(gentle piano jingle)
- [Narrator] We're in the
American Museum of Natural History
and we're looking at a Moai
from an island in the Pacific called Rapa Nui.
And it's very popular because
it appeared in a recent movie.
And so lots of folks come in the museum
and wanna take their picture with it.
- [Narrator Two] People already love
coming to see this Moai.
It's a cast, it's not an actual Moai from Rapa Nui,
and it's brought a lot of people into the Pacific Hall.
And we're hoping that people will
not just take their selfies with the Moai,
but they'll also stop and read a bit more about the Moai
and understand a bit more about
the culture that he comes from,
and also stop and look around the Pacific Hall
and learn a bit more about the
amazing cultures that are there.
- [Narrator] You normally think about museums having
original works of art, but this one is a cast.
- [Narrator Two] Yes, I'm so glad it's a cast
and not an actual Moai,
because they really do belong in Rapa Nui.
They were sacred figures.
They're ancestor figures, and they're very heavy.
They're made out of massive stone carved on the island
and they were worshiped through different ceremonies.
And what's happened over time is that
they become very iconic
and people from beyond the Pacific recognize them
and the museum wanted to have something
really substantial and impressive
and recognizable in their new Pacific Hall
when they were putting it together.
It was first open in the 1971.
When they had an expedition there,
they didn't bring back an actual Moai,
they were bringing back more documentation
about the ways of life there,
the different types of people there,
they were doing anthropological and other collecting,
but they had an artist with them, Toshio Asaeda,
and he created a plaster cast of one of the Moai
that was on the inner slope
of the volcanic crater, Rano Raraku.
And what they decided to do was
take this plaster cast and bring it back to the museum.
- [Narrator] Let's go back a minute
and talk about Rapa Nui,
because so many people in the west know it as Easter Island,
which is a name given to it by--
- [Narrator Two] The Dutch explorers
who landed there in 1722 on Easter day.
- [Narrator] So there are close to 900 of these figures.
They were part of a sacred precinct
where they helped to form a bridge as ancestors
between the earthly realm and the supernatural realm.
And they stood on these platforms called ahu.
- [Narrator Two] The ahu were platforms
that raised these Moai up high,
above the people who were communing with them.
- [Narrator] And they're already quite tall.
- [Narrator Two] On average, about 14 feet high.
So extremely impressive, very large eyes
and very imposing bodies and heads,
and their backs were to the sea.
They're facing inwards towards the middle of the island.
And they were carved inland
where the rock quarries were.
Their fronts were carved and they were
still attached to the rock.
And then the rest of them would be chipped away
from behind and then raised.
- [Narrator] We believe that many of them
did originally have inlaid eyes,
which would've made them look very different.
- [Narrator Two] They had eyes made of coral
and they were inset.
- [Narrator] Their faces are very imposing
and they seem to stick their very
squarish chin slightly forward.
Their shoulders are a bit narrow,
so that we really focus on that head
and the nostrils, the nose is very pronounced.
The brow is very pronounced,
but it must be very different
to see these on the island arranged in a row
with their backs to the sea.
- [Narrator Two] I think also you have the elongated ears,
which was another part of the ritual power.
I think that many of the early ancestors would've had
and you could also see the wonderful curved nostrils,
which are on all the figures on Rapa Nui.
The one here doesn't have
those wonderful nostrils, unfortunately.
We're not quite sure why,
but we think we have an artist's impression here.
We don't have an actual cast of the Moai's face.
- [Narrator] This was a very standard type,
but they're identified with specific ancestors.
For example, the one in the British museum.
- [Narrator Two] The one at the British museum,
Hoa Hakanani'a, was found in the ritual center
in the middle of Rapa Nui
and was brought by an archeological expedition
back to England.
And at the time when they unearthed it,
the expedition team saw that he was painted.
And the most amazing thing was that he had
Bird man religion images carved into his back.
So it's this incredible transition
from one religion to another
was represented in this one object.
- [Narrator] So by around 1400,
we begin to see the decline of the religion
that inspired these ancestor figures
and the rise of a new religion called the Bird man religion.
So the people of Rapa Nui today,
the indigenous people, are interested in repatriating
some of the figures that made it to
museums like in Washington, DC or in London.
- [Narrator Two] There's been course continuity
throughout the history Rapa Nui,
and though the population did drop terribly
because of European diseases that were brought in
because of the slave raids,
when people were taken off the island forcibly
and taken to working the mines in Chile,
the population has grown again,
but it's been a hard period
for a lot of the cultural traditions to survive
in the kinds of ways that the Rapa Nui would like.
There's been a lot of ways of remembering
those kinds of traditions
and bringing them to the fore again.
So even though there's been a lot of
the usual sorts of difficulties that people have
in a colonized and missionized environment.
- [Narrator] It is unfortunate that the character
in the movie The Night at the Museum is called Dumb Dumb.
- [Narrator Two] It does unfortunately
continue these ideas about the Pacific
being a primitive place,
which is of course not at all true.
And this ancestor figure is a figure of great manner,
great personal and ancestral power
with great wisdom and dignity.
And it would've been great if the character
could have been a character like that.
(gentle piano jingle)