How Do We Arbitrate Social Contracts?

I haven't been writing much in my blog this Month.  Since I returned from Easter Island I have been very busy working on the report of my research as well as working on the graduate school application process.  Additionally, there just hasn't been news stories about which I felt I had anything of value to add.  Then I saw a very scary picture yesterday.

Hundreds of NYPD officers turned their backs on mayor de Blasio

The picture that I found scary was one of hundreds of police turning their backs on their mayor.  This image scares me for many reasons.  I will list some of those reasons.

The most basic reason that the picture scares me is that it suggests that the NYPD equates criticism with the assassination of police.  De Blasio joined in criticism of the NYPD when people were protesting the death of a man who was choked to death for selling cigarettes.  Then a lone gunman killed two officers in apparent retaliation.  This image of the police turning their backs on the mayor suggests to me that the NYPD considers any criticism tantamount to endorsing the murder of police officers.

The next reason that this picture scares me is that the image suggests a rift between civilian leadership and police forces.  As those who read my blog are aware, I fear the growing militarization of out nation's police forces.  Civilian control of the US military is a fundamental issue protecting our country against military dictatorship.  Military officers are supposed to remain apolitical and respect civilian leadership because that helps defend our democratic system.  Civilian control of the military also helps to maintain the idea of the military existing to defend the people of the USA, rather than the people existing to support the military.  Military personnel swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution.

Over the past several decades US police forces have increasingly become domestic military forces that owe no allegiance to the US Constitution.  With this image it appears that the NYPD owes no allegiance to the civilian leadership of the city of New York.  The question of who the NYPD serves brings me to the biggest reason that this image scares me.

The image of the NYPD turning their backs on the elected executive of the polity they ostensibly serve causes me to fear that the social contract between the police and the citizenry is broken from both ends.  The protests across our country over the past few months have shown that there were many US citizens, especially people of color, who felt that the social contract between the police and themselves was broken.  Of course most of these protests focused on the police as the source of rupture of trust.  Police supporters essentially responded that the failure was on the part of populations that failed to conform to acceptable social norms (obey the law, don't resist arrest, and you won't have trouble with the police).

While most of my writing on the police in recent months has been critical, my personal biases tend to lie more in line with the police supporters.  I see the police as the good guys (with rare exceptions).  I've known and worked with many police officers.  And I suspect that social groups that are pounded with the message from birth that the police are liable to kill and/or victimize them are going to have a hard time trusting the police and behaving in a truly respectful manner.  If you are convinced that a group of people is out to kill you then fear only motivates you to stay in line until you feel that your time may have come.  People who think the police are out to get them can't truly respect the police on a fundamental level.  So I have tended to view instances of potentially excessive force as driven more by a failure of trust than of actual racism or ill will on the part of the police.

When two police officers were assassinated in New York City the possibility of a severely broken social contract seemed very possible.  It was a lone gunman, but coming against a backdrop of nationwide protests and cries of police racism, it seemed like an increasing number of people were seeing the police as the enemy.  Speaking purely subjectively and anecdotally, in my social circles it has seemed in recent years that almost all discussion of the police has been in terms of opposition.  Of course opposition to, and distrust of, law enforcement has a long history in this country.  During the early years of our nation's history there was no provision for formal police forces.

The process of revolting against British authority had so poisoned the culture in the US against law enforcement that professional law enforcement agencies were scarce across much of the country until very late.  The first municipal law enforcement agency in the US was formed in Boston in 1838, more than a half a century after the Revolutionary War ended, and it wasn't until the 1880's that police forces were ubiquitous even in major cities.  If you want more information on the history of police in the US (including things like the evolution of police in Southern states from the Slave Patrols) then I suggest reading more here.  Suffice to say, in the US, law enforcement was more likely to be conducted by vigilantes or private forces until almost the twentieth century.  But as the US grew, the need for order became increasingly pronounced, but the US has never truly found peace with its peace forces.

Over the past hundred years or so we have become, as a nation, more accepting of the need for law and order; but that acceptance has never truly been unambiguous.  One can contrast the US's history with law enforcement with our neighbors to the north, Canada.  Canada did not have a Wild West the way that the US did.  Canada had organized law enforcement in the form of Mounties.  The US had self appointed "lawmen" who got into shootouts with people they didn't like.  Hark A Vagrant has a very fun comic relating to these historical differences.

