p On the other hand, why necessarily search for submerged land along the shores of Easter Island? Even if the picture of a dramatic breakup of a continent and sinking of the island shores, together with their huge statues and platforms, is a figment of the imagination, this does not mean there may not be other lands around Easter Island that are now at the bottom of the ocean.

p Professor Brown believed that Easter Island was a vast mausoleum, visited by the people of neighbouring islands that have vanished. In an article written in 1949 Professor Nikolai Zubov, an eminent Soviet oceanographer, put forward a hypothesis that Easter Island was once a kind of Mecca for the inhabitants of Oceania, that people from many islands, both those that exist now and those that have vanished, voyaged there to perform religious rites.

p This, said Professor Zubov, is confirmed by the fact that all the statues were made in the same place, of the same material, while all the hats of the statues were also made out of the same kind of stone, but in a different place. Also by the fact that all the statues lining the roads leading to the quarry were set up with their backs to the quarry, in such a way that travellers or processions of people going to the quarry to 43 work saw the faces of the images. Although, said Professor Zubov, the purpose of the statues on the burial platforms and along the roads leading to the quarries could somehow bo explained, there was no explanation for the statues dug into the ground on the outer slope of the crater, to say nothing of those on the inner slope. It would have been impossible to drag the statues out of the crater. Nor was it intended that they should be dragged out. It cannot be accidental, Professor Zubov said, that all the statues stand with their faces turned towards the centre of the crater.

p Professor Zubov considered the fact that all the statues were made according to a single pattern to be even more weighty evidence in support of his theory. There was no question here of any sort of creativity, of any quest for something new. You did not have to be an artist to carve a statue. All you needed was diligence. The relative sizes of the individual features of the images had long been established. Regardless of their si/c, the statues intended for the burial terrace and set up on the horizontal platforms would be stable. So would those intended to be buried in the earth.

p But if we view Easter Island as the Mecca of Oceania, Professor Zubov said in conclusion, a question arises which is more involved than the question of the peopling of the island. Pilgrimages mean regular travel, yet this would hardly be possible if thousands of miles separated Easter Island from the other islands of Oceania. Besides, provisions and other supplies would have to be transported.

p It is quite possible that a large number of islands and archipelagoes, now submerged, 44 facilitated travel between Easter Island and other Oceanian islands.

A quarter of a century after the books of Brown and Menzbir appeared, Professor Zubov again put forward the theory of sunken land in the region of Easter Island. Now an oceanographer had come to the support of the ethnographer and zoogeographer. A true scholar, Professor Zubov admitted that only a thorough investigation of the Pacific bed, an investigation which to this day is incomplete, would bear out or refute the hypothesis.