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The Moai of Rapa Nui
The giant stone ancestors of Easter Island, carved on one of the remotest inhabited islands
On a triangle of volcanic grassland more than 3,500 kilometers from the coast of Chile, nearly a thousand stone figures with heavy brows and long ears stand, lie and lean across the landscape. These are the moai of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, carved by Polynesian settlers between roughly 1250 and 1500 CE to embody deified ancestors and set on stone platforms with their backs to the sea, watching over the villages. That a small community on one of the remotest inhabited islands on Earth quarried, carved and moved statues weighing many tonnes without wheels or draft animals has fascinated outsiders since Dutch sailors arrived on Easter Sunday 1722, and it still fuels debate about how they did it.
Rapa Nui covers about 164 square kilometers, a grassy island formed by three extinct volcanoes. Almost all the moai were carved from compressed volcanic ash at the quarry of Rano Raraku, where hundreds still stand buried to their shoulders on the slopes, and where an unfinished giant about 21 meters long still lies in the rock. The average statue is about 4 meters tall. The largest ever erected, known as Paro, stood nearly 10 meters. On the southeast coast, 15 moai stand in a row on Ahu Tongariki, the largest ceremonial platform, re-erected in the 1990s. Some wore red stone topknots, pukao, quarried at Puna Pau, and the restored figure at Ahu Ko Te Riku shows the coral and stone eyes they once had.
By the mid-nineteenth century every moai on the platforms had been toppled, in a period of social upheaval that followed deforestation, and the population was then devastated by Peruvian slave raids and introduced disease. Chile annexed the island in 1888. Researchers now argue that the statues were walked upright with ropes, rocking side to side, rather than dragged. Rapa Nui National Park covers much of the island and was inscribed by UNESCO in 1995, and since 2017 it has been administered by the Ma'u Henua Polynesian Indigenous Community. A wildfire in October 2022 scorched moai at Rano Raraku. About 115,000 people visited in 2024. The Rapa Nui continue to seek the return of the moai Hoa Hakananai'a from the British Museum.