I'm sure that the punishments were more severe than sitting in a corner in real life, but the relationship to officers of the law was radically different in Canada and I believe still affects Canadian cultural on a very basic level to this day.

The differences between Canadian attitudes toward the police and US attitudes continues to be pronounced.  When I was living in Canada in 2005 the Mayerthorpe Tragedy occurred.  Four Mounties were killed in the line of duty.  It was a national tragedy.  In Ottawa, where I lived, thousands of miles from where the tragedy occurred, flags were lowered to half-mast.  It was the worst single day loss of life for the RCMP in modern Canadian history.  Even the name "Mayerthorpe Tragedy" speaks to the radically different attitude toward the Mounties.  Mounties are federal police, would the death of four FBI officers be a cause for national mourning?  Mounties are seen as heroes, US policemen are all too often viewed as violent predators.

I don't believe that the difference in the way people in the US and Canada view their law enforcement is because Canadian police are all angels and US police are all devils.  I believe the difference is because the US never truly established a national trust with the forces of law and order, and the uneasy trust that grew over the first half of the twentieth century (especially after the end of Prohibition) has eroded dangerously since the Vietnam war.

Now in a time when police are more militarized than ever, and anti-cop sentiment is a seething current in our country, some people are seeking to wage war on the police.  Two days ago, at the memorial for the two officers killed in New York last week, hundreds of police officers turned their backs to the mayor.  With this gesture the police communicated that they also saw the public, and those who would criticize them, as the enemy.  The NYPD seemed to tell the world that the feeling was mutual.

We cannot repair the relationship with law enforcement if the police see the public they are supposed to serve as the enemy.  But the social contract goes both ways.  We cannot repair the relationship with law enforcement if the public views their protectors as the enemy.  It seems that the social contract between the public and the police has been horribly ruptured, at least in New York, and it is not clear how to repair that trust.

The severity of the fracture of trust is further underscored by another image, also apparently from the memorial two days ago.

But it appears that one officer did not turn his back

And this image might be even scarier.  In a sea of white faces turned away from the mayor, a black officer did not turn his back.  This image seems to simultaneously magnify the severity of the breach of trust represented by the NYPD turning their backs, and to further confirm the perception of the issues as one of race.  The narrative of racism feels like it is acting as a runaway train eradicating any hope of constructive discussion.

Yesterday a story came up on my Facebook feed of a black plainclothes NYPD officer being shot and killed by other NYPD plainclothes officers.  It is a real story, and true, and reported by the New York times, but it is not current.  The story is five years old, and as tragic now as it was a half decade ago.  But such is the power of social media's ability to engage in News Necromancy, that when people get upset about an issue, all the previous stories that confirm a bias can be revivified and made new.

Even the image of the black officer not turning his back has traveled via social media.  I have not been able to find the source of the image.  I don't even know if it is real or if it was taken at the memorial.  But this unattributed image is moving through social media, and while it is a troubling image, it underscores the difficulty facing us if we want to repair our society.

Emotions are running high.  Social media creates an environment where every tragedy gets rolled into every tragedy and it is impossible to parse what is going on.  While emotions run high it is nearly impossible to even try to discuss issues like use of force and institutional racism.  Everyone just yells past everyone else, unhinged individuals assassinate police, and the police set themselves in opposition to civil society.

It is a scary situation.

It is a situation that must be repaired.

But I don't know how to repair this situation.  When a social contract is broken, how can it be arbitrated?  If a contractor breaks a contract they can be sued.  Who can we sue when the public and the police are both in breach of contract with each other?

We need police.  And far more than the individuals in uniform, we need trust in the police.  There will never be enough police to keep everyone in line.  Our society works because we believe in it.  We trust that our system should work.  Laws are obeyed because people agree they should be obeyed.  Even our money only has value because we agree it has value (US currency is fiat money and is intrinsically worthless).  Our entire interconnected world functions because of trust.  That trust is built on order, and in an urban society the municipal police are a fundamental cornerstone of that order.

We cannot, as a society, simply accept the failure of trust in the police.  Nor can we simply blame the collapse of trust on the police.  Police officers daily risk their lives to maintain order, but in order for the police to be able to keep the peace they require the trust of the public.  We all of us, each and every one, bear a share of the burden of keeping our society functioning.

