Photos by Betsa Marsh, Travel Arts Syndicate Archaeologist Claudius Cristino and the Moai Restoration Committee of Japan arranged for a giant crane to lift these 15 statues onto an altar near the waves at Tongariki.

By Betsa Marsh, Travel Arts Syndicate

EASTER ISLAND, Chile -- "Truthiness," comedian Stephen Colbert's sliding scale of reality, has come into its own on Easter Island.

Travelers are encouraged to arrive on this little Chilean outpost with their own pet theories about the prehistoric stone colossi that tower over mortals. Because there is no airtight archaeological proof, chances are they'll go home with their own Easter Island "truthiness."

"You'll have more questions when you leave the island than before you came," said Maria Lilian "China" Pakarati, an islander who teaches English and leads tours for Kia-Koe. After three days of climbing up volcanic cones, shimmying into caves and staring up at hundreds of gargantuan statues, I have to say the woman speaks the truth.

The confusion starts even with the name. Four thousand islanders call their home Rapa Nui, "Big Land." When they're feeling poetic, it's Mata Kite Rangi, "Eyes Looking at Heaven."

	The statues retain their mysterious power centuries after being carved Click photo for larger image.

Then, 19th-century Christian missionaries landed and added "The Navel of the World," according to Ms. Pakarati's timetable. Then Chile annexed the world's most remote inhabited island in 1888 and christened it Isla de Pascua.

That, of course, is Spanish for Easter Island, the least popular name.

"We're Rapanui," Ms. Pakarati insisted. "Don't call us Easter Islanders." The island itself is Rapa Nui, the people, Rapanui.

Easter Island comes from the European discovery of the island about Easter Day 1722, when Dutch Admiral Jacob Roggeveen spotted land, anchored for one day, then sailed off. But not before leaving his mark.

"This European captain shot 15 natives at his first chance," Ms. Pakarati recounted. Many historians set the death count at 13 islanders, but regardless, it was a bloody harbinger of what the Rapanui could expect when outsiders came calling.

		If you go ... For more information on the cultural heritage of Easter Island and the Easter Island Foundation, visit islandheritage.org/ index.html

Instead of 1722, "I think we were discovered about 400 A.D., when Hotu Matua ("Prolific Father") came ashore," said Ms. Pakarati, referring to the legendary founding monarch. "Every Rapanui believes we came from the West, from Polynesia. You see our eyes?"

The origin of the Rapanui people is one of the biggest "truthiness" issues. The late Thor Heyerdahl, fabled Norwegian explorer who sailed his balsa-wood boat Kon-Tiki from Peru to the Tuamoto Islands in the South Pacific, was convinced that Rapa Nui had two waves of migration. The first came about A.D. 800-900 from South America on the prevailing currents; the second, against the waves, from Polynesia.

Mr. Heyerdahl, the first to excavate scientifically on Rapanui, pointed to certain uniquely American deities, plants and construction techniques to prove his theory. Most archaeologists dismiss it now, including archaeologist Peter Bellwood. "The peoples of Oceania deserve the credit for their achievements, not the peoples of some imaginary Mediterranean colonial enterprise."

Anthropologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii, who excavated on Rapa Nui from 2000 to 2004, puts the achievements in an even tighter time frame, suggesting colonization as late as 1200. And the disastrous deforestation that some environmentalists lay at the feet of rapacious, overpopulating Rapanui? Blame it on the Polynesian rats who ate the seeds of the Jubaea palm trees into extinction.

For Ms. Pakarati: "Our oral tradition is almost always opposite to what the archaeologists say."

How to sort through the contradictions? The best way is to pull on some hiking boots and hit the UNESCO trails; the entire island is a World Heritage Site.

But isn't it just one giant head after another? No, each altar is a different era, construction and condition, telling different parts of this complex tale.

In a frenzy of devotion from A.D. 900-1600 -- on some researchers' truthiness timeline -- workers slung basalt picks and chiseled giants from the side of a volcano. Each behemoth took a year to 18 months to carve, cut away from the rock face and lowered safely to the quarry floor. Transporting the giants -- often 20 feet tall and 20 tons -- over miles of volcanic rubble was another project altogether.

For Ms. Pakarati, these "living faces" -- moai in Rapanui (pronounced moe eye) -- represented not gods but dead kings and honored ancestors, re-animated to protect the villages they loomed over. "As soon as someone important died, the people went to the factory and said 'I want that moai on the altar.'"

With 387 of the island's 888 moai suspended in the quarry -- leaning, buried to their chests or still supine on the carving block -- the overwhelming question is "What happened?" Workers dropped their picks and walked off the job site forever.

Was it war? Regime change? Religious upheaval? Or did they simply run out of trees to move the moai to their altars?

The work stoppage enigma is unsolved, and the logistics still torment researchers. How did they move the blocky statues? Current thought is that the moai shuffled along on a path of flat stones, propelled up and forward. Men on each side pulled on ropes attached to a massive log at the statue's back. Imagine moving a refrigerator on steroids.

This image suits the ancestors' contention that the moai "walked" to their appointed spots, but no supposition answers every point. Ms. Pakarati's truthiness?

"Mana is the force that comes through the gods. In 2006, Rapanui still believe that through the power of mana the statues moved."

However they first arrived, each statue now standing owes a lot to human help. From about 1600 until the last moai was flattened in 1838, Rapanui culture convulsed in a civil cataclysm, the old worship reviled and the moai toppled. Today's standing moai were restored by modern archaeologists.

Surely there were records of such revolution? In one of the most profound ironies of this search for truth, the Rapanui were the only Polynesians to develop a writing system, the rongo rongo script. Missionaries ordered the pagan documents, inscribed on wooden tables, burned, and today you see only copies at the island's Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum.

Undaunted, three generations of archaeologists have toiled to reset more than 30 moai onto altars. Mr. Heyerdahl raised the first during his 1955-56 expedition, camping on Anakena Beach where King Hotu Matua was said to come ashore. In a 1992-96 collaboration between archaeologist Claudius Cristino and the Moai Restoration Committee of Japan, a giant crane lifted 15 statues -- the largest historic relics on Rapa Nui -- onto an altar near the waves at Tongariki.

Visit each site and soon a tour becomes a quest: Why the pointy nose? What's with the long ears? Hey, there's a female moai over here. A good guide is essential.

As long as travelers keep off the sacred altars and don't touch the petroglyphs, they're free to gawk and daydream until the sun goes down. And beyond -- each sunset, photographers gather at the moai in a quiet, reflective mood.

Centuries after these leviathans were carved, they still retain some of their mute power -- can it be mana? Our group of travelers starts to anthropomorphize these stony giants, saddened when we see them face down. We even debate: Is it better to have "lived" on the altar and been deposed or to have been left behind in eternal anticipation at the quarry?

Each day, the statues become more real as the expert theories become shakier. I've read and read about this mysterious island, and now I think I'll let my own experience with these blind, brooding monoliths become my personal "truthiness" of Rapa Nui.

Which seems just fine with one of the island's biggest champions.

"All of you can have your own version of this place," Ms. Pakarati told us, "and that's OK."