Stone fish hook with fibre trace.
Stone Fish-Hook, Matau, Rapanui Easter Island, Eastern Polynesia Fish hooks from Rapanui are rare, and this stone hook is of a very uncommon type. Similarities in form can be recognised between this hook and the fish hooks online here from the Cook Islands and New Zealand Maori: this reflects the ultimate origin of the Rapanui people in Central Polynesia. One of the main challenges of life on Easter Island in recent centuries was a lack of raw materials in the environment. In many other cultures, fish hooks are often constructed from wood or shell and weighed down in the sea with a stone sinker so that it hung from its float and remained more-or-less stationary in the water. This Rapanui hook, however, is ingenious in combining hook and sinker into one object. Stone. Late 19th Century. Collected on Easter Island in 1900 by an unidentified crewmember of HMS Blanche; formerly in the collections of the Welsh National Museum, and transferred to the Horniman Museum with other ethnographic specimens in 1981.
