Carl Lipo: CSU Long Beach Department of Anthropology

The monumental statues (moai) of Easter Island represent substantial investment in cultural elaboration by the prehistoric islanders. Constructing explanations of these features requires generating measurements of temporal and spatial statue variability. Using a method based in cultural transmission, cladistics and occurrence seriation I present the results of analysis that potentially reflects a phylogeny of the monumental statues. This work enables the evaluation of models of statue change in which diversity of styles and materials produces patterns of lineages and the general form of an explanatory model for the evolution of culture elaboration on this famous island.