Episode 39: The Moai of Rapa Nui

🌊🗿 🌊🗿🌊 The emojis say it all: this episode is a deep dive into the monolithic moai of Rapa Nui—also known as Easter Island. Come for the in-depth discussion of how generations of Rapanui (i.e. the people of Rapa Nui) made and moved moai; stay in spite of the bad puns about 🌋 volcanoes 🌋. The wave noises are courtesy of Tim Kahn via FreeSound.

Transcript

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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's bango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I have my PhD in podcasting. Just kidding. Uh, between you and me, I barely know what I am doing. No, I have my PhD in a subject that some might argue is even less practical than podcasting, which is art history. But I've never been a very practical person. Where's the fun in that? Which is how this whole thing got started. For those of you who are new to the show, this is a podcast in which I thoroughly, if not exhaustively, research a topic in art history and then tell you all about it. For those of you returning to the pod, welcome back. I very much appreciate all of the kind feedback I got on the last episode on spirit photography, particularly the opening narrative about Mrs. Lindell. I didn't quite know how that was going to go over, so I was really happy when a few people reached out to say that they liked it. So much so that I may have inserted another into this episode. What can I say? I'm no better than Pavlov's dog. You give me positive reinforcement, and I will continue to do something. But first, I have a little positivity of my own in the form of a podcast recommendation. That podcast is ArtMuse, which is dedicated to exploring the women of art history, both as makers and as muses. The ArtMuse's host, Grace Anna, is a fellow art historian, and she approached this whole podcasting thing much smarter than I did, in that she developed a backlog of episodes that she posts with actual regularity, something I can only dream of. I only just started listening to ArtMuse myself, so I haven't gotten to all of the episodes, but I did recently enjoy the episode that Grace Anna did on a woman named Filide Melandroni, who posed for several of Caravaggio's paintings. I had never even heard of Filide, which is weird because my specialty, like Grace Anna's, is Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, which goes to show just how little love these women have gotten over the years and the centuries. It was a lot of fun getting to delve into an aspect of art history that I had never encountered before, and I do know that there's quite a few of you out there who regularly listen to my podcast that have requested episodes on female painters of the Renaissance. While I do plan to do that eventually, for now, ArtMuse would scratch that itch quite nicely. Grace Anna also has a wonderful voice. It's very calming and professional. She does not talk in multiple fonts like I do, which is what one listener once said of me, and they weren't wrong. If that sounds like your cup of tea, please do give ArtMuse a go. I think you're gonna like it. And of course, I would be remiss not to also recommend my buddy Jean's podcast, What is a Painting, which focuses more on the technical and material aspects of art history than I think any other art history pod you will ever find. I have recommended that podcast before, but Jean is awesome, and she too is putting out episodes on the reg. Every one of those episodes always makes me feel just a little bit, and sometimes a lot a bit smarter than I did when I pressed play. So if you haven't already, please do give those two podcasts a listen. Art Muse by Anna Grace, and What is a Painting by Jean Dahmermouth. But for right now, if you haven't turned this off yet, you're stuck with me. Lindsay, hello. And I thank you very much for joining me for episode 39. This episode is on a topic that has been requested several times by listeners like yourselves, specifically over the past few months. And weirdly, those requests only started after I checked out a ton of books from the library about the topic. Now, I don't usually think that I'm being spied on, except by, you know, all of my digital devices, naturally. But apparently I need to worry a little bit more about the good folks down at the public library. Now that I think about it, Donna has been looking at me a little weird, a little suspicious like. But that's probably just because I order a billion books and regularly return them late. Oops. And I will say it is pretty fun to get an email from a listener being like, hey, you should think about doing an episode on this. While books about that topic are scattered across my desk and my apartment. Makes me feel like we're vibing. Which, of course, we are. That is what brings us here to the part where I tell you stuff about some megalithic sculptures and the mysteries behind their making and their moving. The Moai of Rapanui, also known as the Walking Statues of Easter Island. The ships approached from the same direction as the rising sun. It's hard to say what was stranger the bizarre hulking boats with their timber hulls and billowing sails, or the fact that something was appearing on the horizon at all. While the islanders called their home the naval of the world, to an outsider, it might as well have been at World's End. The giant stone sculptures that peppered the island's shore did not see the approaching strangers. Their unseeing eyes were instead fixed on the small speck of land over which they had long reigned, and if Island Lore is to be believed, walked. These stone sentinels and the ancestral powers they were once thought to embody offered no protection to their people on this day. A day that would irrevocably change the history of the island and all those living on it, not just in the moment, but for centuries to come. The stone statues would have watched as wind rippled through the treeless landscape, the one that the islanders crossed as they made their way down to the beach, hoping to greet the pale-skinned men who were rowing up to the shores on small boats. The strangers had seemed to come in peace, but there was nothing peaceful about this encounter. Cries of welcome quickly turned to screams of terror and grief as great bangs ripped through the air, just as bullets ripped through flesh, soaking the white sand with blood. The sand, for its parts, would have shifted beneath the bodies of the dead, cradling them in their final moments. It would have also stuck to the skin and the clothes of the strangers who sailed away from the island. The small particles reminding them for days, perhaps even weeks, that while their strange weapons had kept their hands clean of blood, the same could not be said of their consciences or their souls. When the strangers were called upon to give this island a name, it is unlikely that they understood the irony of their actions, for they called the island Easter after the day they had disembarked on its shores. Easter, a Christian holiday synonymous with the resurrection of the dead. But resurrection was the privilege of the strangers, not those who lived in seeming ignorance on a near barren island at the edge of the world. The great stone statues were spared from witnessing the carnage