Culture : Trouble in the South Pacific : Trying to save their culture, Easter Island’s people demand control of their lives.

The huge altar and its towering stone statues have been meticulously reassembled and now stand silhouetted against a seascape of craggy cliffs and crashing waves, a sight unseen for centuries. With their backs to the South Pacific, the monolithic icons evoke the forsaken gods of a culture that was devastated long ago and remains shrouded in tantalizing mystery. But the people of isolated Easter Island are focused on the present as much as the past.

They call their island Rapa Nui and are demanding increased control over its affairs. Ultimately, they want dominion over the land that was lost by their Polynesian ancestors and annexed by faraway Chile, 2,300 miles of unbroken sea to the east on the South American mainland.

Easter Islanders also fear losing what remains of their culture, including their language, as increased tourism and other contacts with the mainland flood the island with foreign influences. For many, restoring their ancestral monuments goes hand in hand with reclaiming land rights and cultural identity.

Restoration of Tongariki ahu , the greatest monument of prehistoric Polynesian culture, is nearly complete. Thirteen of the massive statues, or moais , have been resurrected on the huge stone altar, the ahu . The last two will be raised by the end of the year. They stand as tall as 27 feet, with elongated heads and shortened torsos, long ears, prominent noses and pursed lips. The work at Tongariki is a landmark in efforts to study and preserve the remains of the civilization that flourished here in a past era of glory, then collapsed in violent upheaval, a milestone in the island’s tumultuous history.

In terms of distance, Easter Islanders are the most isolated people on Earth. Their nearest neighbors are on Pitcairn Island, 1,200 miles to the northwest. The isolation was complete until Easter Sunday, 1722, when three Dutch ships under the command of Capt. Jakob Roggeveen arrived at Rapa Nui, putting it on the map with a Christian name.

Before 1965, there were no airline flights, and supply ships came only once or twice a year. Now LAN-Chile flies in twice a week from Santiago, and twice more on return flights from Tahiti. Tourism has become the island’s bread and butter.

Last year, more than 7,000 visitors arrived, a presence overwhelming the nearly 3,000 islanders. In 1862, the population was estimated at 6,000 but contact with the mainland, including disastrous slave raids from Peru and imported diseases, cut the count to an almost unsustainable 111 in 1877. Eleven years later, Chile took possession of the island.

Through a series of irregular land deals and rental contracts, a private sheep ranch occupied nearly all of the island’s 40,000 acres from 1895 to 1953, when the Chilean navy took over administration. In 1965, the Chileans gave the islanders a civilian administration similar to mainland provinces and development began.

Small hotels and inns, tourist agencies, restaurants and curio shops have proliferated in Hanga Roa, the only town. Mainland business people and television have arrived, adding to outside influences. What is left of the traditional Polynesian culture is fading rapidly.

Subsistence agriculture has declined as food imports increase. Social problems, especially alcoholism, have grown serious.

According to a 1992 study, only 5% of Easter Island’s schoolchildren spoke the Rapa Nui language, down from 70% in 1977.

“The language is heading for extinction,” said Lilian Gonzalez, an anthropologist with the University of Chile’s Institute of Easter Island Studies. If the language dies out, she added, “one of the strongest indicators of cultural identity would be lost.”

This year, concerns have focused on a power struggle between two rival groups that claim leadership of the Council of Elders, a community organization based on traditional Rapa Nui social structure. At issue is how the islanders should regain control of government lands and, more broadly, what interests should prevail in the island’s development.

Since the 1970s, the president of the Council of Elders had been Alberto Hotus, who also is the current mayor of Hanga Roa. Hotus and his supporters back a Chilean government plan, established under a newly enacted Indigenous Peoples Law, to distribute surplus government lands to the native people. The plan also would give them a greater say in the administration of remaining government lands, including a 16,000-acre cattle ranch and a 16,000-acre national park.

In January, a group led by owners of tourist businesses challenged Hotus’ leadership of the Council of Elders. The new group elected a new council, but Hotus and his followers have refused to step down. The challengers reject the plan to share responsibility for government lands under the Indigenous Peoples Act. Instead, they say the lands should be directly ceded to Easter Islanders for administration in coordination with the national government.