The most concrete suggestion I can offer toward repairing the ruptures in our society is to engage in actual conversation.  Do not demonize police.  Do not demonize minorities.  Do not demonize conservatives.  Do not demonize liberals.  We need to try to find points of agreement and build from there.  If we want a functioning society we have to agree on what constitutes functioning.  If we want police that protect us we need to agree that we want police to exist.

Maybe the first step could be agreeing that we want police to protect us.

Fantoni HB 02 Review: First Impressions

I just bought a new knife, a Fantoni HB 02.  Since these sorts of knives always seemed to be photographed with guns I pulled out my Great-great-grandfather's rifle for some of these photos.

This knife is the most expensive knife I have ever purchased, coming in north of $200, but my first impression when I got to hold it was that it is worth the money.

The knife came in a nicely designed box with a foam pad and a card with the details of the knife.  The knife is so light that when I first picked up the shipping box it felt empty.  

When I picked up the knife I was immediately struck by how different it felt from any other pocket knife I've ever owned.  The first thing I noticed (besides the weight) was how intensely grippy the G10 handle scales are.  The titanium frame feels very light, but the knife handle still feels very solid.  The blade blade has zero wiggle.  The lock has no give or wiggle when engaged.  The lock doesn't over or under engage, even when I snap the knife open.

The other thing that I notice is that the detent (the little ball on the liner-lock that engages with the tang of the blade which helps keep the blade from opening accidentally) is really firm on this knife.  So stiff that it's actually a little hard to get the blade open.  The plus side of this is that I really don't think anything is going to make this knife open accidentally.  But I am hopeful that use will make this knife a little easier to open.

The other things that feel potentially problematic on this knife are actually also kind of positives.  The fantastically grippy G10 combined with the very strong pocket clip make this knife a little difficult to get in and out of my pocket.  I'm worried about the amount of wear that this might put on my pants.  I may need to do a little light sanding of the handle scales under the clip.  We will see.

I am looking forward to seeing how this knife performs over the next month or so while I work on my final review for the knife.  I'm not planning on altering anything about the knife until after that.  I am pretty excited about this knife, it is beautiful and feels fantastic.

This knife is full of neat little touches.  If you look closely at the jimping along the handle you can notice that the grooves get deeper the closer they get to the end of the handle.

Speaking of the jimping, the jimping on the thumb ramp is fantastically grippy.  When you place your thumb on the ramp there is zero slipping.

The knife fully opened.  The ink on the pocket clip is actually slightly iridescent.  At some other angles the ink looks very dark, but I didn't like the way any of the photos that showed this turned out.

Another photo that just fits with the normal photo types.  It seems like every review of a knife has this photo.

This photo shows of the centering of the blade.  Right down the middle.

This picture shows some of the other nice subtle touches.  Firstly, the clip is titanium, which is pretty groovy.  You can see the paint on the clip showing up dark in this angle.  The holes in the clip for the screws are beveled so that the screws are countersunk flush.  And one of my favorite subtle touches, the titanium frame is slightly evenly larger than the G10 handle scales.  This provides a little extra grip, but mostly it just indicates that the scales were ground and smoothed separately from the frame, just a nice touch.

Even though this is a fairly small knife, there is enough handle even for someone with fairly large hands like myself.  This isn't the grip that I would normally use obviously, but I just wanted to show how nicely sized the handle was.   But the handle is not so large that one needs large hands for it to be comfortable.

I just love the shape of this blade, and the stonewashed finish on the blade is simply gorgeous.

Kershaw Cryo G10 Review

I have an updated version of this review you can find here.

Kershaw Cryo G10

And here is what the other side looks like when it's closed

I actually wrote most of this review in Easter Island.  I wrote the review to post on Amazon, but I was pretty happy with the review, so I thought I would also post it here on my blog.

I am really debating giving this five stars, but I can't quite do that.  Maybe 4.5 stars.  This knife was not quite exactly what I wanted, but it was as close as I could get for less than $200.  So that makes me pretty happy about the purchase. 

For the price this is an excellent choice.  For the sake of simplicity I will start with the Cons that make this not a 5 star purchase for me.

Cons: 

Too short:

Another quarter inch of blade and handle would make this a much better fit for me.  I have pretty big hands, and this does not fill my hand.

Opening Mechanics:

The assisted open seems unnecessary, it also makes the thumbstuds totally superfluous.  The thumbstuds are a hazard on this knife.  They make it harder to get out of your pocket, tear up the pocket, and if you do try to open the knife with the thumbstuds it is very easy to cut your thumb due to the amount of force needed and the small size of the knife.

