page_title: Moai
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Moai / History
caption_attribution_description: Español: Isla de Pascua This is a photo of a national monument in Chile: 628
context_page_description: Moʻai, or moai, 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 moʻai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the island's perimeter. Almost all moʻai have overly large heads three-eighths the size of the whole statue. The moʻai are chiefly the living faces of deified ancestors. 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 production and transportation of the more than 900 statues is considered a remarkable creative and physical feat. The tallest moʻai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres high and weighed 82 tonnes. The heaviest moʻai erected was a shorter but squatter moʻai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tonnes. One unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately 21 m tall, with a weight of about 145–165 tons. The moʻai were toppled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, possibly as a result of European contact or internecine tribal wars.
context_section_description: The statues were carved by the Polynesian colonizers of the island, mostly between circa 1250 and 1500. In addition to representing deceased ancestors, the moʻai, once they were erected on ahu, may also have been regarded as the embodiment of powerful living or former chiefs and important lineage status symbols.  Each moʻai 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 moʻai.
  Completed statues were moved to ahu mostly on the coast, then erected, sometimes with pukao, red stone cylinders, on their heads. Moʻai must have been extremely expensive 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 moʻai 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 moʻai were under the sea. That idea has long been debunked, and now it is understood 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.
caption: An incomplete moʻai in quarry
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