that left the island's shore stained with blood and nine bodies for burial. But the statues knew death all the same. The landscape over which they had watched for centuries was littered with the bodies of their fallen kin. Bodies that, like those on the beach, had no hope for resurrection. But the presence of these statues, fallen or not, signaled that this island was no stranger to miracles. Miracles made all the more miraculous by the fact that they weren't miracles at all, but feats of human ingenuity so great that they empowered stone giants to walk. Some of the most mysterious things in our world are those that are found on accident, emerging seemingly out of the blue with no context and no forewarning. That is what happened in the days leading up to April 5th, 1722, when Dutch explorers became the first known people to make contact with those living on the most remote inhabited place on earth. A tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that the Dutch explorers named after the Christian holiday of Easter. A holiday that coincided with the very day that the Dutch rowed their boats to the shores of the island. Today, though, the island is known by a different name, the one preferred by its inhabitants, who call it Rappa Nui. Rapanui has fascinated the world since the island's first encounter with the Europeans in 1722. There are a lot of reasons for that fascination, but the biggest, literally and figuratively, are the monolithic sculptures that dominate the island's landscape. If there's one word you learn today, have it be monolithic, which in this context refers to man-made items of stone that are really, really, really big. These particular really, really, really big stone sculptures are called moai, spelled M-O-A-I, which in the language of the island simply means statue. Moai are massive figural sculptures that are thought to represent ancestors. While no two moai are the same, the vast majority of them do follow the same visual script, which is a big ol' head on a torso with arms but no legs. They're cut off at the hip. It's the head though that's the most important and iconic aspect of a moai. All of them are very rectangular and jaw-heavy, with deep-set eyes, strong noses, and straight pursed lips. Most moai also have ears, all the better to hear you with, and those ears are typically shown as very elongated, as if they've been ritualistically stretched. While the visual look is very similar among them, moai vary wildly in size, ranging from just under four feet tall to over thirty feet tall. And that's just for the ones that were erected, which we'll talk about, but four feet tall to thirty feet tall. If you average all of their heights and weights together, though, the average would be about 13 feet tall and weigh approximately 14 ton, which is 28,000 pounds, but only 25,000 pounds if they're being asked to provide their weight for a driver's license. No, I am not projecting. Yes, I am. One of the things that surprised me the most when I started reading about Rapanui and the Moai were just how many moai there are. As of 2022, the official number was 1,043, and that is a number that is always growing as more archaeologists study the island. Now I'm not sure where these honking things are hiding, but more are found and catalogued every year. That is a lot of moai for an island that is only 63.2 square miles big. Whether you know it or not, I would bet that you have an idea of what a moai looks like. If someone showed you a picture of one, you'd be like, oh yeah, right, that thing. Never knew it had a name. As you're listening to me talk, I would guess that some of you are questioning, why do I think the moai are just heads? Am I bonkers? No. Well, maybe, but not about this. If you think of moai as being heads alone, it's likely because the most famous pictures from Rapa Nui show moai scattered across a grassy, hilly landscape. Over time, the lower part of the moai have gotten buried, leaving only the head visible above ground. That gives the false impression of the moai being all head. A misconception that is reinforced by something like the moai emoji that's gained traction in recent years, which is a little greystone head. As for how the moai became an emoji, that's actually a topic that I'm considering covering in a mini sod because it's fascinating. But for now, we'll just say that it's clear that the moai of Rapanui have fascinated the world for centuries and continue to fascinate us today. To understand why, we need some context. Let's start with the island itself. For as iconic as the moai are, I would bet that most people would have no hope in heck of identifying Rappa Nui on a world map. That's not a judgment, because up until about four months ago, I couldn't either. And I sure as heck couldn't have told you much about the island itself or the people living there, which made my reading all the more mind-blowing. As I said before, Rapanui is one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth. Unlike somewhere like Antarctica, where people like quote unquote live but don't actually live full-time, people have lived on Rappa Nui for over a thousand years and continue to live there today. The nearest inhabited land to Rapanui is a small island 1200 miles east. 1200 miles. And the nearest inhabited land to the west is Chile, which is 2200 miles away. And yes, I say Chile because Chile to me is a delicious meat-based stew, not a country. But you do you. When I used Google Maps to try to figure out where Rapa Nui was compared to literally any other recognizable landmass, by the time I had zoomed out to see Chile, the only reason I could still see Rapa Nui was because Google Maps had put a little red tag on it. Otherwise, it would have completely disappeared. Not even like a speck of dust on the screen. It'd be gone. It is teeny teeny tiny. As for its remoteness, the island is so remote that post-European contact, when people outside of the island learned of its existence, the most logical theory of the time of how Rapanui was inhabited, is that the island was the last remaining piece of a lost continent. The idea was that people must have gotten there before it broke off from a larger body of inhabited land, because how the heck else was someone expected to get to this land mass in the freaking middle of the ocean? To early historians and archaeologists, the answer to that was they came with the island. But the greatest mystery of Rapanui is how in the world people living there made and transported massive stone sculptures weighing tens of thousands of pounds. These are people who had no metal tools, seemingly no major sources of wood, and, again, seemingly, no good sources for making rope strong enough to handle this kind of thing. To this day, most industrial cranes would not be able to pick up and move a moai. They would likely tip over. So how in the heck then did people inhabiting a tiny treeless island in the middle of the South Pacific manage to do it? It has taken over 300 years to even start answering some of these questions with any sense of confidence. Even then, we, meaning present-day academics and the kind of cultural curious types among us, we still have major gaps in our knowledge about the island, its early inhabitants, and, of course, the Moai. What