Easter Island

Easter Island  is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. It is famous for its 887 monumental statues, called moai. Easter Island is claimed to be the most remote inhabited island in the world.

Moai

 The most visible remnants of the culture of the ancient Easter Island natives are stone statues called moai that represented deified ancestors. It was believed that the dead provided everything that the living needed and, through offerings, the living provided the dead with a better place in the spirit world. Most settlements were located on the coast and moai were erected along the coastline, watching over their descendants in the settlements before them, with their backs toward the spirit world in the sea.

The moai were carved from 1100–1680 CE according to rectified radio-carbon dates. A total of 887 monolithic stone statues have been discovered so far, both on the island and in museum collections. Although often identified as "Easter Island heads", the statues are actually torsos, with most of them ending at the top of the thighs, although a small number of them are complete, with the figures kneeling on bent knees with their hands over their stomachs. Some upright moai have become buried up to their necks by shifting soils.

Composition

Almost all moai were carved out of distinctive, compressed, easily worked solidified volcanic ash found at a single site inside the extinct volcal no Rano Raraku. The native islanders who carved them used only stone hand chisels, which lie in place all over the quarry. These stone chisels were sharpened by chipping off a new edge when dulled. The volcanic stone was first dampened to soften it before sculpting began, and dampened again periodically during the process. While many teams worked on different statues at the same time, a single moai took a team of five or six men approximately one year to complete. Each statue represented the deceased head of a lineage.

Only a quarter of the statues were installed, while nearly half remained in the quarry at Rano Raraku and the rest sat elsewhere, probably on their way to final locations. The largest moai ever raised on a platform is known as "Paro". It weighs 82 tons and 9.8 m (32.15 ft.) long. It is not yet known how they transported the statues. Possibilities include employing a miro manga erua, a Y-shaped sledge with cross pieces, pulled with ropes made from the tough bark of the hau-hau tree, and tied around the statue's neck. Anywhere from 180 to 250 men were required for pulling, depending on the size of the moai. Some 50 of the statues were re-erected in modern times. One of the first was on Ahu Ature Huke in Anakena beach in 1958. It was raised using traditional methods during a Heyerdahl expedition.

In 2011, a large Moai statue was excavated from the ground, suggesting that the statues are much older and larger than previously thought. <span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', 'serif'; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN">Some moai may have been made from wood and were lost.