BY WENDY SODERBURG
UCLA Today Staff
When Jo Anne Van Tilburg first visited Easter Island in 1981,
she fell in love.
“I loved the island, I loved the people and, most importantly,
I loved the idea of the giant statues,” she remembered.
“Not just the statues, but the idea of them — that
there were people living on that small island with such a magnitude
of vision that they had risen to such heights.”
Sixty-eight years earlier, in 1913, another
woman had stepped onto Easter Island and felt the same connection
with the stone giants and the Rapa Nui people who built them.
That woman was Katherine Routledge, a pioneering archaeologist
who was one of the first Europeans to give serious attention
to the island’s massive stone monoliths.
Under those circumstances, it wasn’t unusual
that Van Tilburg, a research associate of the Cotsen Institute
of Archaeology at UCLA and director of UCLA’s Rock Art
Archive, would have so much in common with the Victorian woman
who wrote one of the most popular archaeological texts of all
time, “The Mystery of Easter Island.” But according
to Van Tilburg, Routledge never received the credit she deserved
for her archaeological contributions.
After years of research, Van Tilburg explains
what happened to the woman pioneer she so admired in her new
book, “Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge
and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island.” She writes
that Routledge was brilliant, pushy and a bit of an embarrassment
to her prominent English Quaker family. Routledge also suffered
from schizophrenia.
“When it appeared that mental illness
had been a problem, my research slowed down a lot,” Van
Tilburg said. “I was afraid that I would discredit her
research if I found out something too unpleasant about her background.
“But on the positive side, it became clear
to me that while she was on Easter Island, she learned to manage
her illness. So the work she did is valid.”
Van Tilburg herself followed a rather unusual
career path. From 1971 to 1979, she taught junior high school
boys at the Fernald School at UCLA and was constantly looking
for ways to engage them. Archaeology was one such way, and Van
Tilburg enjoyed it so much that she began taking lecture and
field courses in archaeology at UCLA Extension. In 1986, she
went on to earn a Ph.D.
Today, as head of the Easter Island Statue Project,
Van Tilburg makes yearly excursions to the island to conduct
an inventory of all 887 statues. As the author of “Among
Stone Giants,” Van Tilburg will also participate in a
panel on April 26, “Women Writing Science,” at the
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on campus.
“In my humble opinion, the book is worthy
of Routledge’s legacy,” Van Tilburg said. “I
also think it’s a lot of fun to read. It’s got everything.
Sex, lies and field notes.”
