Easter Island Statue Mysteries

Anthropologist Terry Hunt discussed how the Easter Island statues were created and moved. “What we see is that we might have had some pretty skilled engineers,” he said, regarding the creators of the infamously mysterious monuments. To that end, Hunt revealed that the statues appeared to be “designed for movement in a vertical position.” He cited his own experiment where 18 people were used to make an Easter Island statue replica, which stood 10 feet high and weighed 5 tons, ‘walk’ via a series of rocking movements using ropes. The process proved to be so easy that the group ‘walked’ the statue over 100 yards in 40 minutes, including a trip uphill.

Biography

Terry L. Hunt is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he has taught since 1988. He earned his master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Washington. Hunt has been conducting archaeological field research in the Pacific Islands for nearly 30 years, and he is currently director of the University of Hawaii Rapa Nui Archaeological Field School.

Moai Listeni/ˈmoʊ.aɪ/, or mo’ai, are monolithic human figures carved from rock on the Chilean Polynesian island of Easter Island 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 three-fifths the size of their bodies. 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, but most
would be cast down during later conflicts between clans.

The production and transportation of the 887 statues are considered remarkable creative and physical feats. The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tons; the heaviest erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tons; and one unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately 21 metres (69 ft) tall with a weight of about 270 tons.