The Mystery of the Monoliths
Detailed geological analysis and new archaeological findings have solved the mysteries of Easter Island, its mighty statues and the tragic story of its people.
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Easter Island is a tiny scrap of land far out in the Pacific Ocean between Tahiti and Chile. It is the world’s most remote inhabited place: the closest human habitations are on Pitcairn Island, 1900km (1300 miles) away, where the mutineers from HMS Bounty were marooned in 1790.
The coastline of Easter Island is studded with hundreds of huge beetle-browed statues, moai in the island’s Rapa Nui language. Each one is carved from a single block of volcanic stone; some are nearly 10m (33ft) high. All the figures have distinct features: a prominent nose, stretched earlobes, downturned mouth and long chin atop a stunted torso with arms held tightly at the sides and hands resting on the midriff.
Many of the moai have been sited with astronomical precision — in one group of seven, for example, all face the point where the sun sets during the equinox. More than a hundred lie abandoned and unfinished in the island’s quarry, half hewn or apparently awaiting transportation.
For more than 250 years, historians and archaeologists were at a loss to understand how a primitive island race with few resources, totally cut off from the outside world, could fashion these great monoliths, shift them over miles of rough terrain and then erect them. Among the many theories and wild speculation, a number of experts suggested that the island had once been home to a vanished civilisation or lost culture, perhaps an advanced society of American Indians, who were wiped out by a cataclysmic event before they were able to finish their work.
Now, with the help of detailed scientific analysis of core samples taken from the island’s soil, the mystery has unravelled. The truth of what happened on Easter Island has sobering implications, which reach far beyond its shores.
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