and crewed by a collection of English seamen, fishermen, scientists and the odd Royal Navy lieutenant, had just been hauled up onto a floating deck in Talcahuano on the Chilean coast. They were nearly a year into …

Hoa Hakananai’a in British Archaeology

The new British Archaeology contains the first printed report on our study of the great Easter Island statue in the British Museum. The feature makes a great spread, and the results are really interesting. I wrote about our work in the BM at the time here and here. Now the analyses are well advanced. In …

Night at the Museum 2

A chance to give Hoa a quick dust Last night we finished the job of recording the British Museum's large Easter Island statue (see here for the first post). As with photogrammetry, the really clever stuff with PTM lies mostly in the software and not the kit. The two most important things here were a …

Last night in the Wellcome Gallery

I spent last night all but alone with the British Museum's Easter Island statue, Hoa Hakananai’a. Graeme Earl, James Miles, Hembo Pagi and I began a project to record and analyse the carving in unprecedented detail. It is one of the British Museum’s most popular objects, but well known as it is, it has been …