Horizons

052

Standing eternally with their stout backs to the sea, these dark stone gods protect us from the world’s evil.

When the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen spotted the island on Easter Sunday 1722, it was the remotest inhabited spot on the face of the earth. The 2,000 islanders were forced to hack out a living in a barren land, surviving on chickens (and perhaps rats) carried to this forsaken spot by their ancestors.

It wasn’t always that way. The first (and only) wave of settlers arrived in double-hulled canoes in the fourth century A.D. (as determined by radiocarbon tests on reeds from a grave) at a fertile oasis in the desert sea. The thickly forested island was a breeding ground for many species of birds; and it was so hospitable to human life that the seaborne population (perhaps as few as a 100 people) grew to around 15,000 souls by 1400 A.D.

The islanders were Polynesians, perhaps from the Marquesas Islands 1,500 miles to the northwest. (DNA analysis of skeletal remains confirms that the settlers were of Polynesian stock—debunking Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s theory that the island was populated by migrants from South America.) The immigrants brought the chickens and rats that would prove essential for the survival of their descendants a thousand years later, as well as bananas and taro. They also brought fishing skills and, equally importantly, a set of religious traditions involving the sacredness of ancestors, which they came to express in powerful images.

Around 700 A.D. the islanders began erecting colossal statues, called moai, carved from volcanic stone. (The island is actually a single massive volcano, with three extinct craters, rising more than 10,000 feet from the 055ocean floor.) Almost 300 moai statues once stood on massive stone platforms, consisting of squared stone blocks filled with rubble. About 250 of these platforms, spaced about a mile apart, circle the island. Another 600 statues have been found in various stages of production, both in quarries and in coastal areas around the island. The average moai statue is 14 feet high and weighs 14 tons. Some statues are more than 30 feet high and weigh more than 80 tons. One partially carved statue, found still in its quarry, would have been 65 feet high, and it would have weighed 270 tons.

Many of the moai have cylindrical crowns of red volcanic stone (quarried at Puna Pau). Their eyes are inlaid with white coral, with pupils of black glass (quarried mainly at Rano Kao), and they look slightly up, toward the heavens.

The moai stood near the island’s coastline, with their backs to the sea. (One eccentric group of statues at Ahu Akivi, however, was erected miles inland, facing the sea.) Most of the statues were quarried and sculpted at Rano Raraku; then they were miraculously transported upright on log rollers to the sites where they were to stand.

By the 15th century, however, the islanders had exhausted their supply of trees, which were used for fuel, shelter, canoes (for fishing) and log rollers (for moving the moai). The rich soil eroded away, springs dried up and the birds disappeared. The island’s population shrank—through disease and famine—to the 2,000 people found by Captain Roggeveen. In the 18th century, rival clans of Easter Islanders, angry with the gods, began to topple each others’ statues. By the mid-19th century, no statue was left standing (the statues standing today have been reconstructed).

The sad truth is that we know little about the moai. Why are their backs to the sea? Are they guardians, or does their great size simply suggest the distance between the immortal gods and frail humanity? If the stone colossi are ancestors, then they are vigilant watchmen for a people who no longer know them, facing away from the changeful sea and gazing on some charged circle of holiness.

Standing eternally with their stout backs to the sea, these dark stone gods protect us from the world’s evil.