Semi-con:

Stiff.  Everything about this knife is stiff out of the box, and use doesn’t change that much.  The assisted open is stiff.  The thumbstuds are too stiff to use.  The frame lock is stout and stiff.  But the blade is stiff when deployed.  The stiffness also seems to translate to a solidity when the knife is deployed.  I would ideally like easier deployment, but this is not a big deal on this knife.

Pros:

Out of the Box Sharpness:

This knife came literally shaving sharp.  I had been working with trees the day it came in the mail and had some pitch in my arm hair, so I decided to see if the knife would shave off the pitch tangled hairs, it did no problem.

Edge retention:

Very good.  I know that 8Cr13Mov is not the most amazing steel, but I have been impressed with its performance on this knife.  I have had this knife for a month and have been using it very heavily and the edge has remained nicely sharp. 

Cutting ability:

I am actually in Easter Island as I write this, and I brought this knife with me since I figured its small size would avoid any legal difficulties for a pocket knife.  I am in a fairly remote location, and the accommodations require we do food prep ourselves, unfortunately all the knives provided were extremely dull, so for the last few weeks I have been using this pocket knife to do all of my cooking on top of regular EDC duty.  This knife has performed far better than I would have expected.  I had already found the knife to be surprisingly good for field duty, I didn’t think it would be any use for the kitchen, but it has performed admirably.  I had not expected to be using this knife so heavily while in Chile, and so I deliberately neglected to bring a whetstone in order to better discuss the edge retention on the review I’ll do on my blog when I get home, so I have been very grateful for how well the edge has stood up to a lot more use than I anticipated.  The edge is not razor sharp any more, but still significantly sharper than any knives available to me here.  It’s still sharp enough to handle tomatoes cleanly without serration, I’d call that usably sharp J

Update:  The edge stayed very sharp until two days before I left Easter Island.  Two days before I left I barbecued.  The cut of meat I barbecued was a big chunk of beef that had a lot of connective tissue and fascia.  I decided to separate the connective tissue.  Trimming the meat off of the connective tissue puts a lot of wear on an edge, so I was not surprised that it really dulled the knife.  The knife was still sharper than anything else in the kitchen afterward, but it had lost the fine edge.  It still cut a tomato, but with a little squishing.  Still for a knife that I bought for less than $40 I think this was tremendous performance and edge retention.

Weight:

Feels nice in the hand, but light in the pocket.  Good for hiking and everyday activities, but with enough heft to feel right for heavier use than its size might indicate.

Lockup:

Solid.  Rock solid.  If you try to use the thumbstuds the lockup can get sticky because it causes the frame lock to engage late, but with the assisted open the lockup is neither too late nor too early.  It’s like Goldi-Locks, just right.

Grip and Jimping:

The G10 scale gives this knife good grippiness.  Sadly the jimping seems to be more decorative than functional.  The jimping on the blade in particular does not stand out sufficiently from the handle and is not sharp enough to provide good grip.  But the blade is short enough that choking up on the blade is not a real issue.  Still, a nice looking satisfyingly grippy handle.

Overall: 

For the price, this is a hell of a knife.  I strongly recommend it.  Great for Every Day Carry.  I only wish it was a little bigger.

One Last Easter Island Mystery

And that mystery is of course, where does the time go?  It has been a pretty amazing trip.  I got to look at a lot of lithic debitage, and meet a lot of interesting people.  I'm looking forward to getting home, but it is sad to leave the island.

But I'm pretty sure I'll be back.

This is the Refugio Arquelogico where I stayed

Jose Miguel, my Chilean counterpart while I was herfe, and Jo Anne Van Tilburg, the Boss.  I am very thankful to Jo Anne for giving me the opportunity to come out her and work

And a beautiful Rapa Nui sunset

Easter Island Mysteries: What happened to the trees?

Anakena, the main beach on the Island.  Quite pretty, there are actually only two small beaches on the island

So what happened to the trees?  This is actually quite the mystery.  No one knows for sure when the last tree died.  No one even knows what trees originally grew on the island.  Were they all palms?  Were there other trees?

The traditional narrative is that the trees were all cut down to make statues.  But even the latest dates for the removal of all the trees on the island (the 1600's is about as late as the guesses get) don't go all the way to the end of the statue making period.  The biggest statues were actually made AFTER the trees were gone.

