Places where rocks become statues, and where they fall into ruin
Between 1904 and 1929, Henry Edmunds and William Bryan photographed archaeological sites on Rapanui.
Looking at the photos of moai, I found my gaze returning not to those famously perfect statues but to the pictures of those fallen or broken or, like the one to the left, still in the quarry, never completed.
I became fascinated with ancient quarries when I did my Master’s work on Inka architecture. Nothing about Inka quarrying was simple or easy, as quarries were often difficult to access and involved bringing sometimes enormous stones over long distances in a rugged landscape of rivers and mountain valleys. Today, one can see the Kachiqata quarry from the ruins of Ollantaytambo and it seems as though huge rocks were simply rolled down the mountain slope, and some of them got stuck. Even if they were rolled, once they got to the bottom of the slope they remained to be transported across a river and up the next mountain slope to the construction site. Some stones, likely dropped during transport and impossible to pick up again, are still readily visible on the landscape. There is even an Inka myth concerning the Tired Stone, north of Saqsaywaman, a massive rock which needed to rest during transport, wept tears of blood, forever remained in that spot, and thereafter was worshiped as a waka or sacred place.
