Easter Island or Rapa Nui, as the islanders call it, is an island in the South Pacific. It is 3700km off the coast of the South American continent and is one of the most geographically isolated, inhabited places on earth. The island was formed 3 million years ago when a huge volcanic cone began to rise up from beneath the sea. Numerous eruptions created the island as we know it today, the last ones being 300,000 years ago. Rapa Nui is on a tectonic plate, but without it there wouldn’t be an island. The Rapanui are believed to have settled there between 300 and 1200 CE and they were of Polynesian origin. The Rapanui speak Spanish but originally they spoke the old form of Rapanui, which is an eastern Polynesian language.

Rapa 1The Rapanui erected stone statues or moai in various places around the island, most facing inland. The statues were erected on stone ceremonial platforms called ahu around the coastline. The moai face inland towards the villages as if watching over the people. Over 800 statues were made on the island. Many of them being carved out of a type of rock called volcanic tuff, and they tend to have large heads and elongated features. The eyes were only put in for ceremonies, when the statues were ‘activated’.

Rapa 2

The Rapanui performed rituals from the moment of birth including when the umbilical cord was cut, the first haircut, first tattoo and coming of age. The most important rituals were associated with death. By invoking the help of the ancestors through the statues the Rapanui believed that their forefather’s spirits would come to their aid when needed.

Rapa Nui’s population may have grown to around 15,000 before the Europeans discovered the island in the 1700’s. During the early 19th century Easter Island became a stopping-off point for whaling ships and other vessels. The Rapanui had little resistance to the diseases that the ships’ crews brought with them. Rats were also introduced by Polynesians, however, there was no known disease associated with them in particular.  In 1862 Peruvian ships involved in what were known as ‘blackbirding’ raids, forced captured islanders to work in South America. The few Rapanui who returned brought with them infectious diseases, which killed a large number of the people that stayed on the island. About a thousand islanders had been taken away for slavery, and the remaining population was devastated by smallpox, which all contributed to the decline of the Rapanui. By the 1870s there were only 111 Rapanui still remaining on the island. The island became part of Chile in 1888 and in 2002 it was reported that the population was around 3,304 inhabitants, almost all living in the village of Hanga Roa on the western coast.

Rapa 5

Post by Shaun Bennett

One of the attractions of museums is they preserve and display things from mysterious parts of the planet that are rarely visited. In this series of blogs, I am hoping to delve deeper into some of the mystery and excitement, the stories behind some pretty innocuous looking objects that might otherwise be overlooked. Rocks for example, may appear boring with crystals only slightly better for getting people to stop and look due to their beautiful colours, shapes and sparkle. The frozen aesthetic of crystals, and the apparent blandness of rocks, belies that they are a product of powerful and violent processes deep within the Earth’s crust. This is a constant reminder that what we eat, sleep, go to work on, play on, get bored, destroy, dream and build on is, and always has been, in constant flux.


When the universe began 4.5-4.6 billion years ago, Earth remained a super-hot mass of magma from the initial super-nova, the Big Bang. Oxygen didn’t exist, in fact it was only 500 million years ago that the atmosphere became breathable. Prior to this, the Earth was essentially an inhospitable furnace blasted by a continuous onslaught of meteors. There are no meteors or rocks whatsoever from this time in Earth’s history because they would have been vaporised in the swirling Hadean mass. Meteors were exploded out from the same Big Bang that formed the Earth, and so the ones that have been found since the surface cooled tell us Earth’s age. We will come onto meteors in a subsequent blog. However, I do want to take us to a mighty celestial body in what is a relatively new lunar year. Thea, is the size of Mars and it brushed by us shortly (in planetary terms) after the Earth formed. The energy produced from this glancing blow was enough to dislodge a mass of boiling rock large enough to eventually settle into the Earth’s gravitational field and form our Moon.

Post by Jennie Trueman

MocheThe Moche civilization flourished from about 1 to 700 CE, on the North Peruvian region between the Andes and the Pacific. They farmed beans, cotton, squash, chillies and peanuts. They also reared duck and llamas, which they then used the wool of for clothing.  The Moche people were experts in the extraction of gold, silver and other metals from the environment. The Moche also made some beautiful jewellery using gold and silver; with inlays of turquoise and other semi-precious stones. Another craft that the Moche people were famous for is the pottery.

Moche 2The Moche were skilled ceramists, of which some were very sexually explicit. The ceramic artwork had a variety of subjects, complex scenes from animals, plants and Gods to human figures. Some of the pots were used as water vessels, for ceremonial purposes, maybe to teach about procreation or to be used for burial purposes. The pots in my opinion are quirky, funny, cute and simply beautiful.

The most common sexual position depicted in Moche pottery was anal, both heterosexual and homosexual. This was probably a form of contraception, or when all other positions were forbidden during the agricultural festivals. I find the comical faces portrayed to be humorous; but then again, I can’t imagine why they would have a straight face.

