Unfortunately, there is no written record (and the oral history is scant) to help tell the story of this remote land, its people, and the significance of the nearly 900 giant moai that punctuate Easter Island’s barren landscape.
Are the statues on Easter Island Large?
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 (13.8 tons) each.
How many monoliths are found on Easter Island?
By quarrying rock for the statues, the people of Rapa Nui fertilized the soil. When Europeans first reached Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, on Easter Day, 1722, they were awed to find around 1,000 imposing stone moai, or monoliths, carved in the shape of human beings.
Are there any Easter Islanders left?
The Rapa Nui are the indigenous Polynesian people of Easter Island. … At the 2017 census there were 7,750 island inhabitants—almost all living in the village of Hanga Roa on the sheltered west coast. As of 2011, Rapa Nui’s main source of income derived from tourism, which focuses on the giant sculptures called moai.
What does moai mean?
The moai of Rapa Nui
Easter Island is famous for its stone statues of human figures, known as moai (meaning “statue”).
What is the most famous moai?
When dawn breaks on Easter Island, it is the moai that first feel the sun. These 15 moai at a site called Tongariki are perhaps the most famous. Carved out of volcanic rock, they’re placed on a stone platform called an ahu. The tallest is nearly 30 feet.
What is the largest moai?
In comparison, Paro, the largest Moai ever erected, is 10 meters (33 ft) high, and weighs 75 metric tons. Though the giant statues have been the subject of many conspiracies and myths, one gradually realizes there are few major mysteries left about them.
Do Easter Island heads really have bodies?
As a part of the Easter Island Statue Project, the team excavated two moai and discovered that each one had a body, proving, as the team excitedly explained in a letter, “that the ‘heads’ on the slope here are, in fact, full but incomplete statues.”
What country has giant stone heads?
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.
Who discovered Easter Island first?
Ever since the Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen, the first European known to have reached Easter Island, arrived in 1722, scholars have debated the origins of the isolated population he found there.
Why are the giant heads on Easter Island?
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.
Why are there no trees on Easter Island?
When it rains on the island, also known as Rapa Nui, the water rapidly drains through the porous volcanic soil, leaving the grass dry again. … That’s one reason why the island at the end of the world has stayed almost entirely bare, with no trees or shrubs.
How old is Easter Island heads?
When were they built? This is a question of much debate among scholars in the field, although there is a consensus they were built sometime between 400 and 1500 AD. That means all the statues are least 500 years old, if not much more.
Is Easter Island one of the 7 Wonders of the World?
“They’re not ONE of the seven wonders, they are THE world’s wonder, the number one,” he told Reuters in an interview on the island, 2,240 miles (3,600 km) and a five-hour flight from the Chilean capital Santiago.
Is Easter Island a wonder?
When Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen landed on the island on Easter in 1722 (hence the name Easter Island), the population was around 1,500 to 3,000 people. … The statues on Easter Island are a wonder because of how they were created. Ninety-five percent of each statue was made from volcanic ash.
How were moai built?
The moai were individually carved out of single bays of the rock rather than a big open area like a modern quarry. It appears that most were carved lying on their backs. After the carving was completed, the moai were detached from the rock, moved down-slope, and erected vertically, when their backs were dressed.
What does ? mean in texting?
Use of the moai emoji is usually meant to imply strength or determination, and it’s also used frequently in Japanese pop-culture posts.
Does Moi mean?
moi → me, it’s me, speaking.
Is moai a word?
They tend to do that, moai — the local word for the island’s famous, and perpetually scowling, stone heads.
What language do they speak on Easter Island?
Ever since Chile annexed Easter Island more than a century ago, the Spanish language has been chipping away at the Polynesian-based language called Rapa Nui. But these tourists, fuelling the island’s economy, are also diluting the culture they came to see.
Are there moai in Hawaii?
Although they are often referred to as heads, they are in fact whole-body carvings made by descendants of the first Polynesian settlers hundreds of years ago. … Just down the road is the National Park of Rano Raraku, the quarry where the moai were carved. A path winds among the 400 statues, completed to varying degrees.