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The Pacific Archive of Edwin N. Ferdon
The Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific in 1955–1956 was an important milestone in Easter Island studies, bringing a team of highly-qualified archaeologists to the island. The reports of the expedition contain a huge amount of research data and have been profusely consulted during past years. More results and casual observations of the expedition members were written in personal diaries and field notes. This short note describes the field notes and other documents of Edwin N. Ferdon, the archaeologist who performed excavations at the ceremonial center of ‘Orongo and was also very interested in ethnohistorical research of Easter Island society. The future study of Ferdon’s field notes, now in the collections of the Kon-Tiki Museum, will certainly reveal many new interesting facts and details.
La Expedición Arqueológica Noruega a la Isla de Pascua y el Pacifico Oriente de los años 1955–1956 fue un logro importante, trayendo un equipo de arqueólogos de alta calificación para trabajar en la isla. Los reportes de la expedición son muy consultados durante las décadas pasadas, ya que contienen una cantidad impresionante de los resultados y datos. Más detalles y observaciones casuales de los participantes de la expedición fueron escritos en los diarios personales y apuntes del campo. Este articulo se enfoca sobre los apuntes del campo de Edwin N. Ferdon, el arqueólogo quien trabajó sobre estudios y excavaciones del centro ceremonial de ‘Orongo, y quien también tenía mucho interés en los estudios etnohistóricos de la sociedad de la isla. Los estudios futuros de los apuntes de Ferdon, ahora en las colecciones del Museo Kon-Tiki en Oslo, con certeza van a resultar en muchos nuevos descubrimientos interesantes.
‘Orongo, the ritual site with its many thick-walled, low stone houses situated on top of the southwestern crater wall of Rano Kau, has been visited by most scientists and explorers coming to Easter Island. Many of them have written about ‘Orongo, and some have surveyed the complex, but only three researchers have thoroughly investigated the stone houses archaeologically. The first was Katherine Routledge (1919, 1920), who mapped the site and collected stories associated with the birdman (tangata manu) ritual from people who had themselves participated in ceremonies or heard about the ceremonies from close relatives, and were still living when she came to the island in 1914. The next researcher and the first to conduct professional archaeological excavations at the site was Edwin N. Ferdon (Figure 1), from the Museum of New Mexico, as part of the research team of the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific in 1955 and 1956 (Ferdon 1961). In 1974, William Mulloy, who had first come to the island as part of Thor Heyerdahl’s expedition in 1955, began extensive restoration of the site together with island workers, amongst them Sonia Haoa Cardinali (Mulloy 1975). The beautiful rock carvings on the site have been surveyed several times; the first was by the Belgian archaeologist Henri Lavachery in 1934 (Lavachery 1939), but the most notable documentation of the rock art of Easter Island was conducted by Georgia Lee, who did fieldwork at ‘Orongo in the early to mid-1980s (Lee 1992). The records existing from Edwin N. Ferdon’s investigation of ‘Orongo, his initial excavations in the area surrounding ‘Anakena, and his ethnohistorical material are today part of the Edwin N. Ferdon Pacific Archive deposited at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway. Below I will present a few highlights from his career and give a short description of his records from Easter Island in 1955–56.
Edwin N. Ferdon was born in 1913 in Minnesota. Ed was an Eagle Scout, and his interest for archaeology came early, when he led a group in trenching a Hopewell mound in Ohio. Ed was educated at the University of New Mexico and the University of Southern California before he joined the School of American Research and began a series of excavations in Ecuador. Between 1938 and 1955, he participated in and organized archaeological fieldwork in Mexico and [End Page 5] Ecuador. Ferdon enjoyed a long professional career, first at the Museum of New Mexico and the School of American Research in Santa Fe. During the last twenty years of his professional life, from 1961 until he retired in 1983, he was an associate director and researcher at the Arizona State Museum. Ferdon died in 2002, the same year as his friend Thor Heyerdahl.
Edwin N. Ferdon at the sacred precinct of Mata Ngarahu, ‘Orongo, studying a birdman carving with an inscribed fan-shaped motif. Photograph by Erling Schjerven; Image 147.1 from the Photographic Archives of the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and East Pacific, 1955–1956.