we know for sure is that at some point about a thousand years ago, if not longer, a group of people rode to the island. That's rowed with a W, rowed their boats. Because in case this hasn't already been emphasized enough, Rappa Nui is an island in the middle of nowhere. But to these people, whoever they were, Rapanui wasn't the middle of nowhere. It was very much somewhere. That is evident from some of the earliest known names given to the island, which translate to something like the navel of the world. This navel of the world owes its existence to volcanic eruptions about three million years ago. These volcanic origins are still very much visible on the island, which is a roughly triangular shape, with an extinct volcano on each of the three points of the island. One of these volcanoes will be very important in a hot second. And while I would say, pun intended, technically these volcanoes are extinct, so they don't get hot. Rappa Nui was likely colonized by Polynesians who arrived from the west, using their extreme talents as sailors and navigators and canoe builders to travel thousands of miles over the ocean to this tiny speck of land. Even then, though, with all of this knowledge and skill, finding Rappa Nui would have still been like finding a needle in a very wet haystack. According to a story passed down through generations of Rapanui inhabitants, also called Rapanui, the first people to reach the island were a Polynesian king by the name of Hotumatua and 300 of his closest family and friends. Depending on the version of the story you hear, Hotumatua and his crew may have been tracing a dream that someone had about this island, or more likely, they were fleeing from their home after some kind of conflict. Doing the old post-battle skedaddle. Whatever the reason, it is clear that Hotumatua and his crew had no intentions of going back to wherever they had left, because they brought with them everything they would need to settle somewhere new, from chickens and other animals to agricultural products like sweet potatoes, yams, and bananas. This clearly was not a casual exploratory mission. These people were looking for a new place to live. From that point on, Rapanui became the settlers' entire world, and they set up a fully functioning and self-sustaining, at least for a while, life for themselves and future generations. Despite arriving together, Rapanui's inhabitants do seem to have split off into distinct tribes, each of which had their own bit of land on the island. These tribes seemed to have lived in relative harmony for hundreds of years, and that's good because, in case I haven't stressed this enough, the island is very small. One area of the island that was shared by the tribes is a volcanic crater by the name of Ranurowaku. Now I think we all know what craters are and look like. They're like bowl-shaped indents in the earth, usually caused by something like a meteor hitting the ground. A volcanic crater is a little bit different, and it looks to me like a meteor fell straight onto a volcano. But unlike normal craters, volcanic craters are typically not formed by some kind of impact, but rather an explosion from inside the volcano that blew the top straight off of it, leaving a bowl-shaped indent at its center. So if you wanted to reach that crater, you would first have to go up a pretty steep rocky hill, as if you were climbing up a volcano, which you are, it's just not active. And once you get to the top, you'd face a downhill journey into the crater. Ranurwaku might be one of the strangest places on Earth because, in addition to looking like something that you might find on the moon, this is the place where the vast majority of moai were carved. And that's very obvious because there are hundreds of moai scattered around this area. Some of them are unfinished and some of them. Still engaged in the rock face, while dozens of others dot the landscape at the base of the crater's outer slope. These are the moai that appear in some of the more well-known and famous photographs taken on the island. The reason why this quarry was chosen for the moai is because the stone here is volcanic toof, which is quite easy to carve as far as stone is concerned. As for how the moai were carved, sculptors used a tool called a toki. Toki were handheld chisels made from basalt, which is another kind of stone found on the island. Basalt is harder than volcanic tof, so when you smack it against the toof, you can make a dent. A small dent, but a dent nonetheless. That is exactly how the moai were carved. The sculptors used these basalt chisels to just chip chip chip away at the toof. As for who was carving the moai, it is believed that being a moai sculptor was a full-time job, and a very plum one at that. Yeah, you have to smack basalt chisels against tooth all day, sure, that's probably not very glamorous. Probably get your fingies pinched, but this was an honored position. It's also likely that each tribe on the island had a team of people whose full-time job it was to carve and move moai. These tribal groups seem to have used moai production as a kind of competition, which, as it always does, seems to have spurred innovation as sculptors and workers attempted to make not just more moai, but bigger and bigger moai. Now some moai were carved on an incline, so it sort of looks like they're sliding down the rock face, while others were carved horizontally, so they kind of look like they're snoozing. Regardless of where these were carved in the quarry or who was carving them, they all seem to have been carved in a very similar way. A group of sculptors would work together to first outline the general shape of the moai they were carving and block out its features. They would then really start to chisel away at the rock. This included carving away enough rock to work around this moai, because moai be real thick. So you needed these channels or passages in the stone to continue to carve down and then in order to start blocking out the back. Sculptors were very careful, however, to not carve too far beneath the moai, because if this thing were to suddenly disengage from the rock face and someone is underneath it, that person's not just dead. They are the human equivalent of jelly. Instead, sculptors left a strip of stone along the back of the moai called a keel, which kept it safely anchored to the rock face. So it looks like a kind of weird spine. Once they're at this stage where the moai is effectively carved but still attached to the rock face by this keel or this, you know, spine of stone, the sculptors start to perforate the keel like human versions of a three-hole punch. A puncher? Is that what those things are called? While they did this, they were also stacking rubble up beneath the moai, kind of like a bed, to support its weight as they chipped away at the keel, displacing the weight of the moai from the rock face onto this rubble, so the moai doesn't just break off and smush someone or roll off down the hill. It probably took a team of sculptors, we're talking 10 to 12 people, probably, give or take, over a year to reach this step, where the moai has now been fully disengaged from the rock face but is still chillin' in the quarry. That whole shebang is step one. Step two is getting the moai from its