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The statues remaining at the quarry are in all stages of completion. Some are still attached to the bedrock out of which they were being carved, roughed out but with details of the ears or hands missing. Others are finished, detached, and lying on the crater slopes below the niche where they had been carved, and still others had been erected in the crater. The ghostly impression that the quarry made on me came from my sense of being in a factory, all of whose workers had suddenly quit for mysterious reasons, thrown down their tools, and stomped out, leaving each statue in whatever stage it happened to be at the moment. Littering the ground at the quarry are the stone picks, drills, and hammers with which the statues were being carved. Around each statue still attached to rock is the trench in which the carvers stood. Chipped in the rock wall are stone notches on which the carvers may have hung the gourds that served as their water bottles. Some statues in the crater show signs of having been deliberately broken or defaced, as if by rival groups of carvers vandalizing one another’s products. Under one statue was found a human finger bone, possibly the result of carelessness by a member of that statue’s transport crew. Who carved the statues, why did they carve them at such effort, how did the carvers transport and raise such huge stone masses, and why did they eventually throw them all down?

Easter’s many mysteries were already apparent to its European discoverer, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who spotted the island on Easter Day (April 5, 1722), hence the name that he bestowed and that has remained. As a sailor who had just spent 17 days crossing the Pacific from Chile in three large European ships without any sight of land, Roggeveen asked himself: how had the Polynesians greeting him when he landed on Easter’s coast reached such a remote island? We know now that the voyage to Easter from the nearest Polynesian island to the west would have taken at least as many days. Hence Roggeveen and subsequent European visitors were surprised to find that the islanders’ only watercraft were small and leaky canoes, no more than 10 feet long, capable of holding only one or at most two people. In Roggeveen’s words: “As concerns their vessels, these are bad and frail as regards use, for their canoes are put together with manifold small planks and light inner timbers, which they cleverly stitched together with very fine twisted threads, made from the above-named field-plant. But as they lacked the knowledge and particularly the materials for caulking and making tight the great number of seams of the canoes, these are accordingly very leaky, for which reason they are compelled to spend half the time in bailing.” How could a band of human colonists plus their crops, chickens, and drinking water have survived a two-and-a-half-week sea journey in such watercraft?

Like all subsequent visitors, including me, Roggeveen was puzzled to understand how the islanders had erected their statues. To quote his journal again, “The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment, because we could not comprehend how it was possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber for making any machines, as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images, which were fully 30 feet high and thick in proportion.” No matter what had been the exact method by which the islanders raised the statues, they needed heavy timber and strong ropes made from big trees, as Roggeveen realized. Yet the Easter Island that he viewed was a wasteland with not a single tree or bush over 10 feet tall (Plates 6, 7): “We originally, from a further distance, have considered the said Easter Island as sandy, the reason for that is this, that we counted as sand the withered grass, hay, or other scorched and burnt vegetation, because its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a singular poverty and barrenness.” What had happened to all the former trees that must have stood