How did statues come to be on Easter Island?

While doing research for my Remote Sensing project I happily stumbled across an entry in the book, Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology by Sarah H. Parcak, that I just had to look up. Once I got into it, I knew I had to share, since more than a few have asked about this very topic. read more

Stories were circulated that the ancestor statues could attract ature (bonito fish), a favorite food on Easter Island. With time, the islanders began to think that greater size of the statue reflected more honor on the ancestor, so they made the statues larger and larger. read more

Officially called the Moai, they are stone monoliths depicting giant human figures with extremely large heads. The stone they are carved from is called Tuff, which is an easily carved, compressed volcanic ash [Radford 2012]. read more

Moai / ˈ m oʊ. aɪ / ( listen), or mo‘ai, are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island in eastern Polynesia 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. read more

Easter Island covers roughly 64 square miles in the South Pacific Ocean, and is located some 2,300 miles from Chile’s west coast and 2,500 miles east of Tahiti. Known as Rapa Nui to its earliest inhabitants, the island was christened Paaseiland, or Easter Island, by Dutch explorers in honor of the day of their arrival in 1722. read more