Overview
Easter Island lies in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, 3,700 kilometres west of Chile and 2,075 kilometres from the nearest inhabited island — Pitcairn. At 163 square kilometres it is one of the most isolated permanently inhabited places on the planet. It was settled by Polynesian voyagers, probably from the Marquesas or Mangareva islands, sometime between 700 and 1200 CE — an extraordinary feat of open-ocean navigation.
The Rapa Nui people who colonised the island developed a unique culture whose most visible expression is the moai: tall, long-faced stone figures averaging 4 metres tall and 12.5 tonnes in weight, carved from the volcanic tuff of Rano Raraku quarry on the eastern side of the island. At least 900 moai were carved; approximately 400 remain unfinished in the quarry, and around 300 were transported to ahu (stone platform altars) around the coast, where they were erected with their backs to the sea, watching over the villages of their clans. The largest erected moai stands 10 metres tall; the largest in the quarry is 21 metres.
"We could not understand how it was possible that people who were destitute of heavy and thick timber, and also of stout cordage, could raise such statues."
— Jacob Roggeveen, journal of the Dutch discovery of Rapa Nui, Easter Day 1722
Transporting the moai — some weighing up to 80 tonnes — from quarry to ahu across the island without metal tools or wheeled vehicles is one of the great engineering mysteries of the ancient world. Modern experiments suggest the statues may have been walked upright, rocking from side to side, with ropes. The moai wore topknots (pukao) of red scoria stone, emphasising their chief-like appearance. All of the standing moai were eventually toppled, probably during inter-clan warfare in the 17th-18th centuries.
Rapa Nui National Park was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995. The island is a territory of Chile.