place high on the rock face on the outer part of the crater to the hilly landscape below. The prospect of this must have been terrifying. Because you just spent over a year carving this massive thing weighing thousands and thousands of pounds, and now you gotta move it. There's not a ton of theories on how exactly the Rapanui people did this, probably because it was pretty simple. They were almost certainly just slid down the hill. But it's not enough to just get the moai to the landscape below the crater. You also have to devise a way for it to stand, for it to go upright. It is believed that workers did this by digging a special kind of pit at the base of the slope where the moai would slide down to. This pit was absolutely essential to getting the moai from its back to an upright position. Now making up these numbers for the sake of explanation, but imagine a moai sliding down a hill at about a 45-degree angle. That angle, though, eventually turns steeper. When the moai hits that point in the slope, its base is going to angle down, at which point gravity takes over. And because the moai is made of stone, it is rigid. Doy. So as the base starts to angle down, the head naturally starts to angle up, and the whole thing slides down into place, leaving you with an upright moai. Woo! This would have all happened at the very base of the slope. So once the moai was ready for transport, all the workers really had to do was excavate or remove the earth in front of the moai, allowing it to move freely forward and down this gently sloping hill. If anything that I just said confused you, and let's be real, it probably did, because it's confusing. I think you'll find it really helpful to look at a diagram of the process, which you can find on the pod's website. For those who don't know, that is stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. So you've got a moai that is in a partial pit. So part of it is above ground, part of it is below ground. Nice and secure. This is a no face plant zone. Sculptors used this as an opportunity to finish the moai's back, which at this point would have been extremely rough. They also added additional details and did some polishing. As the workers prepared the moai to move from its pit to its intended spot on the island, there was only one detail missing: the eyes. For those, the moai would have to wait. And wait they have, because to this day, the vast majority of moai that made it this far in the process never received their eyes. Many of them never even left their pits. There are still hundreds of moai in this area, either half carved and still engaged in the rock face of the quarry, or still in their pits at the base of the slope. Over the course of hundreds of years, those pits got filled in, leaving only parts of the moai visible. From about 1850 to 1950, these moai at the base of Rano Ruwaku were the only moai still standing on the island. Thank you, pits. Needless to say, an upright moai is much more photogenic than a toppled one. And so for decades, it's this view of the abandoned and half-buried moai at the base of the quarry that became arguably the most famous view of the island, and one that really affected what we thought moai were and looked like. And it's the reason that so many of us grew up thinking of moai as quote unquote just heads. So what's the deal with this? Why are so many moai abandoned, either half done in the quarry or half buried at the landscape below? The truthful answer is we don't really know. There are even some theories that some of these moai were never meant to leave this place. That is partly because one of those moai is famously known as El Gigante, Spanish for the giant. El Gigante is a partly carved moai that, if finished, would have been 72 feet tall and weighed hundreds of thousands of pounds. That is twice as tall and twice as heavy as the largest moai that the islanders had ever managed to successfully move into place. He's a big boy. So ridiculously big that it's hard to fathom how anyone thought this moai could be moved. So why start it in the first place? My admittedly very amateur take on this is that it was a highly ambitious project that was abandoned after people realized, uh-oh, we won't be able to move this thing. While there are quite a few scholars who would agree with that opinion, there are other equally trustworthy sources that have argued that El Gigante and some of his compadres were always intended to be left like this at the quarry. Now there's no great explanation as to why, but that's largely because so much of the island's history was erased over the centuries. For all of these mysteries, it is no secret where finished moai were supposed to end up. We know that. And it ain't at the base of Rano Browaku. All around the island are sacred platforms called Ahu. There are hundreds of them. Now, these platforms don't get a lot of love, especially compared to the moai, but they themselves are absolute triumphs of engineering. The masonry or stonework of these Ahu's is so sophisticated that it's commonly compared to that of the Aztecs and the Incas, which is quite the complement, because the Aztecs and the Incas were both very, very good builders. The Ahu were made by stacking stone blocks to create the walls of the platform before filling that in with rubble and topping it with more stones. Furthermore, the front of the Ahu is constructed to slowly slope down towards the ground, creating a kind of ramp, which is important. That may not sound super sophisticated, like, oh whatever, masonry and rubble, but these platforms were designed to support hundreds of thousands of pounds of weights in the form of moai. And that's pretty damn impressive. The moaia relationship was one of great importance, because it's believed that only moai that were successfully placed on a platform were worthy of being activated by the spirits or the mana of an ancestor. No Ahu no mana. That said, not all Ahu were necessarily made to hold moai, but a lot of them were. It is therefore rather shocking that only one out of every five moai made it to an Ahu. While one out of five may not sound like a great success, you do have to remember that the average moai is 13 feet tall and weighs 28,000 pounds. That's the average. At least one of the moai that made it to an Ahu, the Moai nicknamed Paro, is three times that size. And he was moved five miles from the quarry onto an Ahu. Excuse me, what now? How? How how? How? How? It is a question that has been driving us bonkers for centuries. There are even some kooks out there who believe that it was not the Rapanui people who moved the Moai, but rather aliens from outer space. Because that somehow makes more sense to those people than what to some might be an uncomfortable truth: that the Rapanui people figured out something that has continued to stump the outside world for centuries. I mean, can you imagine the audacity of them? And audacity is absolutely the right word, because it's something the Rapanui people had in spades. It also doesn't hurt that they were kick-butt engineers. Something made all the more unbelievable when you consider the resources that they had to work with, which were nothing compared to those of civilizations like the Incas and the Aztecs. According to oral traditions passed