In 1955 Ferdon became one of four archaeologists on the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific, which was organized by Thor Heyerdahl, then man behind the Kon-Tiki Expedition. The others included William Mulloy, Arne Skjølsvold, and Carlyle Smith. Gonzalo Figueroa accompanied the expedition as an official representative of Chile. All five returned to the area and worked on questions related to Pacific prehistory, although Mulloy, Skjølsvold, and Figueroa were the only researchers who undertook actual archaeological fieldwork on Easter Island after the expedition.
Thor Heyerdahl and Edwin N. Ferdon met in March of 1949, when in the midst of the Kon-Tiki frenzy the Norwegian explorer settled in a log-cabin in Tesuque, just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, to finish writing his main scientific work American Indians in the Pacific. They became close friends, and when Heyerdahl began planning an archaeological expedition to Easter Island, Ferdon was invited to participate. Ferdon was the only one of the expedition, except Gonzalo Figueroa, who spoke Spanish fluently and was a specialist in South American archaeology, which made him central to the expedition on Easter Island. Ferdon also co-edited the scientific reports from the expedition (Heyerdahl & Ferdon 1961, 1965). His talent for line drawing and the fact that the School of American Research decided to publish the reports were instrumental in making Ferdon an official editor.
Marit Bakke, Reidar Solsvik, and Paloma López Delgado cataloguing Ferdon’s Pacific Archive. Photo courtesy of M. Bakke.
Ferdon’s professional interest in the Pacific, first fueled by the expedition to Easter Island, never waned, although he did not return to carry out archaeological fieldwork in Polynesia. On Easter Island, Edwin N. Ferdon was not only interested in the archaeological record of the island, but also the social interactions he observed on the island, which he published before the first volume of Expedition Reports (Ferdon 1957, 1958). This interest developed into the Polynesian Ethnohistory Project, a larger project that resulted in the publication of three books on Tongan (Ferdon 1987), Marquesan (Ferdon 1993), and Tahitian (Ferdon 1981) culture as evidenced in early historical sources, and he almost finished a similar manuscript [End Page 6] on Hawaiian culture entitled “Early Hawaii: Contact and Change, 1778–1825” (Ferdon 2002).
At the time of his death in 2002, Edwin N. Ferdon left an extensive archive of both his South American and Pacific works. Although Ferdon wished that his archive and library would be kept together in one institution, eventually it was divided in two, the South American items going to the University of Arizona and the Pacific part of the archive to the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo. With the help of Marit Bakke, the Edwin N. Ferdon Pacific Archive arrived at the Kon-Tiki Museum in 2011, and a year later the entire archive had been catalogued and archived by Paloma López Delgado (a Spanish student working as an intern funded by the EU’s Culture in Practice program), Marit Bakke, and Reidar Solsvik (Figure 2). The detailed ICA description of Edwin N. Ferdon’s Pacific Archive can be found elsewhere (López Delgado 2012).
Edwin N. Ferdon’s Pacific Archive consists of the following items:
Book manuscripts: 67 boxes
Article manuscripts: 3 boxes
Lectures, public speeches: 1 box
Drawings: 1 box
Personal research notes: 2 boxes
Expeditions: 6 boxes
Academics: 5 boxes
Correspondence: 9 boxes
Books, pamphlets, etc.: 1 box
Miscellaneous: 2 boxes
Most of the archive consists of detailed categorized notes on the culture of Polynesian Islands as evidenced in early European explorer’s journals, a result of Ferdon’s Polynesian Ethnohistory Project. The remainder consists of his own writings and correspondence and notes from his 1955–56 work as an archaeologist on Thor Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku expedition. This material includes three boxes from the Easter Island 1955–1956 expedition; one box of notebooks; and his correspondence relating to the expedition and the editing of the Reports of the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island, Volume 1 (Heyerdahl & Ferdon 1961).
