Mystery of Easter Island: the Story of an Expedition

Katherine Routledge's account of her groundbreaking 1913-1914 expedition to Easter Island reads less like a dry archaeological report and more like a dispatch from the edge of the known world. As the first woman to receive an archaeology degree from Oxford, Routledge brought both rigorous scientific method and an appreciation for the profound strangeness of the place. She and her team catalogued the giant moai, examined the stone platforms, attempted to decipher the mysterious rongo-rongo script, and interviewed the last survivors who could recall the old ways. The book captures a pivotal moment: before tourism, before Hollywood, when Easter Island still felt genuinely unreachable, its massive stone faces staring out at the Pacific with answers that refused to come. Routledge did not solve the island's mysteries - some critics argued she made them more complex - but she established the foundation for all future study. The book remains essential not for its conclusions but for its questions, and for the vivid sense of standing on that remote volcanic triangle, surrounded by statues that have watched the ocean for centuries.