Which Island Is Known For Its Huge Stone Sculptures?

Easter Island , Spanish Isla de Pascua

What island has the big stone heads?

Called moai (say “moe-eye”) they made Easter Island one of the most mysterious places on Earth!

What island is home to 1000 stone statues?

Easter Island’s most dramatic claim to fame is an array of almost 900 giant stone figures that date back many centuries. The statues reveal their creators to be master craftsmen and engineers, and are distinctive among other stone sculptures found in Polynesian cultures.

Which islands known for giant sculptures of heads are found off the coast of Chile?

Located nearly 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile in the Pacific Ocean, Easter Island is famous for the nearly 1,000 enormous stone statues, known as moai. The massive works were erected there starting around the 13th century A.D. by the Rapa Nui, an ancient Polynesian society that later collapsed mysteriously.

What are these large stone sculptures called?

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.

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.

Do Easter Island heads really have bodies?

As a part of the Easter Island Statue Project, the team excavated two moai and discovered that each one had a body, proving, as the team excitedly explained in a letter, “that the ‘heads’ on the slope here are, in fact, full but incomplete statues .”

Where are these giant stone heads?

The Easter Island heads are known as Moai by the Rapa Nui people who carved the figures in the tropical South Pacific directly west of Chile. The Moai monoliths, carved from stone found on the island, are between 1,100 and 1,500 CE.

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 did the Moai statues fall?

Construction of the moai statues appears to have stopped around the time of European contact in 1722, when Dutch explorers landed on Easter Day. Over the next century the moai would fall over, either intentionally pushed over or from simple neglect . Why construction was abandoned is another mystery.

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.

How much does it cost to fly to Easter Island?

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.

How many Moai statues are there?

There are around 1000 statues , up to 86 tons tons in weight and 10 m in height, though average is around half of that. 95% of the moais were carved from the volcano Rano Raraku. This location was chosen since it consists to a great extent of tuff, which is what the moais from this volcano consist of.

What is the name of the largest statue?