Moai or moꞌai ( ; , ; ) are monolithic human figures carved from stone by the Rapa Nui people, on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500.The island at the end of the world. Reaktion Books 2005 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 account for three-eighths of the size of the whole statue. They also have no legs. The moai are chiefly the living faces (aringa ora) of deified ancestors (aringa ora ata tepuna). Although the stone moai are the most famous, the Rapa Nui also carved small wooden moai: moꞌai kavakava (male), moꞌai paepae/papa (female), and moꞌai taŋata (male).
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.Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
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 high and weighed . The heaviest moai erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing . One unfinished sculpture, if completed, would be approximately tall, with a weight of about . Statues are still being discovered .
Description
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 (a three-to-five ratio between the head and the trunk, a sculptural trait consistent with the Polynesian belief in the sanctity of chiefly the head) 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; sometimes the clavicles are subtly outlined in stone too. 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 images for the island showing upright moai are of the statues on the slopes of Rano Raraku (many of which are buried to their shoulders), which has led to a popular misconception that they do not have bodies. Some of the "heads" 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 , with the average width at the base around . These massive creations usually weigh around 12.5 tonnes (13.8 tons) each.
All but 53 of the more than 900 moai known to date were carved from tuff (a compressed volcanic ash) 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.
Characteristics
Easter Island statues are known for their large, broad noses and big chins, along with rectangle-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. There are some inland ahu such as Ahu Akivi. These moai face the community but, given the small size of the island, also appear to face the coast.
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 that were found at the 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 thus symbols of authority and power, both religious and political. However, they were not only 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. There is a legend that says there were seven men who waited for their king to arrive."Mystery of the Easter Island Statues." Red Ice Creations. N.p., 27 October 2011. Web. 30 October 2013. A study in 2019 concluded that ancient people believed that quarrying of the moai might be related to improving soil fertility and thereby critical food supplies.
Pukao topknots and headdresses
The more recent moai had pukao on their heads, which represent the topknot of the chieftains. According to local tradition, the mana was preserved in the hair. The pukao were carved out of red scoria, a very light rock from a quarry at Puna Pau. Red itself is considered a sacred color in Polynesia. The added pukao suggest a further status to the moai.
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.
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 aboriginal Polynesians of the island, mostly between 1250 and 1500.Steven R. Fischer. The island at the end of the world. Reaktion Books 2005 In addition to representing deceased ancestors, the moai, once they were erected on ahu (stone platforms), may also have 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 grandest statue was ever prevalent in the culture of the Easter Islanders. The proof stems from 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 must have been very time-consuming to craft and transport; not only would 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 generally believed that: Some statues were rock carvings and never intended to be completed. Some were incomplete because, when inclusions were encountered, the carvers would abandon a partial statue and start a new one. 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 groups within the Rapa Nui communities were 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. Study of fossil pollen and charcoal traces found in sediment cores collected in the island's three main crater lakes suggest that forests that originally covered the island were gradually logged between 800 and (as the island was being settled by migrants from eastern Polynesia), then again in the decades or centuries before 1700.
New archaeological studies have revised the debate about the large stone statues located at Easter Island. Using physical evidence, experimental modeling, and landscape study, new archaeological approaches replaced folklore, historical suppositions, speculative reasoning, or unproven assumptions with scientific testing of measurable data. These methodologies allowed for honest comparison and testing of all competing hypotheses on the same terms. A combination of environmental science and experimental archaeology provided similar positive results, as well as providing additional information regarding how the ancient population interacted.