It’s a truism that is actually true: most of us end up working in careers that we never planned. That is certainly the case with archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg who, with her architect husband, Johannes, moved to Malibu 27 years ago. Her recently published book, Among Stone Giants (Scribner, $27), is a fine read about the life and career of Katherine Routledge, a trailblazing woman archeologist. But it is also a homage by the author, today recognized as the world’s foremost authority on the famous statues of Easter Island, who credits much of her fascination with the monoliths to Routledge’s early work.
Although tragically haunted by schizophrenia, Routledge, born in 1866 and among the first woman graduates of Oxford University, was one of the most remarkable women of the Edwardian era. It was she who, starting in 1913, led the first-ever excavations of the now world-famous stone heads on remote Easter Island (known as “Rapa Nui” to the native population, meaning “Land’s End”). At the same time, through interviews with dozens of elderly members of the indigenous population, then threatened with extinction, she was able to save the history, traditional beliefs and customs of the island’s native Polynesians. In doing so, she laid the foundations for every future researcher of the island.
Although Van Tilburg had been fascinated by archaeology since a child, the idea of a career in the field was first piqued in 1972 when she took a trip to view the Chumash Indian pictographs in Camarillo.
“It was a turning point in my life,” the archaeologist, then a teacher at a Whittier Junior High School, says. “You could see in the rock art what people were thinking and feeling. There were birds depicted, and humans with light streaming out of their heads and eyes. It was like being in church.”
Her interest continued to develop when, after earning a master’s degree in educational psychology, she discovered that archaeology was a subject that engaged the learning-disabled adolescent boys whom she was teaching at UCLA’s Fernald School (a psychology clinic).
“That’s how I became involved intellectually in the university’s archaeology program,” she adds. “I didn’t think it would become a full blown passion, but it did.”
Her future was sealed when she accompanied a colleague to Easter Island to study the island’s rock carvings.
“The petroglyphs were interesting,” she says, “but I fell in love with the statues which were strewn all over the island.”
In 1982 she began cataloging the heads, and soon found herself heading a crew searching for and documenting them. (Funded in part by the National Geographic Society, the project has, to date, located 887 heads on the 63-square-mile island.)
In 1986, UCLA awarded her a Ph.D. in archaeology with a specialty in Easter Island studies, and her standing also has been recognized by a fellowship in the Royal Geographic Society; the Directorship of the Rock Art Archives at UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archeology; dozens of speaking engagements every year and a 1998 PBS/NOVA documentary about her theories of how the statues, each weighing many tons, were carved, transported and raised. Proving those theories was the central theme of the television special.
“Before we went to Easter Island, I tested my theories here, using concrete freeway barriers as stand-ins for the heads,” she laughs.
Like many, Van Tilburg dates the present level of interest in the Easter Island monoliths to the media coverage of the famous 1947 trek from Peru to Polynesia by the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl in his balsa wood raft, the Kon-Tiki. The trip, a 101-day, 4,300-mile drift-voyage across open ocean, was Heyerdahl’s effort to prove his theory that ancestors of the Indians of South America could have populated Polynesia. It was successful, spawning a best-selling book translated into 66 languages, a 1951 Best Documentary Oscar for the film Hayerdahl made of his trip and the continuing interest of countless tourists.
“I didn’t go into archaeology with the idea of changing the field,” says Van Tilburg, who visits Easter Island for a month twice a year. “I did it because I was passionately interested in, and wanted to be a part of, an experiment that I believe is remarkable within the human family-the way in which the Rapa Nui people created these statues with such intense commitment. The aesthetics of rock art gets us into the minds of the creators, and that’s where I wanted to be.”
Her interest has caught up her family as well. Her husband was part of the engineering team in the television special, and her daughter, Marieka, attended school on the island. Jo Anne and her husband also took into their family and educated a native Easter Islander named Elena Mazuela Hucke (who graduated from Our Lady of Malibu and Santa Monica High schools). Now 30, she is back on Rapa Nui working as a guide.