Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island (Lisa Drew Books) - Hardcover

Van Tilburg, Jo Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074324480X ISBN 13: 9780743244800

Publisher: Scribner, 2003

Synopsis

Katherine Routledge is a central figure in the history of Easter Island, one of the world's most remote and mysterious locales. Born to a wealthy and prestigious English Quaker family in 1866, Katherine rebelled against Victorian values, becoming one of the first female graduates of Oxford University and the first woman archaeologist to work in Polynesia. From 1913 to 1915, Katherine and her husband, Australian adventurer William Scoresby Routledge, led the Mana Expedition to Easter Island, where Katherine conducted the first ever excavations of the island's world-famous stone statues. Katherine collected vast quantities of new information, and through interviews with dozens of elderly men and women, she was able to save the history of the island, whose population was struggling back from the brink of extinction. Without Katherine's extraordinary efforts, Easter Island's traditional beliefs and customs would have been forever lost. Many of Katherine's papers were thought to be lost until they were discovered by Jo Anne Van Tilburg, the contemporary world's leading authority on the Easter Island statues. In this compelling biography, Dr. Van Tilburg brings her unique expertise to Katherine Routledge's discoveries and to her turbulent life. The result is an exciting personal story, set against the drama of Katherine's remarkable exploration of one of the most intriguing archaeological sites in the world.

About this title

About the Author:

Jo Anne Van Tilburg, PhD, is an archaeologist with two decades of experience on Easter Island, where she directs the comprehensive and definitive Easter Island Statue Project. Currently a research associate of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, she is also director of the UCLA Rock Art Archive. She is a national lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America and a lecturer for the British Museum Traveller. She lives in Malibu, California.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Englishwoman Katherine Pease Routledge, born in 1866, wanted a life of discovery, not domesticity. Extremely intelligent, curious, diligent, and fearless, she attended Oxford, where women students were barely tolerated, and majored in anthropology. Already hearing voices, the first intimation of the paranoid schizophrenia that would eventually hijack her life, Katherine was at her best while doing fieldwork, first in Africa and then on Easter Island, which became her much loved spiritual home. The story of how Katherine-- forthright, independently wealthy, intrepid, and ambitious--married the scientifically inclined, nomadic, and irascible William Scoresby Routledge and then organized a complicated, contentious, dangerous, and unprecedented expedition to splendidly isolated and enigmatic Easter Island is extraordinary on all fronts. And Van Tilburg, herself an Easter Island expert who has worked with the great-grandson of Juan Tepano, the islander who helped Katherine discern aspects of his culture no outsider ever considered before, tells the extraordinary story of an extraordinary woman extraordinarily well. Animated in her descriptions, sensitive in her insights, and agile in her scientific and cultural knowledge, she brings to life a brilliant and courageous "natural-born ethnographer" whose arduous and groundbreaking fieldwork ascertained the origins of Easter Island's astonishing giant stone statues as well as their surprisingly relevant social and ecological significance. Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 074324480X
• ISBN 13: 9780743244800
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368