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Easter Island, also called Rapa Nui, is a Polynesian Island in the Pacific Ocean, more
than 2,000 miles or 3500 kilometers off the coast of Chile. It is believed that Polynesian
peoples settled on the island more than a thousand years ago, and began building a thriving
culture.
When Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen discovered the island on Easter Sunday in 1722, he was
astonished to find that the island was covered with hundreds of mysterious, giant stone heads.
These huge statues are called 'moai,' and there are nearly 900 of them on the island.
They are believed to be between 500 and 750 years old, and many of them stand around the
coast of the island with their backs to the sea. Most archaeologists believe that they
were meant to represent the spirits of chiefs or ancestors, but there are no written records
to help understand their significance or how they were made, and so archaeologists must
rely on clues that were left behind, and on the stories handed down from generation to
generation by the people on the island.
Each statue is made out of a single huge piece of stone, although some of the statues have
an extra piece of stone on the top of their heads, carved into a topknot. On average they
are 13 feet or 4 meters high and weigh between 12 and 13 tons each. The largest moai ever
erected, called 'Paro', is over 32 feet or 9.8 meters tall and weighs 82 tons.
Although the statues are often referred to as 'heads,' most of them have bodies. Some
were buried in the ground up to their shoulders, and many more were tipped over. At one point,
there were no unburied statues left standing at all, but now dozens of statues have been
re-erected and some have been restored to look as they did hundreds of years ago.
The island is made of three extinct volcanoes, and a variety of volcanic materials abound
which were suited to carving the gigantic statues. The main quarry is a volcanic crater
called 'Rano Raraku,' and archaeologists estimate that 95% of the statues came from here.
The vast majority of the moai were carved from a material called tuff, a type of rock
made from compressed volcanic ash. This type of rock is soft and easy to carve, but it
is less durable than other kinds of stone, making the moai vulnerable to erosion by wind
and water. Hundreds of partially-finished statues surround the Rano Raraku quarry in
various stages of completion. Some appear to have been abandoned when carvers reached
chunks of harder rock that they could not carve through, while others were unfinished
when the people of Easter Island decided to stop all statue-building. One statue at the
quarry would have been the largest ever made if it had been finished, and would have been
71 feet or more than 21 meters high and weigh more than 270 tons.
Archaeologists believe that the people of Easter Island transported the massive moai
by rolling them on tree trunks. Now, you may have noticed that there are not many trees
on Easter Island. That is because the people who lived there chopped down so many trees
that one day they ran out and there were no more trees at all. Once the trees were gone,
they could not move any more statues.
Today much of Easter Island is protected in Rapa Nui National Park, which is a World Heritage
Site. This means that the park, which contains many of the moai as well as the Rano Raraku
quarry and other sites, are considered so interesting and important that they should
be protected and preserved for people of the whole world to learn about and enjoy.
I hope you enjoyed learning about the mysterious moai of Easter Island today. Goodbye till
next time!