Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Rapa Nui is 3,700 kilometers from the nearest continent (South America) and 2,075 kilometers from the nearest inhabited island (Pitcairn). Polynesian navigators reached it around 1200 CE, sailing east across open ocean in double-hulled canoes. They found a volcanic island 24 kilometers long, covered in palm forest, and began carving.

The Moai

Eight hundred and eighty-seven moai have been catalogued. They were carved from compressed volcanic ash at the Rano Raraku quarry on the island’s eastern side. The average moai is four meters tall and weighs twelve tonnes. The largest completed and erected moai, Paro, stands nearly ten meters high and weighs 82 tonnes. An unfinished moai still lying in the quarry would have stood 21 meters tall.

The statues were moved from the quarry to stone platforms called ahu around the island’s coast. How they were transported is debated: rolled on logs, dragged on wooden sleds, or “walked” by rocking them forward on their bases (a method demonstrated experimentally in 2011). The moai face inland, toward the villages. They watch over the living, not the sea.

The Collapse

Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the island’s civilization declined. The palm forests were cut down. Soil eroded. Food production failed. The population dropped from a peak estimated at 7,000-15,000 to approximately 2,000 by the time Europeans arrived in 1722. The moai were toppled during internal conflicts, pushed face-down off their platforms. By the nineteenth century, not a single moai stood upright.

Today

Several dozen moai have been restored to their platforms, most notably at Ahu Tongariki, where fifteen moai stand in a row facing inland. The quarry at Rano Raraku still holds nearly 400 unfinished statues in various stages of carving. Rapa Nui is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The island asks a question about what a small, isolated society does when it runs out of resources, and the stone faces that watched it happen are still there.