down through generations of Rapanui inhabitants, the Moai simply walked to their Ahu. They were so full of mana that it literally activated them, and islanders could feel the island move with each one of their footsteps. For a very long time, this myth was completely disregarded as being just myth, because when myths aren't our own, they're very easy to discount. Early archaeologists working on the island in the late 1800s and early to mid-1900s developed their own theories as to how the Rapinui people moved the moai. Most of those theories hinged on the moai being pulled in some capacity, either on a sledge pulled along wood tracks or using wooden rolly track things. Those were the most popular theories well into the 90s and early 2000s. As of the 1980s, though, an archaeologist by the wonderful name of Pavel Pavel, yes, his first name is Pavel, and his last name is Pavel, Pavel Pavel was the first, to my knowledge anyway, to reconsider the island lore about the Moai walking to their Ahu. Despite the myths, it's pretty clear that the Moai didn't walk themselves to their Ahu, though that would have been pretty cool. What Pavel Pavel instead proposed was that the Moai didn't walk to their Ahu, but rather were walked to their Ahu. That, ladies and gentlemen, and everyone in between, is what you call passive tense, and it's one of my great pet peeves in writing. But in this case it's warranted, because the moai are not the ones doing the walking. The moai are instead receiving the action of the verb. They are being walked. What Pavel Pavel proposed is that two groups of men used ropes to leverage the moai and heave hoe it back and forth so that it waddled forward. This idea caught on fairly quickly, though of course there were still lots of debates about how exactly this method would have worked. Where were the ropes tied? How many men were needed to move them? How fast could they move? How did that work with the landscape they had to cross? Questions like that. In 2011, a trio of archaeologists collaborated on a project that would bring us closer than ever to understanding the how of all of this. Those three men were, uh slash are, I think and hope they are alive and well, Carl Lippo, Terry Hunt, and Sergio Rapu Hayoa. These three gentlemen joined forces to show exactly how workers could use ropes to move moai across the island. The major point of inspiration behind this study are the moai that scatter the island that clearly fell during transit. We know that because not only are they not at the quarry and not at an Ahu, but there do seem to have been roads on the island by which the moai were most commonly moved, and these moai are scattered along those routes. Rather intriguingly, most of them were abandoned horizontally. So some of them are faceplanted and some of them are backplanted. That positioning, the faceplant or the backplant, correlated to whether or not the moai were going slightly uphill or slightly downhill at the time. So the moai traveling at a slight incline were far more likely to fall on their backs than those traveling at a slight decline, which most commonly went nose first into the ground. It is pretty clear that these fell in transit and couldn't be picked up. Ergo, therefore, they were abandoned. But there is a lot to be learned from failure, and that's not just a life lesson. These three archaeologists essentially reverse-engineered what happened to these abandoned moai, which were successfully moved, they just didn't make it to their destination. But in order to do this study, these archaeologists needed a moai. And no, Rapanui did not lend them one. They instead commissioned a replica moai, using fancy scans and studies of actual moai abandoned in transit. It was important that they used those moai in particular and not those that are erected on an Ahu, because it's likely that moai were carved with movement in mind, and that additional tailoring took place when they had arrived at their Ahu and were set to be erected. This whole study went down on a nature reserve in Hawaii, which was chosen for its similarities to the Rapanui landscape that the moai would have walked. After the replica moai arrived in style via an industrial crane, the archaeologists and their team got straight to work. Through trial and error, they discovered that it was not only possible to make the moai walk, but that once they got a feel for things, it was pretty easy, though I suppose easy is a relative term when you're moving a multi-thousand-pound object. The team accomplished this by tying three ropes around the moai's head. It looked a lot like the moai was wearing a blindfold. There were then three groups of volunteers who manned and womaned these ropes, one team on either side and one at the back. The side teams were four people each. They were responsible for pulling the moai back and forth in a weird game of tug of war. There was then a team of ten at the back. That team was responsible for ensuring the moai wouldn't tip all the way forward and faceplant as it moved. Now that was a very important job, because what the archaeologists discovered is that the moai's base had a slight angle to it. It leaned forward, and they had to use the moai version of a door jam when the moai wasn't in use, otherwise it would pitch forward. While super annoying for standing the moai upright, that angle was essential to the moai's forward motion, because it allowed the moai to rock back and forth more easily and scoot forward in a waddle-esque motion. But if the team at the back gave the moai too much slack, you know, if they let it lean too far forward, then it was a lights out for Mr. Moai, kaput. Once a moai had gotten to its Ahu, this feature would have been fixed so that it could easily stand upright. Because of that, the real champion of this experiment was the industrial crane on site, because the replica moai had to be picked up several times as the team figured this all out. Obviously, the Rapanui people didn't have that luxury, which is exactly why so many moai were abandoned in transit. If they fell, there was simply no good way to pick them back up. As for how fast the moai could waddle, the team managed to cover about 100 meters in about 40 minutes. While that's hardly breaking any speed records, this moai did weigh 9,000 pounds. So, relatively speaking, its 40-minute time in the 100-meter dash is pretty impressive. I will say that the replica moai is quite small by moai standards, but the people running this experiment were very confident that this method could be scaled up to move those larger moai. More people, stronger ropes, stuff like that. The team also practiced moving the moai up slight inclines and slight declines, which the moai would have encountered on their journey across Rapanui. If these findings are accurate, it would have taken weeks, if not months, to move these gigantic stone structures miles across the island. But, but, but, this is the important part. No matter how much time it would take, it was definitely possible. This whole experiment was fascinating for me, and if you want to see this study in action, it was all documented in a National Geographic special. That special is called The Statues That Walked, and it's available for free online. Lippo and Hunt also wrote a book