The Easter Island Statues

The Easter Island Statues

The Easter Island is one of the most isolated pieces of land in the world. This volcanic island in the South Pacific has its nearest neighbors, Chile and Tahiti, 2000 miles away. If you are from North America, you have to take an airplane, another aircraft, and a boat to see the famous Easter Island statues.

Natives of the island call their home Te Pito O Te Henua or Navel of the World. The Dutch explorer, Admiral Roggeveen, discovered the island in 1722 during Easter and thus named it Easter Island. Today, Rapa Nui is a collective term to define the island, its inhabitants, and their language.

Discovering the Island

The Easter Island sculptures are the center of attention when one visits the island. The best way to discover them among other interesting things is by hiking or a short taxi ride.

The Easter Island is also known for the beautiful stone statues call “moai” which is made of volcanic rock. There are nearly 1,000 stone statues within Easter Island and the purpose of the statues is a mystery and perhaps it represents the gods or the early ancestors. The biggest moai is says to be 10 meters tall and weight around 75 tons.

For 50 years, archaeologists assumed that the 800-year-old road network on Easter Island was used to transport the mysterious moai. But new fieldwork from UK researchers shows that the roads were mostly ceremonial. How did those blockheads get there?

In 1958, Thor Heyerdahl of Kon-Tiki fame posited that the roads on Easter Island were used for transportation, and that knocked-over statues next to the road were abandoned by their ancient Polynesian builders. Researchers from University College London and The University of Manchester have however discovered stone platforms that correspond with the fallen statues. 

Stone Statues (Moai)

Did the inhabitants of the island do that or did space aliens leave the statues as a marker?

Easter Island is more well known as Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua, meaning ‘The Navel of the World’ and as Mata-Ki-Te-Rani, meaning ‘Eyes Looking at Heaven’. These ancient names and a host of mythological details point to the possibility that the remote island may once have been both a geodetic marker and the site of an astronomical observatory of a long forgotten civilization.

Some scientists suggest that Easter Island inhabitants, the Rapanui, came from Polynesia. But similarities to Indian stone statues around Lake Titicaca in South America are striking. Is this accidental or not? Scholars are unable to definitively explain the function and use of the moai statues. Some of them suggest that the statues were symbols of authority and power, both religious and political.

One of the biggest riddles about Easter Island is how the statues 'traveled'from the quarry to their platforms or ahus, sometimes as far as 20 or 25 kilometres away? Rapa Nui legend has it that the moai "walked from the quarry". But less than one third of all carved moai actually made it to a final ceremonial ahus site. Was this due to the inherent difficulties in transporting them? Were the ones that remain in the quarry deemed culturally unworthy of transport? Or had the islanders run out of the resources necessary to complete the Herculean task of carving and moving the moai?

This massive production of megalithic works on an island that is absolutely barren, with just grass, immediately captures our imagination. How did it all happen? Who built these statues? And why did they build them?