Henri Lavachery

Henri Alfred Lavachery (6 May 1885 – 1 December 1972) was a Belgian archaeologist and ethnologist. In 1934, he became the first professional archaeologist to visit Easter Island, and was later known for his study of its art. He was curator at the Royal Museums of Art and History during the 1940s, and founded the Society of Americanists in Belgium in 1928. Lavachery was born in Liège in 1885, and received his doctorate in classical philology from the University of Brussels in 1908. Thereafter, he traveled extensively through Europe, participating in various internships, including one at the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, and another in Paris under the direction of Paul Rivet at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro. In 1933, fascinated by the objects created by the Rapa Nui people, Lavachery decided to develop an expedition to Easter Island, with Rivet's support. The expedition took place between 27 July 1934 and 2 January 1935. It was headed by Louis Charles Watelin, a French archaeologist who died during the trip in Tierra del Fuego. Other expedition members included the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux, and a Chilean doctor, Dr. Israel Drapkin, who provided leprosy care for affected indigenous people. The expedition discovered that the island's large stone statues had been made by the ancestors of the current occupants, who were of Polynesian descent, and not by members of a prior civilization who had disappeared. Lavachery noted that the island's petroglyphs were sometimes discovered simultaneously by the trip's explorers and the island dwellers. His later observations of the petroglyphs in 1939 suggested a degree of artistic diversity among the creators. According to Thor Heyerdahl, although Lavachery was the only professional archaeologist to have visited the island prior to Heyerdahl's 1950s voyage, Lavachery had not attempted excavations, as the soil appeared too shallow. In the 1930s, Lavachery also wrote about the art of the central African Kuba Kingdom, describing it as decorative rather than sculptural.