Easter Island | Can’t Sleep? Explore the Mystery of the Moai

On Easter Sunday in 1722, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen stumbled upon a tiny, isolated island in the southeastern Pacific while searching for a mythical landmass. He named it Paasch-Eyland—Easter Island. What he found there would puzzle the world for centuries: hundreds of enormous stone statues, the Moai, scattered across a treeless landscape. How did a small, isolated population carve, move, and erect nearly a thousand multi-ton figures, and what happened to them afterward?

The Moai: Carving the Ancestors

The Moai are the island’s most famous feature, with 887 inventoried statues. Though often thought of as just heads, they actually have full torsos, many ending at the thighs. Almost all were carved from compressed volcanic ash (tuff) at a single quarry on the side of the extinct volcano Rano Raraku. The ancient Rapa Nui people used only stone hand chisels, mainly basalt, sharpened by chipping off a new edge. They would splash water on the volcanic stone to soften it as they worked. A single statue took a team of about five or six men roughly a year to complete. Each Moai represented the deceased head of a lineage.