A Brief On Easter Island Rocks

Easter Island Rocks is famous for its giant statues. The island is located in the South Pacific Ocean, 2,400 miles west of Chile and 3,700 miles southeast Tahiti. Polynesians, between 1200 and 1200 A.D, first inhabited Easter Island.

The statues on Easter Island are called Moai. These Moai were made with volcanic ash and rocks that came from a nearby volcano. They were hewn out of rock using only stone chisels, basalt rocks to pound against other rocks to cut or shape them. Some of these stones weighed as much as 82 tons! This makes the Moai’s heads about 14 feet wide at their base!

There are 887 of these statues on Easter Island. The Polynesians made Ninety-five percent of them. Many Moai are still upright today because they were built on rock platforms called Ahu, which helped support their weight.

Some Moai have hats formed onto their heads; this is called pukao (POO-kow). The hats can be up to 12 feet in diameter and 5 feet high! Today there are only 78 original hats that still exist throughout the island. There probably weren’t pukao originally, but later, people put them on for fun or to represent different tribes around the island.

The larger Moai took much longer than smaller ones to make since moving them when they were completed. Sometimes it would take a team of people from as much as 100 to move these Moai. They would take up to 20 years to make from start to finish! However, the smaller ones could be made in as little as two weeks, depending on how large they were.

The Moai’s eyes are looking out towards the ocean. In many other Polynesian islands, it is believed that their gods live in the sea, and this shows respect toward them. These Moai have mouths closed because it was believed that only royalty spoke with an open mouth. The islanders believed that a statue’s spirit would go into its mouth and come out through its eyes, then flying back home or over the ocean.

Easter Island Rocks are popular in many cultures. They are still an enigma in that nobody knows for sure how the islanders moved them both to build them and then once they were built in place. Experts believe it would take over 50 people to move some larger ones, even with ropes and wood rollers.

Many theories exist on how they were moved, including rolling them on logs, sliding them along tracks, or raising them up when completed! Nobody is really sure because no evidence has been found yet; however, there are multiple paintings across the island showing the statues being moved upright.