Moai Easter Island

The enigmatic moai have captivated the imaginations of people for over 500 years. They are, of course, the giant facial statues on Easter Island that you probably will only recognize because you saw ‘Night at the Museum’. Almost 900 of these monumental free-standing statues were quarried and carved by indigenous Polynesian people, the Rapa Nui, who first occupied the isolated island 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile, in the Pacific Ocean.

Conflicting archeological theories regard the moai as representations of Rapa Nui ancestors, or manifestations of religious icons, or both. In any case, the moai constitute one of the most interesting artistic cultural developments in the world.

Some moai weigh more than 80 tons and stand up to 33 feet tall, and each statue is estimated to have taken a year or more to create. These monstrous stone carvings were quarried and moved to positions all over the island, most of them being placed on stone platforms in deliberate arrangement. The vast majority face inward, toward the island's occupants, as if to watch over them. Only seven were set in a group overlooking the ocean. Interestingly, these seven are lined up so they directly face sunset on the evening of the spring equinox, which would be the direction from which the Rapa Nui's ancestors would have originally arrived on the island.

One of the more puzzling aspects to their creation and placement is the fact that the Rapa Nui apparently stopped doing this rather abruptly. Tools are scattered and Moai are all around the quarry in various states of completion. Some appear to have been abandoned even as they were ready for transport. Others seem to have been transported only part way to their intended destinations. And even more interestingly, the Rapa Nui went through a period when they actually toppled the statues in an apparent cultural or religious shift.

Varying theories about how the statues were moved include rolling them lying down on logs or moving them by rocking back and forth in a standing position. The latter seems incredible, but evidence exists that this may have been the most likely method. The remnants of regularly spaced holes exist along roadways, and posts may have been inserted in them to facilitate leveraged movement.