There is a recent paper that suggests that the trees were all killed by rats.  Most all the archaeologists I've spoken to here don't buy it.  I personally think that a combination of human usage and rat destruction probably accelerated the deforestation, but that only applies to certain palm species.  If there were other kinds of trees then it pretty much has to be human agency that deforested the island.

I heard over dinner the other night that there is potentially some late date wood from a non-palm tree. The stuff is still being studied, but it could actually push the date for deforestation closer to the historic era and indicate other local species besides palms.  The people I've talked to seem convinced that there were multiple species of trees on the island.

So what happened to the trees?  The honest answer is that no one knows for sure, we don't know how many or what kind of trees there were.  It's a mystery.

I jokingly refer to this as my legally mandated photo op

The real mystery, why?  If you look at the side of the mountain you can see little notches and caves, all of those are places where a statue was carved.  Clear up the side of the mountain, and even on top.  The grassy slopes are actually meters deep deposits of stone chips from making the statues.  There are entire statues completely buried under the detritus.  No one knows how many.  Sounds like a job for GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) to me.

I was just proud of this photo of Tongariki I took from Rano Raraku

As an update on my work here, I am enjoying being in the lab.  UNESCO and the Japanese government built a nice fully modern lab at the museum.  I'm doing science and it's fun.  I'm washing and analyzing lots of rocks.  It's pretty fun for me, though maybe not everyone's cup of tea.

More Mysteries!

I was pretty proud of this picture I took of the Moai on Ahu Tongariki

So today I actually learned about a real mystery, but the mystery was really just a different way of looking at things.  Today I got to know my Chilean counterpart here on the island.  His name is Jose Miguel and he has been doing archaeology and working on the island for decades, he is currently a professor at the University of Valparaiso.  He pointed out that in his opinion the greatest mystery of the island is not how the statues were transported or carved, that stuff is pretty easy to explain, it's pretty much just mechanics.  What is really mysterious is why they carved the statues completely on the sides and top of a mountain, and then took the finished statues to their destination instead of moving less fragile blocks of rock into place and carving them there.  It would have been much easier and safer.

After all, Michelangelo didn't carve statues at the quarry, he carved them in a studio, where it is easier and safer.  A lot of Rapanui died in order to carve the statues in place, and then a lot of the finished statues broke during the transportation process.  It doesn't make much sense.  There must have been a very important reason that they would do all of the work on the mountain except for the eyes before they transported the statues.  Then they took the statues to their ahus, and only then carved out the eyes to give the statues Mana, supernatural power.

Here is me next to one of the wings of Ahu Tongariki for scale.  The thing is huge.  The platform the statues are on in the middle of the Ahu is the length of a football field by itself.

Here's my Moai impression in front of "the giant" this Moai was never completed, but is over twenty meters long

The Mysteries of Easter Island (Kind of)

Well, my reading thus far has revealed one true mystery about Easter Island so far, how many statues are there?  In the 40’s the first attempted count said that there were 600.  But then in the 50’s and 60’s Thor Heyerdahl’s expedition found dozens more than recorded just in the area of the quarry where the statues were made.  According to what I have read the current total stands at 887 of the moai (the big giant heads, that also have bodies underneath with long torsos and arms, with short legs).  But some statues are buried, and there is current work being done to catalog all of the statues.  You might think that it would be easy to count massive multi-ton statues that are taller than a man, but you would apparently be wrong.  The truth is that no one knows exactly how many statues were carved.  I think that’s pretty awesome.

In the area of the quarry, Rano Raraku, there are statues buried underneath the debris created by the making of other statues.  The prehistoric (just a reminder, in archaeology “prehistoric” just means before white people showed up, that’s actually all the word ever means, but it can be confusing.  In Europe and the Middle-East “prehistoric” means thousands of years ago, in North America Prehistoric” means 520 years ago, in Easter Island “prehistoric” means less than 300 years ago).  Rapanui were busy indeed.  It takes some work to bury giant statues under the rubble of other statues.  Especially with stone tools.  The Rapanui changed the shape of a mountain with stone tools and created so many giant statues out of solid rock that to this day nobody knows how many they made or how the mountain might have originally appeared.

