Unlocking the Secrets of Easter Island’s Moai Statues: Discovering the Bodies Hidden Beneath

This strange image of two of Easter Island’s famous statues sitting with their bodies and arms crossed on the ground is not as far from reality as one might think.

We’ve all seen the iconic images of the Easter Island heads, at least in photographs and videos. However, not many of us know that those heads actually have hidden bodies buried beneath the ground.

According to Vaп Tilburg, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, “The reason people think they are [just] heads is that there are about 150 statues buried up to their shoulders in the side of a volcano, and these are the most famous, most beautiful, and most photographed of all the statues on Easter Island. This suggested to people who hadn’t seen photos of [other statues buried on the island] that they are just heads.”

A team of archaeologists from UCLA developed the Easter Island Statue Project to better study and preserve the statues of the Rapa Nui, the people who carved these figures between 1100 and 1500 A.D. into the rocks found on their islands in the South Pacific. Through this work, the team excavated several of the heads to reveal the torso and body of the Rapa Nui.

The heads had been covered by successive deposits of land masses from the island which buried the lower part of the statues. These deposits developed the statues and gradually buried them up to the head as the islands were worn and eroded over the centuries.

As part of the nine-year project, nearly 1,000 statues from the small Pacific island were documented and studied. The team determined, to the extent possible, the size, function and history of each individual statue.

They found petroglyphs engraved on the backs of the figures, usually in a crescent shape to represent Polynesian cloaks. The cloak motif is likely the symbol of the carver’s family, providing clues about the different family or group structures on the island.

Abundant red pigment was found at the human burial sites of several individuals, suggesting that the statues were probably painted red during ceremonies. These burial sites often surround statues, suggesting that the Rapa Nui buried their dead with the family statue.

Finally, this is how the famous statues were sculpted. The one pictured below was carved but never erected and would have stood 22 metres tall (the tallest is 10 metres) and weighed more than two Boeing 737s.