about this experiment. It delves into their process and methods as well as other facets of Moai production and the island's history. I think most people would probably enjoy this special, but if after watching that you want more, then definitely check out the Book, again named The Statues That Walked. As for how the Moai got onto the Ahu, Ahu were built with a kind of ramp that connected the platform to the landscape. So all the moai had to do is waddle up this ramp and into place, which I'm sure, like everything, was a lot harder than I'm making it sound, but it would not, I repeat, it would not, have required the intervention of aliens. It was also at the Ahu that the sculptors finished making the Moai's eyes, which likely had both practical and spiritual significance. Practical in the sense that the moai had ropes tied around their eye sockets during the transportation process, so you know, probably best to leave that unfinished, and spiritual because eyes are important, but more specifically, they likely served as an important signifier that moai were activated by its ancestral mana. In addition to carving the eyes, there is also evidence that the islanders used things like coral and other stone found on the island to do inlays. In the past 10 years or so, a pair of eyes like this has been installed on one of the moai on the island. A move that was extremely controversial, because it seems like the decision to do it was primarily for the sake of tourists, which really put academic undies in a twist. There was one additional accessory that was sometimes added to the moai at this point, which was a red hat and or a topknot known as a pukao. Sculptors carved pukau from red scoria, which is another type of volcanic rock on the island. These pukao themselves were thousands of pounds, and they were likely lifted onto the heads of the moai only after they were placed on an Ahu. Of the over 1,000 moai on Rapanui, only 288 moai were ever successfully erected onto an Ahu. These moai are specifically known as image moai, or moai that were officially inhabited or animated or infused, I'm not really sure about the verb here, with the mana or divine force of an ancestor. Rather counterintuitively, for what I think most of us would think, when the moai were placed on an Ahu, it was always with their backs facing the sea, and their eyes looking out over the island. For whatever reason, I just naturally assumed it was the other way around. Like everything moai related, the rationale for this placement is a bit of a mystery. But scholars have suggested that the moai acted as a kind of sacred border between the island and the sea, protecting the islanders from whatever lay at the other side of the horizon. Unfortunately, it was a protection that the islanders would sorely need in the coming centuries, and one that ultimately proved ineffective. By the late 17th century, the production of moai was a thing of the past. After something like 400 years, the craft was abandoned. As for the why of all of this, around 1680, give or take a couple decades, Rapanui experienced a civil war. That civil war was undoubtedly caused by the island's slow decline over the centuries, something that started the minute Polynesian settlers came to the island. In many ways, the founding of the island and life on it is exactly what led to the island's fall centuries later. As of the first contact with Europeans in the 1700s, Rapanui looked much like it does today, which is to say it didn't have a lot of trees. It was assumed that the island always looked like this, which made it all the more astounding that early settlers and their ancestors had managed to not just survive but thrive with such limited resources. It was in the 1980s, though, that a biogeographer, which is something I have never heard of, but sounds cool, a biogeographer by the name of John Flenley, used his biogeography skills to show that Rapanui was in fact once covered by vast forests of palm trees. The island's first settlers began to cut these forests down to create agricultural land, which was, of course, necessary to sustain their food sources. Over the years and generations, though, those forests continued to be depleted, but were not growing back at the rate they were being cut down. That, my friends, was largely thanks to rats. Yes, rats, which came to the island with those early settlers, either as hitchhikers or more likely as a potential food source. This rat population grew at an exponential rate. It turns out that rats really freaking love to eat palm nuts, which are the inside bit of a palm seed. But if the rats are eating them, those seeds aren't germinating, and new palm trees aren't growing. The soil quality on the island also took a hit after the local seabird population, which was also a popular food source, entered a decline, as their doo-doo was important fertilizer for the soil. So not only do you not have germinating seeds, but any of those that do manage to grow don't have great soil to do so. Generation by generation, these palm forests disappeared, and eventually the island simply couldn't sustain its population. It's not as if these people could just leave, because one, where would they go? At this point, are they even aware other places exist? Who knows? But more importantly, two. By the 1600s, the Ropnui people didn't have the same kind of canoe power that their ancestors did. The boats that they had could maybe go a few miles offshore if that, much less 2,000 miles to the nearest inhabitable place. The seabird poop really hit the fan in the late 1600s, when a decades-long civil war broke out on the island. Now we don't know a ton about the war or its effects on the population, but one thing is clear. In addition to the loss of life, cultural destruction also ran rampant, and moai were the main target. This is quite ironic, because previously, tribes on the island had tried to outdo each other by making moai. Bigger, better, more. But now they were attempting to outdo each other by destroying them. The main targets for this destruction were the image moai, or the ones that made it onto an Ahu. Warring tribes specifically targeted the eyes and the heads of these image moai. That included putting rocks on the ground just so that when the moai was pulled down, its neck and head region would hit this rock with such force that it would crack it away from the body. It's like a reverse guillotine, but with rocks. So really not a guillotine at all. The extent to which the moai contributed to this ecological collapse of the island is hotly debated. Some people have even claimed that the moai, or rather the islanders' quote-unquote mania for producing the moai, was a leading cause of the island's collapse, though that particular take has been largely dispelled, as we have learned more about how moai were likely moved, which would not have required that much wood. Now, if people are sticking to the sledge theory or the wooden roller track theory, then yeah, that probably had a pretty big effect on the deforestation of the island. But walking, not so much. Similar nuance should be extended to the question of why islanders stopped making moai around the time of the Civil War. For a long time, and even to this day, the dominant narrative about this is that