Where on Easter Island are the statues?

Where on Easter Island are the statues?

The North East Coast has 8, North West 5 plus two inland. Isolated statues are overwhelmingly positioned between the ahus, along the coast, with a slightly higher density on the eastern part of the island.

What are the statues on Easter Island for?

Moai statues were built to honor chieftain or other important people who had passed away. They were placed on rectangular stone platforms called ahu, which are tombs for the people that the statues represented.

What are the statues on Easter Island called?

The islanders call them “moai,” and they have puzzled ethnographers, archaeologists, and visitors to the island since the first European explorers arrived here in 1722. In their isolation, why did the early Easter Islanders undertake this colossal statue-building effort?

Where are the Easter Island heads on Easter Island?

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.

What are the coordinates of Easter Island?

27.1127° S, 109.3497° W
Easter Island/Coordinates

What happened to the trees on Easter Island?

There is good evidence that the trees largely disappeared between 1200 and 1650. Assuming that wood was used to move statues, a popular proposal was formulated that the islanders, besotted with their moai, cut down all the palm trees in order to move statues.

What really happened on Easter Island?

In this story, made popular by geographer Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Collapse, the Indigenous people of the island, the Rapanui, so destroyed their environment that, by around 1600, their society fell into a downward spiral of warfare, cannibalism, and population decline.

How many statues are there on Easter Island?

1,000 statues
Its nearly 1,000 statues, some almost 30 feet tall and weighing as much as 80 tons, are still an enigma, but the statue builders are far from vanished. In fact, their descendants are making art and renewing their cultural traditions in an island renaissance.

How many statues are on Easter Island?

Its nearly 1,000 statues, some almost 30 feet tall and weighing as much as 80 tons, are still an enigma, but the statue builders are far from vanished. In fact, their descendants are making art and renewing their cultural traditions in an island renaissance.

What are Easter Island’s nearest neighbors to the east and west?

Its closest neighbors are the tiny Pitcairn Islands (some 1,200 miles away), while the nearest continental point is Chile, which is 2,200 miles to the east — or five hours by flight. Map of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui. Despite its extreme seclusion, most people know of Easter Island for one reason: the moai sculptures.

What killed Easter Island?

A series of devastating events killed almost the entire population of Easter Island. Jared Diamond suggested that Easter Island’s society so destroyed their environment that, by around 1600, their society fell into a downward spiral of warfare, cannibalism, and population decline.

Why are there so many statues on Easter Island?

The stone moai statues of Easter Island represent revered ancestors of tribal groups who lived on Easter Island. These statues were erected above rectangular stone tomb platforms, facing inland, to protect the villagers who lived there.

Easter Island’s monumental stone heads are well-known, but there’s more to the story: all along, the sculptures have secretly had torsos, buried beneath the earth. Archaeologists have documented 887 of the massive statues, known as moai, but there may up as many as 1,000 of them on the island.

What are the statues on Easter Island?

The Moai statues are also known as ‘ moai ’, ‘ Easter Island heads ’ and ‘ Easter Island statues ’, are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people between the years 1250 and 1500 CE. The Moai statues are located on Easter Island, or ‘Rapa Nui’ as the indigenous call it,…

What is the famous statue on the Easter Island called?

Easter Island (Rapa Nui in Polynesian) is a Chilean island in the southern Pacific Ocean famous for it’s stone head statues called Moai. When you first see a Moai statue you are drawn to its disproportionately large head (compared to body length) and that is why they are commonly called “Easter Island Heads”.