Moai or moʻai are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500. Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the island’s perimeter. Almost all moai have overly large heads, which comprise three-eighths of the size of the whole statue, and they have no legs. The moai are chiefly the living faces (aringa ora) of deified ancestors (aringa ora ata tepuna). The statues still gazed inland across their clan lands when Europeans first visited the island in 1722, but all of them had fallen by the latter part of the 19th century. The moai were toppled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, possibly as a result of European contact or internecine tribal wars.
The production and transportation of the more than 900 statues is considered a remarkable creative and physical feat. The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tonnes. The heaviest moai erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tonnes. One unfinished sculpture, if completed, would be approximately 21 m (69 ft) tall, with a weight of about 145–165 tonnes. Statues are still being discovered as of 2023.
Description
Moai or moʻai are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500. Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the island’s perimeter. Almost all moai have overly large heads, which comprise three-eighths the size of the whole statue and they have no legs. The moai are chiefly the living faces of deified ancestors. The statues still gazed inland across their clan lands when Europeans first visited the island in 1722, but all of them had fallen by the latter part of the 19th century. The moai were toppled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, possibly as a result of European contact or internecine tribal wars.
The production and transportation of the more than 900 statues is considered a remarkable creative and physical feat. The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tonnes. The heaviest moai erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tonnes. One unfinished sculpture, if completed, would be approximately 21 m (69 ft) tall, with a weight of about 145–165 tonnes. Statues are still being discovered as of 2023.
The moai are monolithic statues, and their minimalist style reflects forms found throughout Polynesia. Moai are carved from volcanic tuff, solidified ash. The human figures would be outlined in the rock wall first, then chipped away until only the image was left. The over-large heads have heavy brows and elongated noses with a distinctive fish-hook-shaped curl of the nostrils. The lips protrude in a thin pout. Like the nose, the ears are elongated and oblong in form. The jaw lines stand out against the truncated neck. The torsos are heavy, and sometimes the clavicles are subtly outlined in stone. The arms are carved in bas relief and rest against the body in various positions, hands and long slender fingers resting along the crests of the hips, meeting at the hami (loincloth), with the thumbs sometimes pointing towards the navel. Generally, the anatomical features of the backs are not detailed, but sometimes bear a ring and girdle motif on the buttocks and lower back. Except for one kneeling moai, the statues do not have clearly visible legs.
Though moai are whole-body statues, they are often referred to as “Easter Island heads” in some popular literature. This is partly because of the disproportionate size of most moai heads, and partly because many of the iconic images for the island showing upright moai are the statues on the slopes of Rano Raraku, many of which are buried to their shoulders. Some of the moai at Rano Raraku have been excavated, and their bodies seen and observed to have markings that had been protected from erosion by their burial.
The average height of the moai is about 4 m (13 ft), with the average width at the base around 1.6 m (5.2 ft). These massive creations usually weigh around 12.5 tonnes each.
All but 53 of the more than 900 moai known to date were carved from tuff from Rano Raraku, where 394 moai in varying states of completion are still visible today. There are also 13 moai carved from basalt, 22 from trachyte, and 17 from fragile red scoria. At the end of carving, the builders would rub the statue with pumice to give it a smooth finish. The transportation of the statues from the quarry to their final positions is still not entirely understood. It is believed that the moai were moved using a combination of ropes, wooden sledges, and manpower, but the exact method remains a mystery. Some theories suggest that the statues were “walked” to their positions using a rocking motion, while others propose that they were placed on top of logs and rolled into place. The construction of the ahu platforms where the moai were placed also required significant effort and skill, with some of the larger ahu weighing up to 750 tonnes (830 tons).
Characteristics
The Easter Island statues are known for their large, broad noses and big chins, along with rectangular-shaped ears and deep eye slits. Their bodies are normally squatting, with their arms resting in different positions, and they are without legs. The majority of the ahu are found along the coast and face inland towards the community. Some inland ahu, such as Ahu Akivi, also face the community but, given the small size of the island, appear to face the coast as well.
Eyes
In 1979, Sergio Rapu Haoa and a team of archaeologists discovered that the hemispherical or deep elliptical eye sockets were designed to hold coral eyes with either black obsidian or red scoria pupils. The discovery was made by collecting and reassembling broken fragments of white coral found at various sites. Subsequently, previously uncategorized finds in the Easter Island museum were re-examined and recategorized as eye fragments. It is thought that the moai with carved eye sockets were probably allocated to the ahu and ceremonial sites, suggesting that a selective Rapa Nui hierarchy was attributed to the moai design until its demise with the advent of the religion revolving around the tangata manu.
Symbolism
Many archaeologists suggest that the statues were symbols of authority and power, both religious and political. However, they were not just symbols; to the people who erected and used them, they were actual repositories of sacred spirit. Carved stone and wooden objects in ancient Polynesian religions, when properly fashioned and ritually prepared, were believed to be charged by a magical spiritual essence called mana.
Archaeologists believe that the statues were a representation of the ancient Polynesians’ ancestors. The moai statues face away from the ocean and towards the villages as if to watch over the people. The exception is the seven Ahu Akivi which face out to sea to help travelers find the island. According to legend, there were seven men who waited for their king to arrive.
A 2019 study concluded that ancient people believed that quarrying the moai might be related to improving soil fertility and thereby critical food supplies.
Markings
When first carved, the surface of the moai was polished smooth by rubbing with pumice. However, the easily worked tuff from which most moai were carved is easily eroded, such that the best place to see the surface detail is on the few moai carved from basalt or in photographs and other archaeological records of moai surfaces protected by burials.
