What do Los moais represent?
What do moais represent? Moais with full bodies visible at Ahu Tongariki. 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.
Where did the Easter Island heads come from?
Easter Island – The Statues and Rock Art of Rapa Nui. Using basalt stone picks, the Easter Island Moai were carved from the solidified volcanic ash of Rano Raraku volcano. They are all monolithic the carvings are created in one piece and an average weight of 20 tons and measuring 20 feet tall or more.
Who built the Easter Island heads?
the Rapa Nui people
The Easter Island is located at the southeastern Pacific Ocean, 3512 kilometers away from the nearest continental point in Chile. It is inhabited by the Rapa Nui people, whose ancestors in around 1250-1500 AD built the famous Easter Island Moai–large stone statues averagely weighed 14 tons and measured 4 meters high.
Are there still rats on Easter Island?
Anthropologist Terry Hunt and colleagues say that introduced Polynesian rats may have caused the deforestation of the island’s 16 million palm trees which were key to sustaining Easter’s human population. Virtually no animals besides rats inhabited the island and the natives lacked sea-worthy boats.
What happened to the birds on Easter Island?
Soon land birds went extinct and migratory bird numbers were severely reduced, thus spelling an end for Easter Island’s forests. Already under intense pressure by the human population for firewood and building material, the forests lost their animal pollinators and seed dispersers with the disappearance of the birds.
How did the natives move the moais?
Even specialized priests were known to move moai at the request of those who wanted them on their family land or ahu. Method: Tied statue on its back to a sledge (sled) made from a tree fork. 180 islanders pulled the statue using two parallel ropes tied to each side.
How many moais are on Easter Island?
Moai Stats She reported, “A total of 887 monolithic statues has been located by the survey to date on Easter Island… 397 are still in situ in quarries at the Rano Raraku central production center…..
Did the Easter Island heads 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.”
How were the Easter Island statues moved?
With one rope around the head of the statue and another around the base, they “walked” the moai replica forward by swiveling and rocking it from side to side. Using this method, Pavel Pavel estimated that an experienced crew could move a statue approximately 650 feet each day.
Who made the stones on Easter Island?
Rapa Nui people
The island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, which were created by the early Rapa Nui people.
Who built the faces on Easter Island?
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.