Today’s Random object is the Moai statues from Easter Island. These things are 82 to 80 some odd tons, 30 some odd feet tall some of them are, and they are whole beings.
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The statues are one piece of volcanic stone, carved from the Rano Rataku volcano on Easter Island. The island itself is claimed by Chile. It was named Easter Island because it was discovered on Easter Sunday by a Dutch guy. I grew up thinking these things were thousands of years old, left over from a time period before ancient Egypt. I was shocked to find that out, they are only between five and 800 years old. Some may be as old as a thousand years, somewhere around 1180, but they are not nearly as ancient as I thought they were. Even a thousand years is pretty impressive for a monument like these to stand.
These statues are believed to be memorials to great people in the family, the great leaders of the tribe. The vast majority of them look back over the village as a way to protect the village. We think they look out across the ocean, but there is only a small handful of them that do.
Most of the time when we see them, we only see the heads, but it is a whole body. It is one large monolithic statue, and it was either buried by the people or by weather up to its neck. We were shocked to discover there was a whole statue underneath there because nobody has a memory of this, again there is no documentation. They have carvings on their backs believed to be related to the family history.
The largest completed one was 33 feet tall and weighed 82 tons. The largest attempted one that they discovered still in the quarry was 70 feet tall, and would have weighed 180 tons had they completed it. That largest completed Moai is approximately 11,000 deep sea isopods by volume, or 57,000 deep sea isopods by mass if you wanted to weigh them. We do not do metric here, so anything but metric for comparison.
For years, we speculated how they might have moved them. A couple of guys got together and showed that you can take one that was five tons, stand it up, and walk it on its base with about 20 people, like you are trying to move a refrigerator across your house. They moved it a hundred meters within just a few minutes. The proof of concept is that they might have just walked them across the island. It jives with the legend, because the legend is that these things walked to where they are and never moved again. It is a good theory, it is demonstrable and it works, but it is still just a theory.
Long before European involvement, the tribes on the island would fight. One of the things they would do is pull down the statues. Your protectors were going to destroy your protectors before we destroy your village, and so many of the moai are laying face down, buried face down, crumbled. Many of them were in a state of ruin long before European involvement. The objects themselves were being destroyed by their own creators.
The statues are instantly recognizable when you see their shape. It is a huge tourism thing for the island, just like Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids. They have been trying to restore the broken ones, and that is when they discovered that they had whole bodies underneath them. They discovered that some used to have redstone hats made of scoria and coral eyes, used to have big white eyeballs. They did not know any of that until they started to renovate them.
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Also, if you, or a teacher friend, would like a 20-30 minute lesson plan about Easter Island Moai Statues, feel free to download and share this one:
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