They are mounted on wood and metal frames, with heavy sandbags on the bases to them from toppling over in the wind. Melissa Mauer had provided her husband with a small model of a moai and a couple of books on the subject while his project was in the works. A Polynesian tribe that eventually came to be known as the Rapa Nui arrived at what Westerners would call Easter Island sometime before 1400. During the next 200 years, they created 887 huge stone monoliths, which some archeologists believe were tributes to chiefs and other leaders. The volcanic ash stones were quarried high on the slopes of Easter Island and somehow dragged down to the seashore.
Nobody is sure how that engineering feat was achieved.
The average Easter Island moai stands 13 feet tall and weighs 14 tons. Only about a third of them made it to their final resting places, where they were erected with their backs to the sea. The Rapa Nui reportedly stripped the island of trees and saw their population plunge from a high of about 10,000 to just more than 100. The Rapa Nui population has since rebounded to about 2,000, but there are still no trees on Easter Island, and many of the moai have been destroyed. Bill Sherry of Burlingame, who operates Superior Game Farms, a hunting preserve, offered his land along the highway as soon as he saw Mauer's Easter Island heads.