Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and its Moai
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One of the world's most famous yet least visited archaeological sites, Easter Island is sixty-three square miles in size and located 2200 miles off the coast of Chile. The oldest known name of the island is Te Pito o Te Henua, meaning ‘The Center of the World.’ In the 1860’s Tahitian sailors gave the island the name Rapa Nui, meaning ‘Great Rapa.’ The island received its most well known name, Easter Island, from a Dutch sea captain, Jacob Roggeveen, the first European to visit on Easter Sunday, 1722. In the early 1950s, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl suggested Easter Island had been originally settled by Indians from the coast of South America. Archaeological, ethnographic and linguistic research has shown this hypothesis to be inaccurate. It is now believed that the original inhabitants of Easter Island were of Polynesian stock, that they arrived by canoes in the 4th century AD, and numbered less than 100. At the time of their arrival, much of the island was forested, was teeming with land birds, and was perhaps the most productive breeding site for seabirds in the Polynesia region. Because of the plentiful bird, fish and plant food sources, the human population grew and gave rise to a rich religious and artistic culture.
Easter Island’s most famous features are its enormous stone statues called moai, at least 288 of which once stood upon stone platforms called ahu. Nearly all the moai, averaging 15 feet tall and weighing 14 tones, are carved from stone of the Rano Raraku volcano. Depending upon the size of the statue, between 50 and 150 people were needed to drag it across the countryside on sleds and rollers made from the island's trees. The moai and ahu were in use as early as AD 500, but the majority were erected between 1000 and 1650 AD.
Scholars assume that the carving and erection of the moai derived from an idea rooted in similar practices found elsewhere in Polynesia. Archaeological and iconographic analysis indicates that the statue cult was based on an ideology of male, lineage-based authority incorporating anthropomorphic symbolism. Yet the statues were more than symbols. To the people who erected and used them, they were repositories of sacred spirit. Carved stone and wooden objects in ancient Polynesian religions, when ritually prepared, were believed to be charged by a magical spiritual essence called mana. The ahu platforms of Easter Island were the sanctuaries of the people of Rapa Nui, and the moai statues were the ritually charged sacred objects of those sanctuaries. More about Easter Island and its statues from Sacred Sites
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Review by expert member ‘Rapa Nui’Before my arrival to Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, which is the correct name, I´d heard mixed reviews, some very bad. There is no doubt of the fact that... Read more »
5 / 5
Review by expert member ‘A Hiking Guide to Easter Island’Ask me which Pacific island has the most to offer hikers and I'll probably answer Easter Island. Here on an island 11 km wide and 23 km long you'll... Read more »
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Review by expert member ‘Excerpt from 'Many on Easter Island Prefer to Leave Stones Unturned'’By Larry Rohter for The New York Times First published January 9, 2007 RANO RARAKU, Easter ... Read more » 5 / 5 Review by press. Have you been here? Why not add your own review or report an error. If you liked that, you might like these...
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Photo by Mikael Strandberg
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