Statues of Easter Island
Characteristics
Re-erected tuff moai at Ahu Tahai with restored pukao and replica eyes
Easter Island statues are known for their large, broad noses and strong chins, along with rectangle-shaped ears and deep eye slits. Their bodies are normally squatting, with their arms resting in different positions and are without legs.
With the exception of the seven at Ahu Akivi, the statues always faced away from the ocean.
Easter Island covers roughly 64 square miles in the South Pacific Ocean, and is located some 2,300 miles from Chiles west coast and 2,500 miles east of Tahiti. Known as Rapa Nui to its earliest inhabitants, the island was christened Paaseiland, or Easter Island, by Dutch explorers in honor of the day of their arrival in 1722. It was annexed by Chile in the late 19th century and now maintains an economy based largely on tourism. Easter Islands most dramatic claim to fame is an array of almost 900 giant stone figures that date back many centuries. The statues reveal their creators to be master craftsmen and engineers, and are distinctive among other stone sculptures found in Polynesian cultures. There has been much speculation about the exact purpose of the statues, the role they played in the ancient civilization of Easter Island and the way they may have been constructed and transported.
History
Easter Island has had a couple of names in its lifetime and the oldest known names are Te Pito o Te Henua, meaning The Centre of the World and Mata-Ki-Te-Rani, meaning Eyes Looking at Heaven.
Easter Island looked like another island in Polynesia called Rapa Iti, which means Little Rapa. Because they looked so similar, in the 1860s Tahitian sailors gave the island the name Rapa Nui, meaning Great Rapa.
So where does the current name come from Well a Dutch sea captain Jacob Roggeveen was the first European to visit the Island on Easter Sunday on April 5, 1722. So there you have it, he visited over Easter, and then Easter Island was named!
In the early 1950s, a Norwegian explorer called Thor Heyerdahl, believed that the island had originally been settled by fairly sophisticated societies of Indians from the coast of South America. However, a large amount of research was done and showed that this wasnt true at all.
Now we know that the people who first inhabited the island were from Polynesia, and testing on skeletons has proved this. They probably came from the Marquesas or Society islands, and they arrived as early as 318AD. This island certainly has a long history.
