Description
Nearly every moai on Easter Island was cut from the side of one volcano, Rano Raraku, and the heads in the famous photos have whole bodies under the soil. This is how you make one, one problem at a time. The first problem: the statue is carved lying down with stone picks called toki, and it stays joined to the mountain by a strip of rock down its spine.
The carvers cut through that strip, lowered the statue down the slope and stood it in a pit to finish its back. Soil later filled those pits to the neck. An average moai is about four metres tall and weighs about twelve tons, and the Rapa Nui had no wheels and no animals to move it. Their own tradition says the statues walked. Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt's 2025 study of 962 moai backs that up: in their test, 18 people with ropes rocked a 4.35-ton replica 100 metres in 40 minutes. Some archaeologists still argue for other methods.
On the coast a statue went up on a stone platform called an ahu, its back to the sea. Some were given eyes of white coral and a red stone topknot, a pukao, from a second volcano, Puna Pau. Rival clans are said to have pulled them down: by 1868 none stood on its platform, and 394 are still at Rano Raraku.
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