Paenga house
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The Paenga House ( Rapanui : hare paenga ) is a house of the classic Easter Island culture, the shape of which is reminiscent of an upturned boat body and which was reserved for the religious and political elite.
Settlement structure of Easter Island
The typical settlement on Easter Island in the classical period - from around 1000 to 1650 - was located near the coast in order to have access to the sea, an important source of food. It included houses, earth ovens ( umu ), enclosed gardens ( manavai ) and chicken houses ( hare moa ). The village also had a ceremonial platform ( ahu ) as a religious and power-political center. Closest to the coast and prestigiously not far from the ceremonial platform, the paenga houses, which were reserved for the families of the nobility and the priesthood, were grouped together. In larger and more important settlements there was also a large meeting house ( hare nui ), which was comparable in construction to the paenga houses. According to contemporary reports, some meeting houses were over 100 meters long. Further to the interior of the island, in the midst of further gardens and fields, the more simply built, mostly rectangular, but also round or oval huts of the simple tribal members followed. In the immediate vicinity were the stone chicken houses ( hare moa ). Chickens were a valuable commodity so that constant monitoring was ensured.
Construction
The word paenga has a double meaning in the language of Easter Island, it denotes both the cut or worked stone, but also means extended family or family group. Hare Paenga means both house for the extended family, which relates to the use, and house made of stone, which relates to the material used in the construction.
The basis of the Paenga House were carefully worked foundation stones made of hard basalt , about the size and shape of our current curbs , which were laid out in the form of an elongated ellipse and dug 30 to 100 cm into the ground. The top of each stone had two or more holes into which thin branches of Toromiro wood were inserted. The wooden poles were pulled together in a dome-shaped framework and tied to a long ridge pole so that an elongated, basket-shaped structure was created.
The roofing was in three layers. The innermost layer of plaited mats made from Totora reeds was tied onto the wooden frame . This was followed by a layer of sugar cane leaves ( toa or rau toa ) and bundles of grass ( mauku ) that were attached to the cross braces served as the outermost layer . It is also possible, but no longer comprehensible today, that originally palm fronds of a honey palm species (of the genus Jubaea ) were used to cover the roof in a scale-like manner. When the palm forests had already been destroyed by overexploitation , one had to look for alternative plant materials.
The entrance to the building was a low tunnel, no wider and no higher than a meter, so that the house could only be entered by crawling. On each side of the entrance tunnel, a small wooden figure was stuck in the ground as protection against evil spirits (Aku Aku).
The semicircular forecourt was paved with rolling pebbles ( poro ) and served as a place to stay for the residents and for all kinds of daily activities, such as food preparation and manual activities. Immediately next to it was the earth furnace ( umu ), a square or hexagonal earth pit lined with basalt stones.
The interior of the house was not divided and, as Roggeveen reports, had no furniture , only a few wooden hooks hanging from the ceiling and calabashes for storing water. Carl Friedrich Behrens, the commander of Roggeveen's marines, also mentions woven sleeping mats and red and white colored blankets made of tapa bark .
Hare-paenga were on average between 10 and 15 meters long and about 1.5 to 2 meters wide. But there were also a few larger houses for residential purposes (up to 40 m in length). Meeting houses were even bigger.
Early European reports and descriptions
There are travel reports from the European explorers of the 18th century that describe the Paenga houses that are still intact and in use:
Georg Forster
“... there were no more than ten to twelve huts to be seen. One of the most stately was built on a little hill and curiosity drove us there, but it was a miserable apartment. Whoever wanted in or out had to crawl on all fours. The interior was bare and bare, and there wasn't even a bunch of straw in it. Our companion told us that they would spend the night in these huts, but that must be a miserable stay, especially since because of the few huts they have to lie one above the other. "
Jean-François de La Pérouse
"... since I almost certainly dare to assert that all the inhabitants of a village or district used to make use of the apartments together. I measured some of these apartments that were not far from the place where we took post. It was 310 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 10 feet high in the center. Its shape resembled an inverted pirogue. It had no more than two doors, these were only two feet high, so that one had to crawl into them on hands and feet, and the whole thing could hold more than two hundred people. It could by no means be dependent on the chief of this people to stay, for there were no equipment in it; nor would such a size have served him anything; Rather, it makes up an entire village, along with two or three other huts not far from it. ... Other [dwellings], on the other hand, are made of rushes, which serve to prove that there are swampy areas in the interior of this island. These rushes are intertwined in a very artificial way so that rain cannot penetrate. The building itself rests on a foundation of cut stones, between which holes have been made here and there at measured distances, and rods have been inserted into them, which are curved in an arc on the upper part, thus forming the rafters. The empty spaces between these poles are filled with mats that are usually woven from rushes. "
James Cook
“Their houses are low, long and narrow, and in many ways have the appearance of a large overturned boat with the keel rounded and bent; the longest of them which I saw was sixty feet in length, eight or nine in height in the central part, and three or four at each end, but their breadth was almost the same everywhere; the door was in the middle of one side, built like a veranda, so low and narrow that it was just possible for a single man to crawl through on all fours. The walls are made of small twigs and the roofs are covered with sugar cane and fig leaves, and extend from the foundations to the roof, so that they have no light except that which the small entrance allows. "
These early reports are interesting insofar as they contain facts that can no longer be backed up by archaeological findings, such as the ephemeral materials for roofing, the use as multi-generational houses for the extended family or the lack of any interior decoration. Since the first European explorers only stayed a few hours on Easter Island, the reports are incomplete, for example they do not allow more precise conclusions to be drawn about the structure of the settlement.
