If we put all the pieces together the mystery of Easter Island is perhaps not insoluble after all, seen against a background of raftsmen from Peru. The old civilisation has left on this island traces which the tooth of time has not been able to destroy.
Easter Island is the top of an ancient extinct volcano.
This is no remains of a sunken continent, but a tiny desolate island which was as small and solitary when it was the cultural centre of the Pacific as it is now. In the middle of this wedge-shaped island lies the extinct crater of the Easter Island volcano, and down in the crater lies the sculptors' amazing quarry and workshop. It lies there exactly as the old artists and architects left it hundreds of years ago, when they fled in haste to the eastern point of the island, where, according to tradition, the newly-arrived island people struck down every single grown man of them. And the sudden interruption of the artists' work gives a clear cross-section of an ordinary working day in the Easter Island crater. The sculptors' stone axes, hard as flint, lie strewn about their working place, and show that this civilised people was as ignorant of iron as Kon-Tiki's sculptors were when they were driven in flight from Peru, leaving similar gigantic stone statues behind them on the Andes plateau.