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By Root 2004 0

that everyone thinks of first at the mention of Easter Island: its giant stone statues (termed moai), and the stone platforms (termed ahu) on which they stood. About 300 ahu have been identified, of which many were small and lacked moai, but about 113 did bear moai, and 25 of them were especially large and elaborate. Each of the island’s dozen territories had between one and five of those large ahu. Most of the statue-bearing ahu are on the coast, oriented so that the ahu and its statues faced inland over the clan’s territory; the statues do not look out to sea.

The ahu is a rectangular platform, made not of solid stone but of rubble fill held in place by four stone retaining walls of gray basalt. Some of those walls, especially those of Ahu Vinapu, have beautifully fitted stones reminiscent of Inca architecture and prompting Thor Heyerdahl to seek connections with South America. However, the fitted walls of Easter ahu just have stone facing, not big stone blocks as do Inca walls. Nevertheless, one of Easter’s facing slabs still weighs 10 tons, which sounds impressive to us until we compare it with the blocks of up to 361 tons at the Inca fortress of Sacsahuaman. The ahu are up to 13 feet high, and many are extended by lateral wings to a width of up to 500 feet. Hence an ahu’s total weight—from about 300 tons for a small ahu, up to more than 9,000 tons for Ahu Tongariki—dwarfs that of the statues that it supports. We shall return to the significance of this point when we estimate the total effort involved in building Easter’s ahu and moai.

An ahu’s rear (seaward) retaining wall is approximately vertical, but the front wall slopes down to a flat rectangular plaza about 160 feet on each side. In back of an ahu are crematoria containing the remains of thousands of bodies. In that practice of cremation, Easter was unique in Polynesia, where bodies were otherwise just buried. Today the ahu are dark gray, but originally they were a much more colorful white, yellow, and red: the facing slabs were encrusted with white coral, the stone of a freshly cut moai was yellow, and the moai’s crown and a horizontal band of stone coursing on the front wall of some ahu were red.

As for the moai, which represent high-ranking ancestors, Jo Anne Van Tilburg has inventoried a total of 887 carved, of which nearly half still remain in Rano Raraku quarry, while most of those transported out of the quarry were erected on ahu (between 1 and 15 per ahu). All statues on ahu were of Rano Raraku tuff, but a few dozen statues elsewhere (the current count is 53) were carved from other types of volcanic stone occurring on the island (variously known as basalt, red scoria, gray scoria, and trachyte). The “average” erected statue was 13 feet tall and weighed about 10 tons. The tallest ever erected successfully, known as Paro, was 32 feet tall but was slender and weighed “only” about 75 tons, and was thus exceeded in weight by the 87-ton slightly shorter but bulkier statue on Ahu Tongariki that taxed Claudio Cristino in his efforts to reerect it with a crane. While islanders successfully transported a statue a few inches taller than Paro to its intended site on Ahu Hanga Te Tenga, it unfortunately fell over during the attempt to erect it. Rano Raraku quarry contains even bigger unfinished statues, including one 70 feet long and weighing about 270 tons. Knowing what we do about Easter Island technology, it seems impossible that the islanders could ever have transported and erected it, and we have to wonder what megalomania possessed its carvers.

To extraterrestrial-enthusiast Erich von Däniken and others, Easter Island’s statues and platforms seemed unique and in need of special explanation. Actually, they have many precedents in Polynesia, especially in East Polynesia. Stone platforms called marae, used as shrines and often supporting temples, were widespread; three were formerly present on Pitcairn Island, from which the colonists of Easter might have set out. Easter’s ahu differ from marae mainly in being larger and not supporting a temple. The Marquesas