Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island (review)

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is a lone volcanic island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. Because of its isolation (the closest landmass, Pitcairn Island, present population 55, lies 1100 km to the west) and the presence of hundreds of massive anthropomorphic images ("giants" made of tuff or basalt), Rapa Nui has been veiled in an air of mystery since its rediscovery by Europeans in 1722. For the past three centuries people around the world have speculated whence these images and their makers came and how they got there. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries few Euro American ships stopped at the island, except to exploit the islanders. Even those explorers making scientific voyages to study Pacific cultures recorded only token observations of the native culture on Rapa Nui. It was not until the early twentieth century that a scientific study of Rapa Nui culture was undertaken. This ethnographic and archaeological investigation was led by an English woman named Katherine Scoresby Routledge.

In 1919, following her work on Rapa Nui, Routledge wrote a book for a non-technical audience titled The Mystery of Easter Island: A Story of an Expedition (London: Hazell, Watson & Viney). In her book Routledge related tribal land divisions, oral traditions, and myths of the island as told to her by informants, several of whom had lived prior to the establishment of a permanent foreign presence—the missionaries. She also described the stone images (moai), the platforms on which they were placed (ahu), and other archaeological remains of Rapa Nui. Circumstances within Katherine's life in England following the publication of The Mystery of Easter Island prevented her from publishing a scientific manuscript on her research. Furthermore, many of Routledge's notes and photos disappeared shortly before her death in 1935 and were thought lost.

Jo Anne van Tilburg, the author of Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island, has spent many years tracking down Katherine's scientific notes and interviewing surviving members of Katherine's family. Many of us who have worked on Rapa Nui and have been aware that van Tilburg had acquired access to Routledge's notes have been anxiously awaiting the publication of a sequel to Routledge's 1919 ethnography—maybe a more scientific treatise of her studies. Among Stone Giants is not that book. Instead, van Tilburg uses Katherine's recently discovered diaries and notes, and the interviews with Katherine's family to develop a biographical sketch of a Victorian woman and aspiring anthropologist who relished documenting world views of cultures in faraway lands. Van Tilburg skillfully portrays Katherine, her extended family, English colleagues, and Victorian society in general. Van Tilburg also relates Katherine's reactions to, and interactions with the people whose lives and culture, myths and dreams she put to pen.

Van Tilburg is an archaeologist who has worked on Rapa Nui for more than twenty years and heads the Easter Island Statue Project. In Among Stone Giants she proves to be most capable of analyzing both Katherine herself as well as Katherine's notes on Rapa Nui culture. The first few chapters of Among Stone Giants introduce the reader to Katherine Pease, who was born into a Quaker family and grew up in a stultifying Victorian England. Van Tilburg delves into the background of the Quaker faith and Victorian England to preface how the internal conflicts within English society influenced Katherine. For example, Katherine grew up during the period when Victorian women were considered to be the property of men, but Quakers believed in the innate equality of women and men. Quakers practiced tolerance and respect for different opinions with the ultimate spiritual authority residing in one's own conscience. Katherine's character, her social life, her perception of spirituality and mysticism, and her view of women's role in marriage...