All the pots were functional, with hollow chambers for holding liquid. Museums and private collectors from all over the world have collected these pots, as they are many in numbers.

Nobody really knows the reasons for the end of the Moche. Their civilisation may have perished because of earthquakes, prolonged drought or even flooding. The Moche culture was followed by the Wari people, who lived and ruled for over 500 years. A widely travelled culture, they built vast road networks and strong stone buildings.

Post by Shaun Bennett

Manchester Museum received a VIP guest recently in the shape of Stan’s long-lost American cousin.

No, not our visiting Gorgosaurus but Seattle-based schoolteacher Doug Sacrison, who boasts an interesting connection to Manchester Museum’s resident Tyrannosaurus rex.

Doug is the cousin of Stan Sacrison, the intrepid fossil hunter who first found Stan’s original bones in South Dakota, and also the man who gave Stan his name.

So, it was more or less a family obligation for Doug to call in and say hello to Stan and grab this great photo with him for the Sacrison family album, whilst visiting Manchester on a trip around Europe.


Doug Sacrison

And this isn’t the first time Doug has come face-to-face with the T. Rex – he’s also clocked up two visits to see the cast of Stan in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science, Albuquerque.

So if you’re feeling inspired to take up the Stan Spotting challenge and take a ‘selfie’ with all his complete skeletons, here are just some of the places you’ll need to visit: Black Hills Institute, South Dakota, USA (home of the original Stan); Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Centre, Colorado, USA; Oxford University Museum of Natural History; and, of course, Manchester Museum.

Good luck and happy dino hunting!

And many thanks to Doug, both for paying us a visit as well as sharing this remarkable ‘snap’ from the Sacrison family album.

Haunting images of Manchester Museum’s animal collections took centre stage at a recent art show.

In her display entitled Stereoscopic Adventures, artist Jenna Rouse unveiled a dramatic hanging canvas featuring prints of skeletons from the Bodies cabinet on the Living Worlds gallery.

Final Pieces 1

Jenna Rouse

Also included in Jenna’s selection of final pieces for the group exhibition, called Eks’Vee, was a wraparound print showing monochrome images from the Variety of Life case.


Jenna Rouse

Writing about the project, Jenna notes: “A Stereoscopic Adventure depicts spaces of spectacle and wonder inhabiting the plane beyond between the living and the dead, from which uncanny apparitions appear and take hold.”

Final Pieces 3

Jenna Rouse

She adds: “Using silk and canvas to reconstruct the world acts as a reflection upon the reproducibility of the temporal spaces as fabrications of mechanical reproductions.”

Jenna took the original photographs in the museum back in spring using a 3D camera (See Living Worlds in 3D) and has since transformed them into these impressive artworks inspired by the natural world.

The pieces formed part of a postgraduate degree show by Nottingham Trent University students at the Surface Gallery and Jenna sent some shots of the setting up process so we also get a peek behind the scenes of an exhibition.

Congratulations to Jenna for her great work and thanks very much again for sharing her images.

Set-Up Shot

Jenna Rouse

Sparta’s views on sexuality were mature, they weren’t prudish and they found it liberating. Relationships between Spartan men were closer to what we might consider gay sex. I don’t think it’s fair to say that the Spartans were homosexual, because that classification simply did not exist for them. Did ancient Greeks, and perhaps the Spartans, engage in sex with men? The answer ranges from yes to probably, they did not think simply in terms of straight, bi or gay.

VI think it is anachronistic, to apply the term homosexual to them. As a warlike culture, the Spartans accepted male pairing and segregated the men in to military barracks from quite an early age for long periods of time. It was believed that they would fight stronger and harder for their male connections in that way and would defend each other. However, itg was fully expected that they would be married to women and father children in the future. In Athens, the older man would take a younger male under his wing. In Athenian and Spartan culture it was socially acceptable for older men and young men to be engaged in erotic relationships. This wasn’t in the way we understand homosexuality today though, for example anal sex was purely a heterosexual practice. Men and boys would procreate in different ways. Once the boy reached adulthood, it was fully expected he would leave the older man and get married. If he was wealthy enough, he too would have boys to teach and mentor, which again included sexually.

jThe Spartan girls were  removed at the age of 7, where they were sent to school. They learnt wrestling, gymnastics, how to fight and other demanding training. Spartans believed that strong women produced stronger children. Young women competed at athletic events and may have competed in the nude, as the men did; but other Greeks this to be scandalous behaviour! Once the girls have completed their schooling they would then from the age of 18-gh20 be assigned a husband. The Spartan women got married later than other Greek women, but they produced stronger children, if not as many. On their wedding night the Spartan women would cut their hair short and they were dressed in male clothing. The couple would then secretly return to the husbands all-male camp after curfew. The husbands were only a minor part of Spartan women’s lives, although they both had very close ties with their children.

Shaun Bennett

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Separated at birth?














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