In June, the challengers began what they call a “strike,” which has consisted of periodic motorcades through Hanga Roa and rallies in a tent on the grounds of the town’s Roman Catholic church. Benito Rapahango, a spokesman for the demonstrators and owner of a tourist agency, says they are pressing for private property rights. Rapahango said the group would accept community ownership of the cattle ranch, with leases or concessions to private users, but neither it nor other land should remain under government control.

“We want dominion over that land and over the park,” he insisted.

Hotus, the longtime president of the Council of Elders, prefers to work with the government for gradual empowerment of the island community while reinforcing traditional culture. “There is a sensitivity in the government for Easterites to take on more responsibility,” he said.

He said the rival group represents private business interests, including those of people who want to buy and sell land. That, he said, would result in further concentration of wealth in a few hands.

An anthropologist who studies Easter Island said concentration of holdings is already taking place, threatening the tradition of social equality. “I think that in the next generation, the problem of social classes is coming,” said the anthropologist, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

It was probably the quest for land that brought Polynesians eastward across the Pacific to Easter Island sometime after AD 500. How they found this speck in the vast emptiness of the Pacific is not known, but they may have been helped by the flight patterns of fishing birds that nested here.

In the 1950s, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed westward from Peru in a reed raft called the Kon-Tiki, trying to prove that South Americans may have settled the island. But recent archeological studies have produced more convincing evidence that the island’s early inhabitants were all of Polynesian origin.

They are believed to have used typical Polynesian slash-and-burn agricultural techniques, razing more and more of Rapa Nui’s natural woodlands as the population grew and prospered. Recent research shows that by about 1500, there was little or no timber available.

The population expanded to a high point of 10,000 or more, archeologists say. But producing food from depleted soils apparently became difficult, and with little wood left for canoes, fishing was also limited.

Meanwhile, the culture identified with the great stone statues began. According to speculations of archeologists, rival clans or tribes quarried volcanic rock from the Rano Raraku crater on the east side of the island, building moais to adorn their altars.

The cult of the moai occupied increasingly large labor forces to carve stone, move statues and build grandiose monuments around the island. Rivalry among tribes intensified. According to widely accepted theories, a major motivation was the concept of mana --a mystical combination of power, prestige and prosperity. In a belief system that included ancestor worship, moais representing a clan’s most revered forebears were believed to bestow mana on living leaders.

Because mana was transmitted from ancestors through moais , the tribes competed to build bigger and bigger statues and altars, said archeologist Claudio Cristino, who heads the Tongariki restoration project. Making more moais became a compulsion, he said: “At a given moment, the whole society was dedicated to this.”

But the competition drained energy from the tasks of producing food, and Cristino speculates that, meanwhile, clashes between tribes resulted in the destruction of crops and deliberate burning of what little woodland remained on the island.

Conflict and upheaval climaxed in the 1600s. Archeological studies and oral traditions, recorded by later European visitors, have yielded strong evidence of bloody battles and massacres, cannibalism, mass destruction and anarchy.

All but a few of the moais , which stood on hundreds of ahus , were toppled and broken in the turmoil. Often, the statues were deliberately decapitated and otherwise damaged. The great statues could have been toppled as warring tribes sought to destroy each others’ mana , but Cristino has another explanation.

As the established order deteriorated and warfare spread, he suggests, warriors may have wrested power from the traditional chieftains, leaving them only symbolic influence. The breakup of the old order could have led to an overall loss of faith, even a popular revolt, according to Cristino. The tribes that had raised the moais may have torn them down in rebellion against a social and religious structure that no longer seemed to work.

“What you had here was a religious revolution,” Cristino said.

As the moai cult faded, Easter Island turned to a “bird man” cult in which athletes competed to bring back the first egg of the nesting season from sooty terns on a nearby islet. The competitors raced out to the islet and back using reed floats. The tribes whose designated athlete brought back the first egg ruled the island for the next year, according to the tradition, which survived into the 19th Century.

