Turns Out Those Easter Island Heads Have Entire Bodies Hidden Underground

Take a trip to the southeastern part of the Pacific Ocean, and you’ll find Easter Island. It’s a place we know for its… well, its giant rock monoliths.

The nearly 1000 Easter Island heads, as they’re sometimes referred to (incorrectly so, but we’ll get to that), can be found all over the island. They’ve been a source of mystery and awe for centuries.

So, too, have the Rapa Nui, the island’s aboriginal Polynesian inhabitants. Since 2003, a team of archaeologists has been working to restore and catalogue the statues.

The EISP spent nine years on the island, and they’ve unearthed some pretty interesting things.

Pretty much everyone is already familiar with the Easter Island heads.

They’re actually called moai, and they were carved by the Rapa Nui people on an island at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. They aren’t actually just heads, either. There are bodies attached to those things.

All in all, there are about 1000 statues.

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The most impressive moai weigh in at 86 tons and are 10m tall. The tallest one of them, known as Paro, is 33 feet. But on average, the rest of the statues are about half that size.

They were carved between 1100 and 1500 AD.

According to oral traditions, there are two possibilities for who was actually responsible for carving the moai.

It was either high-ranking professional carvers or simply members of separate tribes, as their home in the Rano Raraku quarry was divided into different territories.

The tools used to carve them weren’t exactly high-tech.

They’re called toki, and they’re basically just handheld stone chisels. High quality toki were made from hawaiite. It’s the hardest rock on Easter Island, and it could only be found in a quarry on the north side of the island.