What are the heads on Easter Island?
Easter Island is famous for its stone statues of human figures, known as moai (meaning “statue”). The island is known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui. The moai were probably carved to commemorate important ancestors and were made from around 1000 C.E. until the second half of the seventeenth century.
What does an Easter Island head symbolize?
It’s thought that the Moai were symbols of religious and political power and leadership. Carvings and sculptures in the Polynesian world often have strong spiritual meanings, and followers often believe a carving had magical or spiritual powers of the person or deity depicted.
How many heads does Easter Island have?
Easter Island’s monumental stone heads are well-known, but there’s more to the story: all along, the sculptures have secretly had torsos, buried beneath the earth. Archaeologists have documented 887 of the massive statues, known as moai, but there may up as many as 1,000 of them on the island.
What is Isla de Pascua known for?
Easter Island, Spanish Isla de Pascua, also called Rapa Nui, Chilean dependency in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It is the easternmost outpost of the Polynesian island world. It is famous for its giant stone statues.
How did the Easter Island heads get buried?
Most production of Moai had ceased in the early 1700s due to western contact. The two statues Van Tilburg’s team excavated had been almost completely buried by soils and rubble.
How did the Easter Island heads get there?
So who put the Easter Island statues here? It is believe that it was the Rapa Nui people, Polynesians who sailed here from other pacific islands that put the Easter Island statues there. Although other theories suggest that they could have arrived from South America.
Who built Easter Island heads?
the Rapa Nui people
The Easter Island heads are known as Moai by the Rapa Nui people who carved the figures in the tropical South Pacific directly west of Chile. The Moai monoliths, carved from stone found on the island, are between 1,100 and 1,500 CE.
How did rats get on Easter Island?
Exactly how rats got on to the island is not known, although one theory is that they arrived as stowaways in the first canoes of Polynesian colonists. Once they arrived, the rats found palm nuts offered an almost unlimited high-quality food supply.
How did the heads on Easter Island get there?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4U5Y7MSAJc