What is the most famous Easter Island statue?

What is the most famous Easter Island statue?

When dawn breaks on Easter Island, it is the moai that first feel the sun. These 15 moai at a site called Tongariki are perhaps the most famous. Carved out of volcanic rock, they’re placed on a stone platform called an ahu. The tallest is nearly 30 feet.

What is the mystery of the statues that made Easter Island famous?

Moai
What purpose do the statues of Easter island Have? Archaeologists suggest that the statues were a representation of the Polynesian people’s ancestors. The Moai statues face away from the sea and towards the villages, by way of watching over the people. So here at Ahu Tongariki these Moai look over a flat village site.

What do moai heads represent?

What do the Moai represent? It’s thought that the Moai were symbols of religious and political power and leadership. Carvings and sculptures in the Polynesian world often have strong spiritual meanings, and followers often believe a carving had magical or spiritual powers of the person or deity depicted.

Why is Easter Island famous?

Easter Island, Spanish Isla de Pascua, also called Rapa Nui, Chilean dependency in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It is the easternmost outpost of the Polynesian island world. It is famous for its giant stone statues. Sculptures cut from volcanic rock, Easter Island.

What does moai mean?

Moai /ˈmoʊ. aɪ/ ( listen) or moʻai (Spanish: moái, Rapa Nui: moʻai, meaning “statue” in Rapa Nui) are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500.

How did the moai statues get there?

Easter Island – The Statues and Rock Art of Rapa Nui. Using basalt stone picks, the Easter Island Moai were carved from the solidified volcanic ash of Rano Raraku volcano. Once completed, the statues were then moved from the quarry to their intended site and erected on an ‘ahu’.

Who made the stone heads of Easter Island?

Rapa Nui people
The island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, which were created by the early Rapa Nui people.

What is the purpose of the moai statues on Easter Island and who built them?

Easter Island is famous for its stone statues of human figures, known as moai (meaning “statue”). The island is known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui. The moai were probably carved to commemorate important ancestors and were made from around 1000 C.E. until the second half of the seventeenth century.

Are the moai statues sacred?

The ahu and moai are sacred to the people of Rapa Nui today, a source of mana – power and spiritual energy, and also tapu – sacred with implied prohibition.

Why are the statues considered to be sacred?

Many archaeologists suggest that “[the] statues were thus symbols of authority and power, both religious and political. But they were not only symbols. To the people who erected and used them, they were actual repositories of sacred spirit.

Who built the moai statues on Easter Island?

the Rapa Nui people
The Easter Island heads are known as Moai by the Rapa Nui people who carved the figures in the tropical South Pacific directly west of Chile. The Moai monoliths, carved from stone found on the island, are between 1,100 and 1,500 CE.

How did they move the moai?

With one rope around the head of the statue and another around the base, they “walked” the moai replica forward by swiveling and rocking it from side to side. Using this method, Pavel Pavel estimated that an experienced crew could move a statue approximately 650 feet each day.

What are some interesting facts about Easter Island?

Interesting Facts on Easter Island Easter Island is one of the world’s most famous yet least visited archaeological sites. Easter Island is a small, hilly and treeless island of volcanic origin. Easter Island is sixty-three square miles in size and has three extinct volcanoes, the tallest rising to 1674 feet.

What is the mystery of Easter Island?

THE MYSTERY OF EASTER ISLAND. One of the greatest mysteries on Earth are the statutes which stand on Easter Island. Easter Island is one of the most remote islands on Earth. It is in the southern Pacific Ocean , 2,300 miles west of the coast of Chile and 2500 miles southeast of Tahiti .

What is the purpose of the statues on Easter Island?

Easter Island Statue Project. Summary. The primary purpose of the Easter Island Statue Project (EISP) is to shed light on the complexities of prehistory by integrating the monolithic statues of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), that were carved by the ancestors of the current population, into the time line of Rapa Nui prehistory.

How did statues come to be on Easter Island?

The main bodies of most of the moai statues at Easter Island were sculpted out of the volcanic tuff from the Rano Raraku quarry, the remains of an extinct volcano. The Rano Raraku tuff is a sedimentary rock made from layers of air-lain, partially fused and partially cemented volcanic ash, fairly easy to carve but very heavy to transport.

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