Moai Of Easter Island

Every statue you have ever seen from Easter Island is looking the wrong way for a postcard. Walk along the coast of Rapa Nui and the moai on their platforms have their backs to the Pacific. They face inland, toward where the villages stood, toward the descendants of the people they were carved to represent. They were never meant to watch for ships. They were meant to watch over a family. Once you know that, most of the wild theories stop being necessary.

The Hardest Job In The Most Remote Place

Rapa Nui is a triangle of volcanic rock of about 160 square kilometres in the middle of the Pacific. The nearest inhabited island is roughly two thousand kilometres away; the coast of Chile is about three and a half thousand. Polynesian voyagers reached it by canoe. When exactly is still argued about, with estimates ranging from around 800 to around 1200. Over the following centuries, with no metal, no wheel and no draught animals, the people of this island carved close to a thousand monumental statues.

Almost all of them came out of one quarry, the volcanic tuff on the slopes of Rano Raraku. The quarry looks as if the carvers simply walked off one afternoon. Hundreds of unfinished moai lie in the rock at every stage of completion. The largest was never freed from the hillside; it is about twenty-one metres long. The biggest one that was actually raised, known as Paro, stands roughly ten metres tall and weighs somewhere around eighty tonnes.

Carving was the easy part. Moving them across the island was the puzzle, and the islanders' own answer was always the same: the moai walked. In 2012 the archaeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt tied three ropes to a five-tonne replica and, with a small team rocking it from side to side, walked it down a road. The statues' forward lean and bulging bellies, odd when standing still, make sense once you see one waddling upright. The legend was an engineering note.

Eyes, Hats And A Long Fall

The statues stood on stone platforms called ahu, each belonging to a lineage. Some were crowned with a pukao, a cylinder of red scoria from a second quarry at Puna Pau; the largest weigh over ten tonnes, and lifting one onto a head several metres up is its own unsolved problem. And they had eyes. In 1978 an excavation at Anakena beach led by the Rapa Nui archaeologist Sergio Rapu turned up fragments of white coral that fitted together into an eye, with a pupil of red stone. A moai only "opened its eyes" once it stood on its ahu, and that was the moment it became an ancestor rather than a rock.

Then it all came down. When the Dutch captain Jacob Roggeveen sighted the island on Easter Sunday 1722, many statues were still standing. Each later visitor saw fewer upright. By the 1860s not a single moai was left on its platform; they had all been toppled, most of them face down. The islanders call this huri moai, the statue-toppling. The cause is still debated: warfare between clans, a collapse of the belief that the ancestors protected anyone, exhausted resources, or all three at once.

What followed came from outside. In 1862 and 1863, Peruvian slave raiders carried off a large part of the population. Few returned, and those who did brought disease. By 1877 around a hundred Rapa Nui people remained on the island. Most of the knowledge behind the statues, and the ability to read the island's rongorongo script, died with the people who held it. In 1868 the crew of the British ship HMS Topaze removed a moai called Hoa Hakananai'a from a ceremonial village and shipped it to London, where it still stands in the British Museum; Rapa Nui's request for its return remains open. Chile annexed the island in 1888 and for decades leased most of it to a sheep ranch.

The Heads Have Bodies

The famous "Easter Island heads" on the slopes of Rano Raraku are not heads. Centuries of soil washing down the hillside buried them up to the neck. When Jo Anne Van Tilburg's team excavated several in the 2010s, they found full torsos metres deep, with carvings on the backs that nobody alive had seen: belts, bird motifs, designs that may echo tattoos. Roughly two thirds of what you think is a head is underground.

Today

The standing moai you can visit were re-erected in the twentieth century. The fifteen statues at Ahu Tongariki, the largest single row, were scattered by the tsunami from the 1960 Chilean earthquake and raised again in the 1990s with the help of a crane donated from Japan. The island became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995, and since 2017 the national park has been managed by Ma'u Henua, a body formed by the Rapa Nui community.

The threats now are slower and harder to fight than a raiding ship. Tuff is soft stone; wind, salt and rain are wearing the faces smooth year by year. Rising seas bring the coastal platforms closer to the waves. And in October 2022 a fire on Rano Raraku blackened dozens of statues and cracked the surface of some. The statues were toppled once and raised once. A third generation is now trying to keep them upright.