Because the archeological record is sketchy, and because oral traditions are often distorted or even reinvented, exactly how the old Rapa Nui culture was destroyed remains a puzzle with most of the pieces yet to be found.

“That is the great fascination in Easter Island,” said Cristino. “In that sense, it’s all yet to be done.”

Although Tongariki’s moais were toppled in the chaotic end of that era, most of the damage to altars, the ahu , came later. Cristino said cut stones from the altar were removed in the late 19th Century to make fences for the sheep ranch that had taken over the island. In 1960, a tsunami swept over the site, scattering moais and ahu stonework over an area of eight acres.

“The energy of a tsunami is an atomic bomb,” Cristino said.

Cristino’s crew has spent nearly two years studying the site, picking up pieces and replacing them exactly where they belonged, as calculated from computer studies of old photographs. The Tongariki ahu’s main platform is 325 feet long, and extending wing walls add nearly 400 feet to the total length.

Before any of the statues were moved, they were treated with chemicals to harden the porous volcanic rock. The first of the 15 moais was craned into its upright position about a year ago. The Japanese company Tadano donated the $700,000 crane. The cost of the entire project will be about $2 million, Cristino said.

The smallest moai erected at Tongariki, about 35 tons, was as big as the largest moai previously restored to an upright position elsewhere on the island, Cristino said. Tongariki’s biggest statue is about 27 feet tall and weighs a total of 88 tons. Because its 27-ton head had been broken off long ago, its torso was set upright first, and then its head was replaced with more than 80 tons of special cement.

How did the Rapa Nui people set the statues upright without power equipment? Cristino has studied the problem and come up with what he says are answers to one of the great mysteries of Easter Island. Using manpower and leverage, he said, the people lifted a statue inches at a time, piling in volcanic stones underneath, lifting some more, until the figure stood at an 80-degree angle supported by a hill of stones. Then they wedged pieces of rock under its base until it stood upright.

On a recent rainy afternoon, Cristino watched as his restoration crew prepared to put one of Tongariki’s biggest statues, moai No. 14, back in place. Workers carefully fitted the huge stone statue with a harness, then hooked it to a cable from a powerful hydraulic crane. The crane lifted, let down, lifted again, but never brought the statue’s full weight of more than 60 tons off the ground.

A computerized mechanism in the crane had malfunctioned and needed cleaning or repair. Later, Cristino suspended the erection of moais No. 14 and No. 15. The project was running out of money, and Easter Island’s rainiest season was coming on. Better to wait for dry weather and new funds before finishing up, Cristino said.

But by sometime in October, he promised, the remaining two maois would be in place, and the broken-off heads of six statues would be cemented on. With other finishing touches, Tongariki ahu would once again be the pride of Rapa Nui.

Ninety percent of the workers who have helped restore Tongariki are descendants of the earlier natives who carved more than 900 moais and built more than 300 ahus on the island. Cristino said today’s islanders are taking great pride in restoring their ancestors’ masterpiece.

“The people say, ‘Our project, our ahu ,’ ” he said. “This gives a new dimension to the concept of cultural identity, and the people are very proud of it.”

MAJOR EVENTS ON EASTER ISLAND

* After AD 500: Polynesian settlers arrive on the island.

* 1722: On Easter Sunday, Dutch Adm. Jakob Roggeveen arrives at Rapa Nui, bestowing a Christian name on the island.

* 1862: Peruvian slave raids take place, reducing the island’s native population by one-third.

* 1863: The Peruvian government puts an end to slave raids.

* 1864: French Catholic missionaries arrive on Easter Island.

* 1888: Easter Island is annexed by Chile.

* 1895: As a result of land deals and rental contracts, a private sheep ranch occupies nearly all of the island’s 40,000 acres.

* 1935: Easter Island is declared a national park and historic monument by the Chilean government.

* 1953: The Chilean Navy takes over the administration of Easter Island.

* Mid-1950s: Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sails across the Pacific seeking to prove that South Americans may have settled on Easter Island.

* 1965: Chilean government gives Easter Island an administration similar to mainland provinces. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition. Compiled by Times researcher LAURA GALLOWAY