What is the composition of the statues on Easter Island?
Most moai are made of tuff. Tuff is a soft volcanic rock native to Easter Island. (A few moai were carved from basalt and scoria, other volcanic rocks.) Because tuff erodes easily, few of the moai’s original designs remain.
What are the sculptures on Easter Island called?
The islanders call them “moai,” and they have puzzled ethnographers, archaeologists, and visitors to the island since the first European explorers arrived here in 1722. In their isolation, why did the early Easter Islanders undertake this colossal statue-building effort?
What do the statues on Easter Island look like?
A completed moai is made of three parts: a large yellow body, a red hat or topknot (called pukao), and white inset eyes with a coral iris. Approximately 1,000 of these sculptures, shaped with humanoid faces and torsos, were created, most of which range between 6 and 33 feet tall and weighing several tons.
Are the statues on Easter Island identical?
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. This ‘style’ is virtually identical to those found on Pitcairn, and other Polynesian islands including Tahiti.
Do Easter Island heads really have bodies?
Easter Island’s monumental stone heads are well-known, but there’s more to the story: all along, the sculptures have secretly had torsos, buried beneath the earth. Archaeologists have documented 887 of the massive statues, known as moai, but there may up as many as 1,000 of them on the island.
How were the Easter Island statues buried?
Most production of Moai had ceased in the early 1700s due to western contact. The two statues Van Tilburg’s team excavated had been almost completely buried by soils and rubble.
How many Easter Island statues have bodies?
What happened at Easter Island?
The island was victimized by blackbirding from 1862 to 1863, resulting in the abduction or killing of about 1,500, with 1,408 working as indentured servants in Peru. Only about a dozen eventually returned to Easter Island, but they brought smallpox, which decimated the remaining population of 1,500.
Do Easter Island heads actually have bodies?
Do Easter Island’s statues have bodies?
The mysterious Easter Island statues — hundreds of huge, ancient carved stone heads that guard the hilly Pacific island landscape — may actually have bodies, according to an email showing excavations at the site.
Did you know Easter Island’s monoliths have hidden bodies?
What you may not have known is that those Easter Island heads actually have hidden buried bodies. Archaeologists have uncovered the bodies associated with the heads and found interesting discoveries that further our knowledge of the Easter Island civilization and how they created the monoliths.
What are the Easter Island heads called?
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…
Are Easter Island’s moai statues real?
One of the greatest archaeological mysteries are without a doubt the mysterious MOAI statues located on Easter Island. According to excavations, the massive statues are more than just heads. Some statues have even been found underwater.