What is the history of the statues on Easter Island?

Easter Island is famous for its stone statues of human figures, known as moai (meaning “statue”). The island is known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui. The moai were probably carved to commemorate important ancestors and were made from around 1000 C.E. until the second half of the seventeenth century.

What is the mystery of the Easter Island statues?

The Moai that Van Tilburg’s team excavated were discovered upright in place, one on a pedestal and the other in a deep hole, indicating they were meant to remain there. “This study radically alters the idea that all standing statues in Rano Raraku were simply awaiting transport out of the quarry,” Van Tilburg said.

What is the story behind Easter Island?

Island tradition claims that around 1680, after peacefully coexisting for many years, one of the island’s two main groups, known as the Short-Ears, rebelled against the Long-Ears, burning many of them to death on a pyre constructed along an ancient ditch at Poike, on the island’s far northeastern coast.

What did the Easter Island statues originally look like?

Significantly, all statues placed on their ahu faced inland, looking over the ceremonial area. The first moai carved were small, round headed statues, with large circular eye-sockets and arms across the chest. Some of these have been found fairly recently in the rubble of ahu being reconstructed.

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.

Who created the Easter Island statues?

the Rapa Nui people
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.

Is Easter Island Mystery solved?

A team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), however, may have cracked the Rapa Nui mystery. A new study published by Jo Anne Van Tilburg of the Easter Island Statue Project claims to have deciphered the meaning behind the stone heads or Moai.

Why did they build the Easter Island statues?

Moai statues were built to honor chieftain or other important people who had passed away. They were placed on rectangular stone platforms called ahu, which are tombs for the people that the statues represented.

What is the purpose of the Easter Island heads?

How were the statues on Easter Island moved?

Even specialized priests were known to move moai at the request of those who wanted them on their family land or ahu. Method: Tied statue on its back to a sledge (sled) made from a tree fork. 180 islanders pulled the statue using two parallel ropes tied to each side.

Who built Easter Island heads?

Why did cannibalism start on Easter Island?

With no trees to anchor the soil, fertile land eroded away resulting in poor crop yields, while a lack of wood meant islanders couldn’t build canoes to access fish or move statues. This led to internecine warfare and, ultimately, cannibalism.

How did rats get to Easter Island?

Exactly how rats got on to the island is not known, although one theory is that they arrived as stowaways in the first canoes of Polynesian colonists. Once they arrived, the rats found palm nuts offered an almost unlimited high-quality food supply.

Who created the statues on Easter Island?

What do the statues represent?

They represent what people in the Past chose to celebrate and memorialise, they do not represent history. Indeed, teaching history is almost never the reason why they are erected. Instead, statues in public spaces since Antiquity have most typically been used to represent power and authority.

What did the moai statues represent?

What do the Moai represent? It’s thought that the Moai were symbols of religious and political power and leadership. Carvings and sculptures in the Polynesian world often have strong spiritual meanings, and followers often believe a carving had magical or spiritual powers of the person or deity depicted.

Can you touch the moai?

5. Touching a Moai is not only forbidden but will land you in major trouble. Visitors are forbidden from touching the Moai and breaking the law carries a hefty fine. Most recently a Finnish tourist was fined $17,000 US for touching a Moai and breaking its earlobe as a souvenir.

Where did the Easter Island statues come from?

It is believe that it was the Rapa Nui people, Polynesians who sailed here from other pacific islands that put the Easter Island statues there. Although other theories suggest that they could have arrived from South America.

Why are there statues of safe water on Easter Island?

ZME Science says that the people living on Easter Island must have created the statutes, also called “megaliths,” to show that there was safe water here. There used to be volcanoes on this island: the website describes it as “a volcanic high island” and there are “three extinct coalesced volcanoes.”

What are some interesting facts about Easter Island?

Google “easter island aliens” and there are some interesting theories of alien spaceships transporting the statues! Finally, no visit to Easter Island would be complete without visiting the volcanic crater at Rano Kau. The Orongo Ceremonial Village, sits on the slopes of this extinct volcano crater.

How did Rapa Nui put those giant hats on Easter Island’s statues?

Archaeologists describe a technique that the ancient Rapa Nui may have used to leverage the hats on the island’s giant stone statues. Experts think they have figured out how the ancient Polynesian inhabitants of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, put those enormous red stone hats on top of the island’s famous giant statues.