Researchers have used a replica moai to show how the giant statues may have been "walked" to where they are displayed.
Image: Courtesy of Carl Lipo
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By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine
Easter Island’s gargantuan stone statues walked. That is the controversial claim from archaeologists who have demonstrated the feat with a 4.4-tonne model of one of the baffling busts. They describe their work in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Nearly 1,000 statues litter Easter Island's 163 square kilometers, with the largest weighing 74 tons and standing 10 meters tall. Much about the megaliths is mystery, but few of the enigmas are more perplexing than how the statues were shuttled kilometers from the rock quarries where they were carved.
Archaeologists have proposed that the Polynesians who settled Easter Island 800 years ago or more laid the statues (called moai) prone and rolled them along on logs. That idea supports the theory that the settlers, known as Rapa Nui, became so obsessed with statue-building that they denuded the island of its forests. In his book Collapse (Viking, 2005), Jared Diamond, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, touted Easter Island as the poster child for a civilization that blew through its natural resources and folded.
“It’s a great story but the archaeological evidence doesn’t really support it,” says Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at California State University, Long Beach, whose team instead proposes that the Rapa Nui 'walked' the moai by rocking them from side to side, as one might move a refrigerator.
Made to walk
Some statues are found on stone pedestals; others are in incomplete forms along roads or in a quarry. The incomplete statues — which Lipo says would have been modified once they reached their pedestals — lean noticeably forward, in a posture that doesn't lend itself to horizontal transport, says Lipo. Broken moai along roads, which were presumably abandoned, also point to vertical transport. On roads that slope upwards away from the quarry, the statues lie on their backs, whereas downwards-sloping roads tend to be littered with face-planted moai, Lipo notes.
Lipo and Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, noted these points in their contentious book The Statues That Walked (Free Press, 2011; see 'Anthropology: Head to head'). A US television program later asked the pair to test their hypothesis with a life-size model. With the help of a ship-building company, they constructed a 3-metre-tall concrete model of one of the statues.
The researchers had no clue how to get the model walking. “An aeronautical engineer can explain why a plane flies, but you don’t want one flying a plane,” says Lipo. “Here we have this giant 5-ton thing, now figure out how it actually moves. It was quite frustrating.”
The statue could not stand on its own and had to be rested on supports. But after several trying days, a team of 18 people chanting “heave-ho” managed to get the thing walking with three hemp ropes — one tied to it from behind to keep the statue from falling on its face and two on either side (see video). “It really hauls,” says Lipo: the team got the statue to travel 100 meters in under an hour. Lipo suggests that a small number of people working part time could efficiently transport moai, questioning a scenario in which Easter Island's population ballooned and later crashed, as Diamond and others have proposed.
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9 Comments
Add CommentThe methods used to carve a statue have never been remotely established. the stone tools found on site had nothing to do with the construction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like history but not sure of the point of all this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the statues are capable of being moved in this method, it doesn't mean they weren't moved via another method. It's a fun exercise but not much otherwise.
Perhaps the population collapsed under the falling statues.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like the idea. If the center of gravity is a little forward of the base, then tipping it to the side will cause it to automatically move forward and sideways, and all you need to do is keep it swinging back and forth. No logs required. This doesn't disprove the theory that they probably still totally destroyed their island.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suppose that a thousand years from now archeologists will examine the statues on Easter Island. They will find one five ton statue that was built in the early 21st century. From this they will conclude that statue building must have persited into the 21st century but that only one statue of that era survived. They will most likely conclude that the inhabitants of Easter Island probably were still building and transporting the statues in the year 2012 in order to worship the ancestors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt didn't say where the concrete statue was constructed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWasn't there also evidence that at one time they had a large forest that was cut down, that had given shade required for some crops?
This is almost certainly how they were moved. In the island legends, the statues 'walked'. An added wrinkle to the technique is to strap logs on either side of the statues so that the log ends protrude further than the base of the statue, then you can 'walk' it more easily on the log 'legs' and very rapidly. I think Thor Heyerdal showed this in the 1950s. So quite what these experimenters think they are proving, the heck knows!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI love the history and your article is giving history to us or it is amazing article about stone statues....
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