Moai of Easter Island

The moai are the great stone figures of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, a remote Polynesian island in the south-eastern Pacific that now belongs to Chile. The island's Polynesian inhabitants carved them, mostly between about 1250 and 1500, and raised hundreds on stone platforms called ahu around the coast. More than 900 are known. They are generally understood as the embodied faces of deified ancestors and as markers of the standing of the chiefs and lineages who commissioned them.

Polynesian settlers probably reached the island around 1200 CE, according to radiocarbon dates from early layers at Anakena, though earlier estimates ranged from 400 to 1300. Nearly all moai were cut from volcanic tuff at the quarry of Rano Raraku; only 53 of those known are of other stones such as basalt, trachyte or red scoria. Carvers outlined a figure in the rock face, chipped away around it and finished the surface with pumice. Oral tradition suggests either a specialised class of carvers or members of each clan, with the quarry divided among the clans.

The figures are whole bodies, not just heads, although their heads are very large in proportion and they have no legs, with one kneeling exception. On average they stand about 4 metres high and weigh around 12.5 tonnes. The tallest one ever raised, known as Paro, was almost 10 metres high, and an unfinished figure still in the quarry would have been about 21 metres tall. Excavations in 1979 showed that some statues once had eyes of white coral with pupils of obsidian or red scoria, and later moai wore pukao, cylinders of red scoria thought to represent topknots. A good many were also painted.

How the statues crossed the island has been argued over for generations. Earlier researchers proposed wooden sledges or rollers pulled by large teams, and in 1999 Jo Anne Van Tilburg had 60 people move a nine-tonne replica on a sledge running on rollers. Island traditions say the moai walked by divine power. Experiments since 1986, and the work of the archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, suggest that teams with ropes on either side rocked the upright statues forward in a walking motion, and that statues found broken beside the ancient roads fell while being moved. The question is still debated.

Large numbers of moai were left at Rano Raraku, finished or half-carved, when statue-making ended. Over time power seems to have passed from chiefs to a warrior class, and the birdman cult centred on Orongo grew up; there are signs that no new moai were made at its height. When the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen arrived on Easter Sunday in 1722, the statues still faced inland over their clan lands. By 1868 every moai on an ahu had fallen. Oral history tells of statues pulled down by rival clans, while other accounts point to earthquakes.

The nineteenth century brought catastrophe. Slave raiders from Peru struck in December 1862 and over several months seized around 1,500 people, roughly half the population, and returning survivors brought smallpox. Missionaries converted the remaining islanders and suppressed customs such as tattooing. In 1888 the chief Atamu Tekena signed an agreement ceding sovereignty to Chile, though much of the island was then leased as a sheep ranch, and the Rapa Nui were confined to the village of Hanga Roa until the 1960s. They received Chilean citizenship in 1966. Ten or more moai were taken abroad, among them Hoa Hakananai'a, removed in 1868 and now in the British Museum in London, whose return the islanders have requested.

From 1955 to 1978 the American archaeologist William Mulloy studied the statues and restored several ceremonial sites, including Ahu Akivi. About 50 moai now stand again on their platforms or in museums. Much of the island lies within Rapa Nui National Park, which UNESCO listed as a World Heritage Site in 1995. Damage continues: a tourist broke a piece from a statue's ear in 2008, a runaway truck destroyed a moai in 2020, and in 2022 a wildfire, which the island's mayor said was started deliberately, damaged statues at Rano Raraku, some beyond repair according to officials.