File talk:Easter Island map-en.svg

Error in key?

I think there's an error in this map's key: The symbols for Ahu and Moai are transposed. Signalhead (talk) 18:48, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

No, it's correct. Thinking afterwards, with your post, you're right that I didn't choose best iconography for them. It's because this one is a new version and in the former one I only represented the ahus for which I made a moai icon. For this version I also had access (but later) to the position of isolated moais so I choose a smaller sign. I understand now it can be confusing. Sting (talk) 20:56, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. Apart from the symbols being slightly confusing, the other thing that made me wonder is that the printed map that I have seems to show ahus roughly where you've shown moai, and vice versa. Does your ahu symbol represent only those that have moai upon them? Signalhead (talk) 23:02, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm not a specialist of Easter Island so I can only tell you that the ahus are ceremonial platforms. I imagine that most (all ?) of them have (or had ?) several moais upon them, but I'm not sure about that. When, on the map, I indicate “moai”, it means that these are isolated moais and that those places weren't ceremonial platforms: manufacture place of the sculpture, moai on its way to an ahu, and so on. This, of course, if the sources I used are reliable (which I believe).

For your printing problem, maybe you tried to print the map directly from your navigator. This means that the map was rendered as a PNG raster image by the MediaWiki engine which doesn't make a good job in my opinion. To avoid rendering problems, I would advise you to open the map in a vector editor like the free Inkscape I used for creating it.

Greetings. Sting (talk) 15:27, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

My understanding was that there are several ahus on the island that do not have moai on them, and possibly never did. Sorry, there has been a slight misunderstanding about the "printed map" I referred to above. I was actually talking about a completely different paper map of the island, which I recently bought (I will be visiting the island later this month). Signalhead (talk) 19:07, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

You know probably more about the island than I do and so, are probably right about the ahus. Ups! My bad for the misunderstanding. Would be great if you had a GPS and could confirm the position, type and names of them over there! I'd like to have this kind of data to confirm/correct my map here. Have a nice trip! Sting (talk) 20:10, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Most of what I know about Easter Island I've learned only in the last week or so... I'm certainly no expert. I'll only spend one full day on the island, and I'm not sure how much of it I can cover in that time. I have no GPS unfortunately. Have you looked at Google Earth? It seems to cover the whole island in pretty good detail and there are loads of linked photographs of specific places. Cheers! Signalhead (talk) 21:29, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, I've been and seen the island for myself now. One fact of particular relevance that I learned from my tour guide is that only about a third of the ahus ever had moai upon them. The ones without moai roughly correspond in number and location to the small square symbols on your map. There are indeed some isolated moai that were never intended to sit upon an ahu. Excluding the 200 or so that are still at the Rano Raraku quarry, they are few in number, far fewer than the square symbols that appear on the map. Signalhead (talk) 21:35, 3 April 2009 (UTC)