What do the stone heads on Easter Island represent?
They stand with their backs to the sea and are believed by most archaeologists to represent the spirits of ancestors, chiefs, or other high-ranking males who held important positions in the history of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, the name given by the indigenous people to their island in the 1860s.
What does each Moai represent?
What do they represent? Only in Rapa Nui did the creation of statues – the moai – reach such a scale and magnificence. The ahu and moai are sacred to the people of Rapa Nui today, a source of mana – power and spiritual energy, and also tapu – sacred with implied prohibition.
What are the stone statues on Easter Island called?
In Tuki’s native tongue, the island—like the people and the language—is called Rapa Nui. Platforms are called ahu, and the statues that sit on them, moai (pronounced mo-eye).
What are the rock faces on Easter Island called?
Moai
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.
Why are the moai statues important?
Moai statues were built to honor chieftain or other important people who had passed away. They were placed on rectangular stone platforms called ahu, which are tombs for the people that the statues represented.
What do the statues represent?
They represent what people in the Past chose to celebrate and memorialise, they do not represent history. Indeed, teaching history is almost never the reason why they are erected. Instead, statues in public spaces since Antiquity have most typically been used to represent power and authority.
What is the story behind the Easter Island heads?
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.
How did the heads on Easter Island 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.
What are 3 facts about Moai?
10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Moai Statues
- 5 They’re Not Just Easter Island Heads, But Whole Bodies.
- 6 Nearly All The Statues Face Away From The Sea.
- 7 The Way The Statues Were Moved Is Still Debated.
- 8 The Statues Were Once Torn Down.
- 9 One Of The Statues Stands Out From The Rest.
- 10 Each Moai Took A Year To Complete.
What do the moai heads mean?
Which culture created the Easter Island heads?
The island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, which were created by the early Rapa Nui people.
How did the Moai statues fall?
Construction of the moai statues appears to have stopped around the time of European contact in 1722, when Dutch explorers landed on Easter Day. Over the next century the moai would fall over, either intentionally pushed over or from simple neglect. Why construction was abandoned is another mystery.
How were the stone heads raised?
Some researchers believe the moai were laid on wood sledges and moved along by means of log rollers. Others think they were moved while standing up on a sledge. One method suggests rocking the statues along on a wooden bipod/fulcrum.