Most moai are made of tuff . Tuff is a soft volcanic rock native to Easter Island. (A few moai were carved from basalt and scoria, other volcanic rocks.)
Are the Easter Island heads graves?
Easter Island’s monumental stone heads are well-known, but there’s more to the story: all along, the sculptures have secretly had torsos, buried beneath the earth . Archaeologists have documented 887 of the massive statues, known as moai, but there may up as many as 1,000 of them on the island.
Are the Easter Island heads gods?
The moai are the iconic and instantly recognizable monolithic human figures that stand so impressively on Easter Island. In the most mundane terms, they are not mythological figures at all: They are simply huge stone statues carved in vaguely human form. But most of the moai statues represent a deified ancestor.
What are the Easter Island heads looking at?
What purpose do the statues of Easter island Have? Archaeologists suggest that the statues were a representation of the Polynesian people’s ancestors. The Moai statues face away from the sea and towards the villages, by way of watching over the people. So here at Ahu Tongariki these Moai look over a flat village site.
What is underneath Easter Island heads?
The Moai monoliths , carved from stone found on the island, are between 1,100 and 1,500 CE. ... As with many things on Earth, time took its toll on the statues and buried them in sediment and rocks, hiding and preserving the torsos of the Easter Island heads.
Why are there no trees on Easter Island?
Easter Island was covered with palm trees for over 30,000 years, but is treeless today . There is good evidence that the trees largely disappeared between 1200 and 1650. ... However there is evidence the Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans) was present from 900 and it seems clear that these rats caused widespread deforestation.
What is the tallest moai?
The tallest moai erected, called Paro , was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tons; the heaviest erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tons; and one unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately 21 metres (69 ft) tall with a weight of about 270 tons.
Are there any Easter Islanders left?
The Rapa Nui are the indigenous Polynesian people of Easter Island. ... At the 2017 census there were 7,750 island inhabitants—almost all living in the village of Hanga Roa on the sheltered west coast.
What does moai mean?
listen), or moai (Spanish: moái, Rapa Nui: moʻai, meaning “statue” in Rapa Nui ), are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500. ... Almost all moʻai have overly large heads three-eighths the size of the whole statue.
How much do the moai statues weigh?
On average, they stand 13 feet high and weigh 14 tons , human heads-on-torsos carved in the male form from rough hardened volcanic ash. The islanders call them “moai,” and they have puzzled ethnographers, archaeologists, and visitors to the island since the first European explorers arrived here in 1722.
How were the moai moved?
With one rope around the head of the statue and another around the base, they “ walked” the moai replica forward by swiveling and rocking it from side to side . Using this method, Pavel Pavel estimated that an experienced crew could move a statue approximately 650 feet each day.
Why is it called Easter Island?
The first known European visitor to Easter Island was the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who arrived in 1722. The Dutch named the island Paaseiland (Easter Island) to commemorate the day they arrived .
Does Easter Island have a flag?
The flag of Easter Island (Rapa Nui: Te Reva Reimiro) is the flag of Easter Island, a special territory of Chile. It was first flown in public alongside the national flag on 9 May 2006.
Why do the moai face inland?
The statues on their platforms can be found ringing almost the entire coast of the island. Remarkably, despite their seaside location, every single one of the moai appears to face inland and not out to sea, suggesting that they were meant to honour people or deities located within Rapa Nui itself .
Why does Easter Island have heads?
Moai statues were built to honor chieftain or other important people who had passed away . They were placed on rectangular stone platforms called ahu, which are tombs for the people that the statues represented.