Those moai that are less eroded typically have designs carved on their backs and posteriors. The Routledge expedition of 1914 established a cultural link between these designs and the island’s traditional tattooing, which had been repressed by missionaries a half-century earlier. Until modern DNA analysis of the islanders and their ancestors, this was key scientific evidence that the moai had been carved by the Rapa Nui and not by a separate group from South America.
At least some of the moai were painted. One moai in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was decorated with a reddish pigment. Hoa Hakananai’a was decorated with maroon and white paint until 1868, when it was removed from the island. It is now housed in the British Museum, London, but demands have been made for its return to Rapa Nui.
History
The statues were carved by the Polynesian colonizers of the island between 1250 and 1500, mostly to represent deceased ancestors. Once the moai were erected on ahu, they may have also been regarded as the embodiment of powerful living or former chiefs and important lineage status symbols. Each moai presented a status: “The larger the statue placed upon an ahu, the more mana the chief who commissioned it had.” The competition for the grandest statue was prevalent in the culture of the Easter Islanders, as evidenced by the varying sizes of moai.
Completed statues were moved to ahu mostly on the coast, then erected, sometimes with pukao, red stone cylinders, on their heads. Moai were extremely expensive to craft and transport; not only did the actual carving of each statue require effort and resources, but the finished product was then hauled to its final location and erected.
The quarries in Rano Raraku appear to have been abandoned abruptly, with a litter of stone tools and many completed moai outside the quarry awaiting transport, and almost as many incomplete statues still in situ as were installed on ahu. In the nineteenth century, this led to conjecture that the island was the remnant of a sunken continent and that most completed moai were under the sea. That idea has long been debunked, and now it is understood that:
- Some statues were rock carvings and never intended to be completed.
- Some were incomplete because the carvers would abandon a partial statue and start a new one when inclusions were encountered. Tuff is a soft rock with occasional lumps of much harder rock included in it.
- Some completed statues at Rano Raraku were placed there permanently and not parked temporarily awaiting removal.
- Some were indeed incomplete when the statue-building era came to an end.
Craftsmen
It is not known exactly which group in the communities was responsible for carving statues. Oral traditions suggest that the moai were carved either by a distinguished class of professional carvers who were comparable in status to high-ranking members of other Polynesian craft guilds or, alternatively, by members of each clan. The oral histories show that the Rano Raraku quarry was subdivided into different territories for each clan.
Transportation
Since the island was largely treeless by the time the Europeans first visited, the movement of the statues was a mystery for a long time. Pollen analysis has now established that the island was almost totally forested until 1200 CE, and the tree pollen disappeared from the record by 1650.
Ahu Akivi is the furthest inland of all the ahu. It is not known exactly how the moai were moved across the island. Earlier researchers assumed that the process almost certainly required human energy, ropes, and possibly wooden sledges or rollers, as well as leveled tracks across the island, the Easter Island roads. Another theory suggests that the moai were placed on top of logs and were rolled to their destinations. If that theory is correct, it would take 50–150 people to move the moai. The most recent study demonstrates from the evidence in the archaeological record that the statues were harnessed with ropes from two sides and made to “walk” by tilting them from side to side while pulling forward. They would also use a chant while walking the moai. Coordination and cohesion were essential, so they developed a chant in which the rhythm helped them pull at the precise moment necessary.
Oral histories recount how various people used divine power to command the statues to walk. The earliest accounts say a king named Tuu Ku Ihu moved them with the help of the god Makemake, while later stories tell of a woman who lived alone on the mountain ordering them about at her will. Scholars currently support the theory that the main method was that the moai were “walked” upright, some assume by a rocking process, as laying it prone on a sledge would have required an estimated 1500 people to move the largest moai that had been successfully erected. In 1998, Jo Anne Van Tilburg suggested fewer than half that number could do it by placing the sledge on lubricated rollers. In 1999, she supervised an experiment to move a nine-tonne moai. A replica was loaded on a sledge built in the shape of an A frame that was placed on rollers, and 60 people pulled on several ropes in two attempts to tow the moai. The first attempt failed when the rollers jammed up. The second attempt succeeded when tracks were embedded in the ground. This was on flat ground and used eucalyptus wood rather than the native palm trees.
In 1986, Pavel Pavel, Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki Museum experimented with a five-tonne moai and a nine-tonne moai. With a rope around the head of the statue and another around the base, using eight workers for the smaller statue and 16 for the larger, they “walked” the moai forward by swiveling and rocking it from side to side. However, the experiment was ended early due to damage to the statue bases from chipping. Despite the early end to the experiment, Thor Heyerdahl estimated that this method for a 20-tonne statue over Easter Island terrain would allow 320 feet (100 m) per day. Other scholars concluded that it was probably not the way the moai were moved due to the reported damage to the base caused by the “shuffling” motion.
Around the same time, archaeologist Charles Love experimented with a 10-tonne replica. His first experiment found that rocking the statue to walk it was too unstable over more than a few hundred yards. He then found that placing the statue upright on two sled runners atop log rollers, 25 men were able to move the statue 150 feet (46 m) in two minutes. In 2003, further research indicated that this method could explain supposedly regularly spaced post holes where the statues were moved over rough terrain between the quarry and various ahu. This means that the statues were not dragged on their bases to their final destinations as previously believed, but rather placed upright and moved in a walking fashion. This method of transportation would have required fewer resources and manpower than the dragging method, further demonstrating the impressive engineering and logistical skills of the Rapa Nui people.
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