Easter Island, the moai and the people who moved them

Easter Island lies in the Pacific Ocean, more than three thousand five hundred kilometres west of the coast of Chile, to which it belongs, and about two thousand kilometres from the nearest inhabited island, Pitcairn. It is a small triangle of land, formed by three extinct volcanoes, about twenty-four kilometres across at its widest. Its own people call it Rapa Nui. The name Easter Island comes from the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen, who arrived on Easter Sunday in 1722.

The island was settled by Polynesian voyagers, who sailed across the open Pacific in great double-hulled canoes, navigating by the stars, the swells and the birds. Recent dating suggests they arrived around the thirteenth century, later than once thought.

The moai

Over the following centuries, the islanders carved the moai, the great stone figures for which the island is famous. There are almost a thousand of them. They represent ancestors, and most were set up on stone platforms, called ahu, near the coast, facing inland, watching over the villages of the descendants.

Almost all of them were carved at Rano Raraku, the crater of an extinct volcano, from its soft volcanic tuff. The quarry is an extraordinary place. Hundreds of moai remain there, in every stage of carving, some still lying in the rock face, others standing on the slopes, buried up to their shoulders in soil that has washed down the hill over the centuries. The largest, never finished, would have been about twenty-one metres long.

By the nineteenth century, every moai on the platforms had been toppled, in conflicts among the islanders or in the upheavals that followed contact with outsiders. Some have since been put back up. The most impressive is Ahu Tongariki, near the quarry, where fifteen moai stand in a row on a long platform, re-erected in the 1990s after a tsunami had scattered them.

How they moved

The moai weigh many tonnes, and how they were moved, sometimes for kilometres, has long been a puzzle. In Rapa Nui oral tradition, the moai walked. In recent years, archaeologists have tested that idea. They showed that a team of people with ropes, rocking an upright replica from side to side, could make it "walk" forward with surprisingly little effort. The shape of the statues on the roads leading from the quarry fits this method.

The fate of the islanders is also being reconsidered. A popular story held that they cut down all the island's trees to move the statues, causing a collapse of their society before Europeans arrived. Many researchers now argue that the population was more stable than that story suggests, and that the great disaster came later, from outside. In the 1860s, Peruvian slave raiders carried off many islanders, and disease brought back by the few who returned killed many more. By the 1870s, only around a hundred Rapa Nui remained on the island. Chile annexed the island in 1888.

Orongo and the birdman

At Orongo, on the rim of the Rano Kau crater, a ceremonial village of low stone houses overlooks the sea and three small islets. This was the centre of the birdman cult, which took the place of the moai in the island's later history. Each year, young men competed to swim out to the islets and bring back the first egg of the sooty tern, and the winner's sponsor became the birdman for the year. The rocks at Orongo are carved with figures of the birdman.

Just You's Chile: the Atacama to Patagonia with Easter Island Extension, nineteen nights for solo travellers, includes Easter Island, along with Santiago, San Pedro de Atacama, Puerto Varas, Chiloé, Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, Torres del Paine, Balmaceda, the Serrano Glacier and Valparaíso.

The same tour without the extension, Just You's Chile: the Atacama to Patagonia, fifteen nights, covers mainland Chile but not Easter Island.

The island is reached by a flight of about five hours from Santiago. Its climate is mild all year. Allow at least three days there, to see the main sites and to return to Rano Raraku and Tongariki at different times of day.