use
Paenga houses were very elaborately built and therefore reserved for the power elite of the tribe, the families of the chiefs and priests. They were used jointly by the entire extended family . As the early reports suggest, the houses were only used for sleeping and not for permanent residence. The whole family was cooked in the nearby earth oven and meals were eaten on the paved forecourt. Otherwise, the entire family life took place on this terrace .
Each settlement comprised only a few Paenga houses, the excavations to date indicate a maximum of half a dozen, even in large villages. The common tribesmen lived in simply built and much smaller huts , which, hidden in the middle of the cultivated areas, were located significantly further from the coast and the ceremonial platform. In this respect it is understandable that the Europeans did not notice them during their short visits or did not find them worth mentioning to a large extent.
House consecration
It is evident that the construction of a house of this importance required special rites. The report by Katherine Routledge gives an indication of this :
“Ngaara [the last chief of the Miru clan, died in Peruvian slavery in the mid-19th century] himself assisted in the inauguration of every important house. The wooden lizards were stuck into the ground on both sides of the entrance, facing the forecourt. The "ariki" [chief, tribal leader and future owner of the house] and an "ivi-atua" [priest of particularly high rank], who walked with him like a "tatane" [ghost, ghost], were the first to enter had their [probably ritual] meal at the house. Only the houses with stone foundations were honored in this way. On a certain month of the year, the ariki was visited by all the people [the clan members] who gave him the pua plant [a ginger plant that is now very rare on Easter Island] on the end of a stick and handed him into his house then removed backwards. "
The wooden lizards mentioned in the report are anthropomorphic figures, a combination of human and lizard. The carved wooden statuettes , as the animal of the same name is called moko , have the head and body of the lizard Ablepharus boutonii from the genus of the adder-eye skinks, which is common on Easter Island . At the same time, however, they also have human attributes such as the backbone, ribs, arms and hands. Often a vulva is notched on the body , on other specimens a circumcised penis . The lizard's tail is unnaturally elongated and ends in a point, which confirms Routledge's description that the figure was stuck in the ground.
According to Thomson's report, consecrated stones were buried under the doorway to protect the house and residents from harm.
Legend
According to legend, the Paenga houses were not very own invention of Easter Island culture, but were, like many other useful achievements ( Rongorongo -Schrift, tapa cloth , Moai u. A.) Of Hotu Matua , the mythical founding father, from the island of Hiva on brought to Easter Island. Among Hotu Matua's followers was a man named Nuku Kehu, the legendary Easter Islander's first master builder.
Individual evidence
- ↑ J.-F. de La Pérouse: Voyage autour du monde sur l'Astrolabe et la Boussole (1785-1788), Paris 1797
- ↑ Description from: PC McCoy: Easter Island Settlement Patterns in the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Periods in Bulletin of Easter Island Committee International Fund for Monuments No. 5, New York 1976, p. 91
- ↑ J. Flenley and P. train: The enigmas of Easter Iceland, Oxford - New York, 2002 (2nd edition), p 94
- ^ Jo Anne van Tilburg: Easter Island - Archeology, Ecology and Culture , London 1994, p. 69
- ↑ J. Roggeveen: Tweejaarige reyze rondom de wereld met drie schepen, Dordrecht 1728 (excerpts from German translation in Friedrich Schulze-Maizier: Die Osterinsel, Leipzig 1926)
- ↑ Carl Friedrich Behrens: The well-attempted southerner trip around the world 1721/22 , reprint Brockhaus-Verlag Leipzig 1923, pp. 67-68
- ^ PC McCoy, p. 50
- ^ Georg Forster: Voyage of discovery to Tahiti and the South Seas 1772-1775. Reprinted by Erdmann-Verlag, Tübingen 1997, Chapter 14.
- ↑ La Perouse'n's voyage of discovery in the years 1785, 1786, 1787 and 1788, translated from the French by JR Forster and EL Sprengel. Berlin 1799, pp. 205-207.
- ↑ James Cook: Discovery Journeys in the Pacific. New edition by Erdmann-Verlag, Tübingen 1971, p. 223.
- ^ Katherine Routledge: The Mystery of Easter Island. London 1919, p. 243.
- ↑ Heide-Margaret Esen-Baur: 1500 years of Easter Island culture - treasures from the land of Hotu Matua, catalog for the exhibition organized by the German-Ibero-American Society Frankfurt a. M. from April 5 to September 3, 1989, Mainz am Rhein 1989, p. 201
- ↑ William Thomson: Te pito te Henua, or Easter Iceland (Report of the National Museum 1888-89), Washington 1891, p 470
- ^ Sebastian Englert : Island at the center of the world - New light on Easter Island, New York 1970, p. 49