After the initial excavations at “Hotu Matua‘s house” in ‘Anakena and others in the vicinity were finished, the four archaeologists of the expedition sat down to decide where they should concentrate their main efforts in investigating Easter Island’s prehistory. Arne Skjølsvold chose to excavate in the statue quarry in Rano Raraku; William Mulloy began investigating the then already famous ahu of Vinapu; and Carlyle Smith was going to investigate a number of sites to obtain comparative data. Edwin N. Ferdon concentrated his effort on the ritual site of ‘Orongo. His notebook from these investigations and some drawings constitute some of the most important material in his archive. It includes one yellow notebook, 13 by 20cm, lined for taking down expenses, from the U.S. Navy Department. The notebook has 6 pages of drawings and 25 pages of notes on the ‘Orongo site, including also 25 sheets of original field drawings on metric paper, size A4 (Figure 3).
Previously unpublished tracings of the designs adorning the interiors of ‘Orongo’s House 18, including what may be a stylized spear point, matā (upper left corner), as well as stylized anthropomorphic (upper right) and bird-like (bottom center) motifs. Brief comments convey the notion of color for the designs depicted. Document reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007-(004)-0001.
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Edwin N. Ferdon also kept a diary from the expedition, which formed the basis for the published work One Man’s Log (Ferdon 1966). The notebook itself is a red diary carrying the mark of “KT 1955.” The KT is not a reference to the Kon-Tiki, but rather the name of the company, Kolbotn Trelast, a “sawmill” just outside Oslo, evidently a gift from someone. On November 28, one may read: “At 4:30 AM & Bill & I organized 20 natives for work … Took nearly 1 hr. to reach top of vol. where Orongo lies.” In addition to notes from daily life, Ferdon also writes down some of his daily tasks in mapping and excavating the famous ceremonial site.
Edwin N. Ferdon had intentions of writing more extensively on contemporary Rapanui society, so he spent considerable time collecting ethnological data. Amongst the archival material, there is one spiral-bound notebook from the bookstore at the University of Michigan containing notes on the island and its inhabitants (Figure 4). These notes are data copied from the official Chilean records of Governor Arnaldo Curti and from Ferdon’s own conversations with his workers, mainly his foreman, Juan Tepano.
Below is a detailed list of Edwin N. Ferdon’s Easter Island data:
Easter Island expedition. Geography and Administration. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0003Easter Island expedition. Artifact cards, archaeological site descriptions and drawings. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0004Easter Island expedition. Ethnology notes. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0005Easter Island expedition. Population data. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0006Easter Island expedition. Archaeology. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0007Easter Island expedition. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0008Easter Island expedition. Ethnographic data. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0009Easter Island expedition. Personal diary. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0010Brief report from the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island, to commandant on “Pinto”. By Thor Heyerdahl
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0011Easter Island expedition. Administration. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0012Easter Island expedition. Expedition technical data. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0013Easter Island expedition. Manuscript. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0014Easter Island expedition. Manuscript. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0015Easter Island expedition. Illustrations. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0016Expedition maps. Rapa, Raivava‘e, and ‘Orongo. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0017Thor Heyerdahl’s Norwegian expedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(003)-0018Easter Island. Field note book. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007-(004)-0001Easter Island expedition. Daily journal 1955. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(004)-0002Field notes, Easter Island. Polynesia
Reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(004)-0005
Note: Researchers interested in access to these documents may contact the Kon-Tiki Museum Library and Archives at kon-tiki@kon-tiki.no. [End Page 8]
The first page of the census of Easter Islanders from the field notes of Edwin N. Ferdon. The information recorded is the names of husbands and wives, the number of the children (with details on age groups and gender statistics). The complete census tables occupy five pages in the notebook. Document reference code NO KTM 2012-010-0007(004)-0005.
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Conclusion
The Edwin N. Ferdon Pacific Archive in general, and his Easter Island notebooks in particular, represents a unique window into Polynesian archaeology, research, and society as it was sixty years ago. A large part of this information was published (or prepared for publication) by Ferdon himself, but a considerable amount of information remains on the pages on his notebooks, awaiting proper evaluation and study. The author hopes that this paper will attract more interest of scholars working in the field of Pacific research to the historical documents of the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific, 1955–1956.