statue production stopped suddenly, that workers just dropped their tools and walked off the job, leaving hundreds of moai abandoned as they were being carved or moved. But it is far more likely that this decline happened over the course of a fairly extended time, months, maybe even years. That is especially true as resources became scarcer and tuf was put to new uses on the island. Tuf again being the stone that the Moai were carved from. Around the same time that all of this was going down, so the late 1600s-ish, there was also a new, or at least a newly popular, religion on the rise. The cult of Tangata Manu, also known as the Birdman. I am not going to talk about this cult, except to say that between the rise of the Birdman cult and the civil war, it's only natural that moai production slowed and eventually stopped, because the very things that moai stood for, a pride in one's ancestors, a belief in the spiritual power of mana, those driving factors of moai production were getting displaced or co-opted by new social and religious customs. That said, there are a few moai that do feature Birdman imagery on their backs, which presents an interesting combination of old and new customs and imagery. Sadly, the two or three centuries that followed the golden age of moai production didn't get any happier. In fact, things got a lot worse. That all started in 1722, when a fleet of Dutch ships became the second group in recorded history to discover the island, the first being the initial Polynesian settlers. By the time the Dutch arrived, most of the image Moai had already been toppled from their ahoos, probably during the Civil War. What started as a rather warm welcome quickly turned into bloodshed after a sailor with a gun got spooked, or at least that's the story the sailors told. From this point on, the island had fairly consistent contact with the quote-unquote outside world, and much of that contact was to the islanders' detriment. It was no bueno. Between 1722 and 1888, there was a drastic population decline on the island. I'm talking about a decrease of 90 to 95%. That's wild. This dramatic decrease was largely caused by the slave trade and the introduction of diseases like syphilis and smallpox to the island. I am not going to dwell too much on this, as it makes me very, very sad. For those of you who are interested in learning more about this devastating but critical stretch of the island's history, several of my sources cover it in great detail. I will have those at the end of the episode, as well as on the podcast's website. In 1888, the country of Chile annexed Rapanui, which is a polite way of saying that Chile was like, yoink, my now, and took control of the island. By this point in 1888, there were only about 100 people still living on the island. Unfortunately for them, life didn't get any better under Chilean rule. It got a lot worse, as the island was essentially turned into a mix of internment camp slash sheep farm. It was also during this time in the very late 1800s that archaeological interest in the island was on the rise. That included the first extensive survey of the island by Catherine Rutledge, who was an absolutely badass British archaeology lady who spent 17 months on the island, and whose notebooks have been invaluable to establishing our knowledge of it. Another major figure in the archaeologist sector of Rapanui is a Norwegian man by the name of Thor Hierdahl, who dedicated much of his career to studying the island. Another important figure was American anthropologist William Malloy. Much of our foundational knowledge about the island and the Moai comes from those individuals, though of course there were others. This is probably a good time to note that much of our knowledge of Rapanui is from people outside of the island, primarily, though not exclusively, Europeans and Americans, plus some South Americans. That is largely because Rapanui's history was passed down orally through generations of islanders, much of which was lost during the population decline. One piece of island history and culture that was recoverable, at least kind of, were the moai, all of which, by the time archaeological efforts were underway, had been toppled from their AHU's. In 1956, Thor Heyerdahl joined forces with islanders to re-erect the first of those moai. They only used logs and stones to do this, and it took them days. That all became a little easier in the 1990s, when the Japanese company Tadano donated the use of an industrial crane to the island. That came after the island's governor had a spot on Japanese TV in the late 80s, during which the governor mentioned wanting to re-erect the moai, quote unquote, if only they had a crane. Using that crane, all 15 moai on one Ahu were re-erected, a project that took about 10 years from conception to finish. In addition to re-erecting the Moai, this project also started an absolutely wonderful, if not unexpected, partnership between the island of Rapanui and the island of Japan. Over the years, the Japanese government has given significant monetary donations to the island, and the company Tadano that gave that first industrial crane has given two additional cranes over the years. Not all moai remain on the island. Of the over 1,000 moai to be made, about a dozen have made their way into museums over the years, usually by nefarious means. For example, there are two moai in the collection of the British Museum in London that were taken from the island in 1868. At least one of those was found half buried in an abandoned ceremonial hut. The crew of the Royal Navy ship that landed on the island dug this moai out, sledged it to the shore, and rafted it to their ship, all without consulting any of the 100 islanders that still remained on Rapanui. That all came to a head in 2018, when the governor of Rapanui at the time made a formal request for the two moai in the British Museum's collection to be returned. Surprise, surprise, the British Museum said no. They have indicated that they would be open to loaning the moai back to the island, but the question of ownership remains hotly contested. As one Rapanui inhabitant stated, specifically talking about the British Museum Moai, but also I think more generally, quote, we want the museum to understand that the Moai are our family, not just rocks. For us, the statue is a brother, but for them, it is a souvenir or an attraction. End quote. There are also moai in museums in France, the US, Belgium, New Zealand, and a couple in Chile. In 2017, though, Chile returned at least one moai to Rappa Nui, which is in accordance with Chilean law that claims the moai are part of the landscape, not artifacts. Speaking of the landscape, at least kind of, it is also ironic that the majority of moai in museums are not made of tuf, but rather of basalt. Of the 1,000 moai in existence, only a small fraction of them were made using materials other than the tuf quarried at Ranu Rewaku. I'm talking maybe a few dozen. One of those other materials is, as I said, basalt, which is much harder than tuf, as evidenced by the fact that it was used to actually carve the tuf moai. Because of that, basalt also holds up better than tuf when exposed to the elements. And the tuf moai on the island are very clearly deteriorating. That's just what