Along the south-east shoreline of the island of Rapa Nui stand thirteen-foot sculptures addressing the spirits of the heads of the Rapanui, the local islanders of what we call Easter Island.

The most remote possessed island on the planet, Rapa Nui is situated around 1,289 miles from Pitcairn Island in the southeast Pacific Sea. The majority of people on the island are Polynesian.
\

The sculptures, whose customary name is “moai,” were cut from volcanic stone between a. between 1100 and 1500 by Polynesians of old. The tallest one stands at 33 feet, 10 meters in height. The moai are thought to have been representations of the indigenous people’s ancestors, despite the fact that their significance is still somewhat a mystery. Every time an important tribal figure died, tribespeople probably carved a new statue.

The islanders gave the statues, or Moai, a name, were made of volcanic rock. During the carving process, the sculptors softened the volcanic rock by pouring water on it.

Each statue was finished by a team of five or six sculptors in about a year. The majority of them are still in the quarry where they were made, but some were built along the coast and can be found scattered throughout the island’s interior.

The statues appear to have been moved around the island by the natives, each weighing approximately 18 tons.

The Easter Island heads are much of the time captured and have been concentrated on throughout the years since European travelers previously noticed them in 1722.

In one of the earliest unearthings in 1914, it was found that the sculpture heads were connected to middles concealed underground because of regular disintegration of the island – throughout the long term, avalanches took care of them.

The public was led to believe that the entire statue was made up of the exposed heads and shoulders because this information was not widely available.

Jo anne Van Tilburg, an archaeologist who works as a research associate at the ULa otsen Institute of archaeology and is the director of the institute’s Rock art archive, has written and lectured extensively about the statues. Together with island residents, Van Tilburg launched the Easter Island Statue Project in 1998 to locate and document each statue using cutting-edge technology.

The EISP website crashed as a result of the amount of attention she received when she posted images of completely excavated statues there. I was totally walloped,” said Van Tilburg. ” However, I now fully comprehend it because the majority of photographs that are widely accessible on the Internet and, without a doubt, in books only focus on the very photogenic statues that are situated on the slopes of the quarry in which they were carved… [they] do appear to only be heads. In point of fact, the statues have frequently been referred to as the Easter Island heads over the years; however, people are now aware that they also have bodies. I believe that is marvelous. I love it when great science can be transformed into public data so rapidly.”

Archeologists have concentrated on the sculptures on the island for about a long period, and have known about the middles underneath the sculptures’ heads since the earliest unearthings in 1914.

She stated, “Over time, it seems, more of these canoes were etched onto the statue in a constant repetition of identity reasserting who they were. What we found underneath the base of one of the statues was a signature stone, a basalt rock with an incised drawing of a crescent, or canoe motif.” She speculated that as the community lost its sense of self over time, they might have wanted to claim these statues as their own.
It is still unknown how the islanders moved the enormous moai. According to legend, the statues were “walked” to their destination, according to some scientists.

The figure could have been supported by ropes, and each corner could have moved forward one at a time. Since the tops of the moai found in the quarry are slanted descending while the tops of the moved figures are not, this might have been a calculate the focal point of gravity of the stone.
Additionally, the relocated stones have larger bases and edges with fractures. Some statues were damaged in the transport and were discovered lying on their backs on an uphill grade along the road. These aspects typically point to upright transportation.

A miro manga erua, a Y-shaped sled on which the statue was placed face down and tied with ropes around the neck, near the middle, and at the bottom, was another potential method.

The new uncovering work means to report interestingly the complicated carvings found on the covered sculptures’ bodies, which have been safeguarded from enduring by their internment.

In 1998, Van Tilburg’s group endeavored to move a copy of one of the sculptures in this style. Van Tilburg believes that the sled that carried the replica 100 meters was the preferred mode of transportation because it required 60 men to pull it.

She writes, “For us, some mysteries remain, although for today’s Rapa Nui people, they have never been in question” on Van Tilburg’s list of the experiment’s conclusions.

A young Rapa Nui tour guide told a group of Japanese tourists, “It wasn’t done the way these archaeologists did it here.” They stood perplexing at the exhibition of a substantial imitation moai whose pukao has now tumbled off, leaving a red slash on its impeccably formed nose. ” We believe that “mana” moved the moai. They strolled across the land and our predecessors have celebrated it for quite a long time.”