A lot of the other mysteries boil down to the twin mysteries of smallpox and slavery.  After contact many of the Easter Islanders succumbed to smallpox.  There were also cases of black-birding, which is what the taking of Polynesians as slaves by European ships was called.  There is debate on how much black-birding there actually was on Easter Island, so it is unclear how much the Pacific slave trade affected population numbers.  But if you have ever wondered what happened to the people that built the statues, smallpox happened.  Having one’s population collapse, and then having survivors stolen by slavers is pretty rough on cultural continuity.  A lot of knowledge was lost shortly after first contact and before anyone decided to study the island.  So a lot of the mysteries come from that gap.

It’s a lot like the mystery of the “Lost Mound Builders” of the American Midwest.  The first person to conduct a serious excavation of a mound, Thomas Jefferson, was able to establish right there that the mound had been built by Indians (Thomas Jefferson excavated the mound that was where he decided to build his house).  Plus early explorers actually met with Indians that lived on and built mounds.  But that didn’t matter to people who were intent on finding out what mysterious people built the mounds.  One popular hypothesis was that it was the Lost Tribes of Israel.  It was important to the early American expansion mythology that the Indians have been capable of nothing noteworthy, and it would have been especially nice if they could have discovered that someone with lighter skin had been living in the US first, so that removing the Indians would have been more like reclaiming land stolen by the savages.  You might not have heard of the Lost Mound Builders, but that might be because as it became absolutely incontrovertibly obvious that they were built by Indians for Indians they seemed to become less amazing and mysterious to the general public.

When pondering the mysteries of lost civilizations there are a few things that should be kept in mind.  First, the term “civilization” is itself actually kind of racist.  Civilization refers to sedentary city building farming societies, but even then what societies are called civilizations seems pretty arbitrary.  The Iroquois were city building farmers whose federation of tribes inspired the design of the United States of America, but they usually aren’t usually called a civilization.  In the Americas the term civilization is usually reserved for polities that are no longer around, like the Aztecs, Mayans, Incans, or Anasazi.  But even then the descendants of those cultures are still around, but they aren’t living in their old big structures, so they are “lost.”  In the case of the Anasazi, even the name is an attempt to separate the big ruins from their descendants who are still around and still living in pueblos in some cases.  The correct name these days is Ancestral Pueblo.  So when you hear about “lost civilizations” just bear in mind that the term basically refers to non-modern people who were not of European descent doing something that colonial powers didn’t want to admit could have been done by the natives.  The second thing to remember is that in most cases there are still people around who are related to the people that did whatever inspired the idea of a lost civilization.

In many cases the people that are still around carry on oral histories that tie them to the “lost civilizations” and often provide details of what happened to those societies.  It seems like these days a lot of post-modernist anthropological thought likes to describe traditionally passed down history as “other ways of knowing” which I find absurd and worse in some ways than the traditional colonial approach of just ignoring the natives.  Native knowledge doesn’t require special magical ways of thinking nearly as much as it requires paying attention.  The example I love lately is the recent discovery of a 200 year old shipwreck… right where the local Inuit have been saying it was for the last 200 years.  The Inuit account didn’t conform to the Western account, so it took 200 years for someone to check out whether or not they were right about where the missing ship was. 

Native knowledge is not always hyper precise and completely factual though, any more than regular history is always super precise and factual.  History is basically the narrative structure we give to things that happened in the past.  Stuff happened long ago, history is the story we tell about it to give the past meaning and value to our present.  Oral history is not a different way of knowing, it’s a different way of learning.  Oral history requires shutting up and listening.  It also requires someone to be there to listen in the language that the teller speaks.  For many natives in the US, the history of residential schools squashing traditional languages helped fracture oral histories by getting rid of people who could listen. 

In Easter Island the oral histories were smashed by disease and enslavement.  In Easter Island there was actually even a system of writing, but the shattering of the traditional society cost even the memory of how to read what was written.  Much of the knowledge that would have helped illuminate the stories of the statues and why they were torn down was lost to disease.  The oral historical record for Easter Island is highly fragmentary.  The loss of people to tell and hear stories meant the loss of those stories.  So sadly a lot of the mysteries of Easter Island are actually tragedies.

Here's where I'm staying, the Refugio Archaeoligica

I'm all up in Easter Island n' stuff.  This is me on days of travelling and no sleep

I had to take a photo of the first Ahu with Moai I saw

Sorry if the end of the post seemed a little dark.  I just wanted to point out that the popular narratives of archaeological mysteries are often kind of problematic.  Rest assured I am having fun doing science in a tropical paradise.