happens when porous stone like tuf is outside for that long. The fact that the moai are deteriorating isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's sad for sure, but it's also natural. And I think it would be even sadder to see the moai moved into a museum, though that decision will be up to the people who continue to call Rapanui home, just as over 1,000 moai have for hundreds of years. Today, Rapanui is open for tourism, though it will take you some time to get there, specifically a five-hour flight from Santiago to the island. People have made good use, well, would I call it good? I don't think I would call it good. People have made use of those flights. One of my favorite tidbits about the island that I learned in my research was that in the early 1990s, Kevin Costner made a film on the island, aptly titled Rapanui. Full disclosure, I didn't watch the film, but I did read quite a bit about filming the movie on the island. The movie itself dramatizes the story of the island's ecological collapse, pulling from island folklore to do so. Uh, surprise, surprise, though, the movie is not super historically accurate, nor was it very well received. In addition to being named one of the worst movies of 1994, its director, Kevin Reynolds, said in 2008 that the film was one of the major letdowns of his entire career. It does, however, have a 63% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which really isn't that bad, especially compared to some of my favorite movies. The film certainly left its mark on the island, which included submerging a replica moai used in filming off the coast of the island. It's actually really cool to see pictures of scuba divers checking out this statue, but it is not an original moai, just one used for filming. I also find it delightful that after filming finished, the name Kevin skyrocketed in popularity for newborns on the island. Kevin. That one made me laugh quite a bit. That said, I am quite tired, so I don't know if it's actually funny or I'm just exhausted. Probably a bit of both. From the mysteries of its foundation to those of its moai, Rapanui, its people, and their accomplishments have fascinated the world for hundreds of years, and will undoubtedly continue to do so for many more. The story of the island is also a testament to the fluidity of history and the fact that what is done, fallen, or damaged might just one day rise again. Today, more than 50 Moai stand upright and attentive on Ahu's around the island, their attention focused over the land just as it had been for centuries before civil war saw the end of not just their watches, but also their reigns. The years that followed were dark ones, but the past 30 years have shown that international collaboration alongside the preservation and protection of local resources can lead to amazing things. Even the resurrection of the fallen. It turns out that the Dutch explorers who named the island after a Christian holiday, Easter, perhaps weren't so off base, though they certainly didn't know it at the time. Rapanui and its people have proven a resilient force, much like the moai that their ancestors once walked across the island. Some of those moai have risen, while others dot the landscape. Fallen, yes, but not forgotten. Somehow, even the fallen stone monoliths are no less impressive than the rest. Such is the stuff of miracles, not in the sense that they were created by an all-knowing power or shot fully formed out of a volcano, another theory, but rather that they were products of belief. Belief in one's ancestors, belief in one's people, and belief in one's ability to not just move small mountains, but make them walk. That is all I have for you on the Moai of Rapa Nui, a behemoth of an episode that I very much enjoyed researching, writing, and making. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as well. As for my main sources for writing the episode, I read a lot for this one, including much of the foundational academic and trade publications that came from those early archaeological digs on the island, many of which are freely available online. That includes works by Catherine Routledge and Thor Heierdahl. While dated in terms of both time and content, these texts have been foundational and critically important for paving the way for what we do know now. There's also a very large sort of adventure quality to them, which I always appreciate. As for more recent sources, I definitely recommend the aforementioned National Geographic episode documenting the Moai Walking, as well as the book that came out of that study, which was by Carl Lippo, Terry Hunt, and, although uncredited in the book, their Rapanui collaborator, Sergio Rapu Haoa. I also read books and essays by John Flenley and Joanne Van Tilberg, both of whom have worked extensively on the topic of the Moai and the island at large. There were also plenty of other essays, books, and media that I consumed, much of which I have posted on the podcast's website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. There you can also find images related to the episode, including very helpful diagrams related to the how of this all. Moving, making, you name it, there's probably a diagram. As for Gus Corner, which for new listeners is the 30 seconds I take to talk about my dog, Gus is fabulous. He is getting older, which causes me existential terror about five times a day, but he's very happy, going on daily walks, and he even exhibits short bursts of being a menace, stealing things from the trash and the laundry. But there's something absolutely lovely about seeing those sassy puppy tendencies in a little old man. I love him to the moon and back, even when his fur covers literally everything that I own. Alright, maybe not literally, but it's pretty close. As for me, corner, I am busy. Ugh. But I am working all of the time on the podcast, even if episodes don't come out as frequently as you would like or I would like. They are still very much in the works. Speaking of the sub-theme of resurrection in today's episode, I'm especially excited about the next one. I am pulling that one out of the graveyard file where partially written episodes go to die. But I'm excited to dust it off and dive back in, which is a hint. Kind of. If you enjoyed this episode or have been enjoying the podcast, I would be immensely appreciative if you took the time to leave it a rating or a review. That means a lot to me, and I am grateful for every single one. If you are so inclined, you are also very welcome to send me a message either through the contact me tab of the website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com, or directly at the podcast email, which is stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com. It does sometimes take me a bit to reply, but I do always reply eventually. That is all from me. I'm exhausted, as is my voice, but I'm not too exhausted to thank the usual suspects of hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org, where I sourced the royalty free music featured at the beginning and the end of the episode. The first song that you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto No. In the meantime, don't forget to look at something beautiful today.

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Bye.